The OG Women of Vacation Rentals: Honoring the Trailblazers that Shaped the Future of the Industry

Alex Husner  1:24  
Welcome to Alex, Nanny, the woman of vacation rentals. I'm Alex and I'm Annie, and we have a truly special treat for everybody. Today we have the OGS, which means the original gangsters, the original gals of vacation rentals, just joined by an incredible crew of women here. Today, we've got Audrey Miller, who is the co founder and CFO of The Cottage Connection of Maine, Valerie Hawkins, the co-owner and CEO of Perdido Key Realty, and Jeanne Dailey, founder and CEO of Newman-Dailey Resort Properties, Inc. Welcome to the show, ladies.

Annie Holcombe  2:12  
Thank we are so excited to have you guys. And I'm just going to play partial favorites, because Jeannie Daly is somebody that I had admired long, long. For a long time, I won't say really long time, but for many years, being from the being from the Panhandle in Panama City Beach, I've always known who known of her and known of her business, and wish she was someone that I had known when I was starting out in vacation rentals. But why don't we go around the table and starting with you, Jeanne, and just give us a little snippet about your background and how you got to be the founder of Newman daily.

Jeanne Dailey  2:45  
I originally came to this area to Destin in 1983 after I graduated from college. So yes, I am dating myself. And I came to work for a gentleman named Randy Newman, and he hired me to be his bookkeeper, rental manager, sales person, you name it. I did it all, as everybody did here, I'm sure. And then we started Newman daily resort properties in 85 and I bought him out in 88 and then been the sole proprietor since that time. I was fortunate destin and our area primarily had vacation rentals. There weren't really any hotels here, so it was just an up and coming industry. But we were up against nobody knowing where we were. We had to say we were between Pensacola and Panama City. So we've come a long way, absolutely.

Annie Holcombe  3:32  
How about you, Valerie, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background?

Valerie Hawkins  3:35  
Well, I'm the southern girl. I came from Savannah, Georgia. My husband and I moved here in 1982 if y'all don't add up, don't add up the years. Okay,

Alex Husner  3:46  
we're not good at math, right? No, calculator. Don't worry about it.

Valerie Hawkins  3:50  
So graduated from college in Savannah and got a degree in social work. Worked for the Board of Education for nine years, and then Alan was offered a job with Gulf Shores plantation selling pre construction condominium with,

Unknown Speaker  4:06  
yeah, yeah. It was

Valerie Hawkins  4:08  
quite an adventure for me. I'm a beach girl. The beach has always called my name Savannah had to be Allen. Everybody knows, I guess, about 30 minutes from Savannah, and so Alan came before me. I had to finish my job. So about 30 days later, my mom and I are driving over the Perdido Key Bridge, which was like, you know, the Stairway to Heaven is all I can say. It is the most beautiful thing. I drive over it every morning. Never gets old. So I was done with social work. I was halfway through my masters. I just abandoned it. There was nothing on Perdido Key. It took us six months to get TV, cable TV, and it took us about a month to get a telephone. So it was, it was really the wilderness. We. Couldn't find a place to live in Gulf Shores, so we ended up on Perdido Key, and there were five condos. Literally, this was a dream come true. I just for for about a month, I didn't do a thing, stepped off the steps in the morning, walked the beach, and then it was like, Well, what am I going to do now? Because I'm really not somebody to just sit around. So got a real estate license in Florida, that makes total sense. And I started doing model duty in the three pre construction condos that were here that JME Realty had listed. It was, it was it was just what I, you know, I was made for it. So, you know, we did that up until about 92 we met a man who owned Perdita Realty. He was very elderly. He at one time, it had six real estate offices in Pensacola. So he was a brilliant man. He was tired. He was renting a duplex, and he lived in half, and his office was in the other half, and I would be in and out of there talking to him. And one day I walked in and he said, If you and Alan never thought about buying a real estate company. And I said, Well, as a matter of fact, you know, we've been talking about either going with a brokerage, 100% pay brokerage, ReMax, whatever, or buying a small company. And he said, Well, I want to talk to both of you. We walked in, sat down, and he said, I don't really care about the money. What I care about is people owning this company who are going to take care of it, and I know you will. So if you will pay me $15,000 and I'll finance it over five years, you can buy pretty to Realty. We both went, Okay, great. The whole story, I walked in on Mr. Meadows. He was still living next door when we moved into the office, and he didn't realize where he was or what he was doing. So I walked into the office, and there's mister Meadows standing in his whitey tighties in front of me. So you know, you could just get a picture of how basic this whole thing was. And it was Alan doing the sales. Me doing the rentals. He had three vacation rentals. That was it? So I knew everybody on the beach went to work. Six months later, I had 25 vacation rentals, and it just was hired. My first employee right after that, my bookkeeper. And, you know, it has been the greatest thing ever. I have a passion for it, and I don't know what I would do if I didn't do this. Oh, and we have 170 units today. What

Alex Husner  7:42  
a great story. I did not know all that about, yeah, early years too. Uh. Audrey, how about you? Well,

Audrey Miller  7:49  
I spent all of the 1980s in California, in the Bay Area, San Francisco, and I was in the earthquake in 1989 and I was getting ready to watch the Giants win the World Series, of course, and they were my favorite baseball team, and I was going to have a big party at my house. And it was five o'clock at night, and the earthquake came, and of course, we never had the party. And I said, I'm out of here. Give me a good Blizzard any day. So I don't train. And I didn't really know what I was going to do. I had been working in various Macintosh computer based companies, doing marketing, and I had had a very successful career there, and I just, I just couldn't deal with the earthquake anymore. I I think I was shaking, and the ground never stopped shaking for at least three months out. Yeah, so I'm from Maine, and I grew up in wisca, which is about 10 miles from booth Bay Harbor, and I started working as a waitress in Booth bay because I didn't have a job. And I met this really handsome man and his father, and, you know, I just thought, well, he's gotta be the walking wounded or gay or something. One story short, he was none of those things. And he and I started dating, and then he was supposed to go to Florida. And he actually went to Florida, to Pompano Beach with his parents, and I got this phone call this, you know, the fall afternoon, and he said, I'd like you to pick up something at the airport. And I said, What's that? And he said me. I said, Great, oh, so we had to figure out what to do in Booth Bay Harbor to earn a living, because neither one of us, you know, had a job, really. So he went to work in a real estate office. He had a license in Florida and Maine, and he saw these quiet inquiries coming in for vacation rentals. And the agency he was with had about 15 homes, but none of the real estate office people wanted to rent them. They just wanted to. Sell houses. So he came one night and he said, you know, we really ought to look into this. And we were actually living in his big house that he had renovated as a family reunion house. It sleeps 16 people, and it's got eight bedrooms, but that was our home in the winter, and then we rented it out in the summer. And so that's actually where the business started. We got a copy machine and a telephone, and that was it. So after that, we made a deal with that real estate office that we would take over those 15 rentals, but we wanted to keep our identity, and we came up with the name booth Bay cottage connection. So the first year, we had those 15 and we grew to about 30 houses. And then the next year, we had everybody started coming to us because there was nobody else doing it. And before we knew it, we had 70 houses. And now mind you, I had no business background, and I didn't know that we had to scale, as they call it nowadays, and so we just kept adding houses. And the next thing I knew, you know, before I knew it, we were up to, like, 150 and of course, we couldn't handle that, so we had to scale back. That was in 1993 and we got married in 1994 and our daughter came into existence in 1999 So ever since then, we've just been family run local business. We've communed. We have a lot of respect in the community, and we love it here. We like to fish and go boating and enjoy our beautiful part of the world. I wouldn't be any place else. And I keep trying to think, well, maybe we ought to get out of the cold weather and go to Florida for a couple of months. Maybe we should relocate. But I can't find any place where there isn't going to be a tornado or something.

Alex Husner  11:51  
Well, maybe between you ladies, you could do a house swap or something. Yeah, it's so just fascinating listening to all your backgrounds, and it's also fascinating that none of you really knew each other too well, at least before this with this call. But you know, Annie and I have always looked all three of you just knowing who you are and how long you've been in the industry, and just the impact that you've made as as women leaders, and it just, it's interesting to me. But you know, thinking back to the early to mid 80s, when a lot of your companies got started. A lot of companies got started in those days like that was kind of the breeding ground time period of in my area, in Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, that's where, when a lot of vacation rental companies, that are still leading today, they put their boots in the ground then. But things were different, right? I mean, like in our area here, there were some condos, not nearly as many as there are now, people didn't really understand the difference between what a condo was and how you even rented a condo versus a hotel. And I'm just curious, like, I think this is interesting for our audience, to understand how different the reality was in so many different ways that we'll cover today. But like, just the landscape of what was it like back then, physically and from a business perspective, of, like, what were you renting? How were you renting it? How are you getting people to book reservations? Was it on pen and paper? I'll Val push that one to you to maybe start with.

Audrey Miller  13:18  
Okay, I'll go first. Well, yeah, we had a mimeograph machine, and we had a mimeograph teacher, and she had a mimeograph machine, we would create a one page black and white Tear Sheet with one photograph and some real estate specifications and a description of the house and print it off, and she would mimeograph copies of it, and we'd send those out. So when we got a booking, we had a big whiteboard up on the wall, and we had all the names of the properties, and then we had each week, because we only rented by the week. And so we'd have, like, starting in June all the way through October, we'd had a grid. And so every time we got a booking, we'd write the name of the guest in the box of the grid. And that's how we kept track of the reservations. We were the first ones in the area to have a catalog, have an 800 number. I mean, the the list goes on and on, have a website. There was nothing like that when we started and we had bag phones for cell phones, you know? Yeah, that was,

Alex Husner  14:33  
I think everybody started with a whiteboard in those years. But was it Val? Was that similar to your situation? Yeah,

Valerie Hawkins  14:42  
it really was, of course, this was 1994

Alex Husner  14:46  
so, yes,

Valerie Hawkins  14:47  
it was a little later,

Alex Husner  14:50  
so modern era. 

Valerie Hawkins  14:51  
So we had a computer. Maybe it was a Mac. I can't we had a computer. We had a tape chart, but ours was big. P. Is a poster board, like a quarter of a poster board. And we actually would use pull off tape, like painters tape, then, and you know, so we were a little more sophisticated with that. But so Alan is just a visionary my husband and so he came home one day he had found a gym in Gulf Shores, and he came in. This was two years after we we really started out, yes, I was doing the colored papers and saying, So and so is come. We had a color printer, so and so is coming to the beach in X number of days, and we would send that out. And so it was pretty much three units, repeat customers, I don't know. And then the website happened, and it was a guy on a sailboat that he met at the gym who was a techie, and they just spent hours building this website. And it was actually really forward thinking, and

Alex Husner  15:58  
it was probably the only one in your whole town that did that at the time? I bet, yeah.

Valerie Hawkins  16:02  
And then I don't in tech a Mr. Brown. I can't remember his first name. Lived in Pensacola, Florida, and this would have fast forward been fast forward maybe two more years, came up with a DOS based Property Management Program. It was genius. He had escrow accounting. This man was so far ahead. And we used that program for about 12 years before we went to something else. I can't remember,

Annie Holcombe  16:32  
was that the one that was called executive for a while?

Valerie Hawkins  16:33  
 I know it was all well, it might well we got it, but it was,

Annie Holcombe  16:39  
yeah, we had something like that at the first property group I was at in the early 95

Valerie Hawkins  16:45  
it. I still miss it. I mean, it was then, sure enough, couple of years passed and we had online bookings. So he went another step, and then we went to live res for about eight years. And now we're with track so but, but back then it was, it was fun. People would stop by the office because it was right on the beach. They would just walk into this little, you know, concrete block duplex. It was so much fun. And we still have best friends that walked into that office who are now owners. Well, Jeannie,

Annie Holcombe  17:19  
how about you? I know you've got, you've got a good story behind yours too. So,

Jeanne Dailey  17:23  
you know, we started, I started, moved here in 83 worked for Randy, and then he and I opened up Newman daily in 85 Well, in 84 we were actually functioning and doing business. But we had a spiral notebook that was a really big notebook, and we had to have two of them because we had more units than the one book would handle, and we had them

Alex Husner  17:45  
back up in case something happened,

Jeanne Dailey  17:49  
just because we had all the one property or complex in one book and the other. And I heard an employee who convinced me to purchase a used three line phone system, and then, so there three of us in the office. We were all connected, you know, to the phone with the cord. So the phones are all twisted around, and we're all handing the books to each other, and then we're penciling in the name, and then we do a note card on each person. So that's how we started. In 1986 I bought my first vacation rental software program. I think it was called rental reservations or something. The developer of it installed me, and then the day after he got me installed and taught me how to run it, he called me and said, Oh, by the way, my company's going out of business. Oh, so I just made this investment and thought I was doing really, you know, good and we wouldn't have to use those notebooks anymore. Uh, anyway, so he, he hung with me for a little while, and then I forget what the young kid's name was that came called on me from a first resort software, and I always accredit him with helping me with huge success. And then, of course, I met, you know, the guys, Pat and anyway, all of them. So I had the or first resort forever. Then we bought, you know, a laser printer that we just got rid of. It was such a good IBM laser printer. We just got rid of it a couple years ago. But anyway, that's how we kicked off. And so it was exciting, but yeah, I'll never forget. I wish we'd taken a picture of us all cross wired with those that's

Annie Holcombe  19:38  
such a visual. I love I love that. But that's, I love that, but that's, I think that's how it was. And kind of to your point, like everybody was in offices back then. It wasn't this remote work. You weren't checking in guests elsewhere, people, if they had an issue, they came to your office to tell you about it. They had to give you that instant feedback right away. But I'm curious to, like, just going back to when you started as. Women and junior kind of alluded to this in the beginning. Like, you know, I started on the Panhandle in 90 like, in the early 90s, and so was in property management around 94 was when I got into it. There was just not a lot of women in the business. And this is, like, the Panhandle in the south is kind of a good old boy network. There's a lot of legacy men operating businesses and stuff. And so, how did you navigate that, and then I'll go to Valerie and you know, Audrey, like navigating that as a woman. I mean, that had to have been just very daunting, but you clearly had the know what people want to say, like the chutzpah and within you to keep going. But what was it that you decided that, like, this is where I need to be in what I want to do with my career,

Jeanne Dailey  20:42  
you know? I don't know, except that Randy Newman offered me a job, and I thought, well, I'll go move to Dustin, Florida, and I'll work there for two years, and then I'll go to a real city and get a real job, you know. And then, you know, what, 45 years later, whatever. It's interesting, Annie, that you asked that question, because the guys in this town and you know lino, of course, we all know lino, and so he was one of my major competitors. We were fortunate, though. We all wanted to grow the community and grow the business, so we've always been kind of friendly competitors. Oh yeah, we're sharks, but we're going to be friendly competitors to help make the keep making the pie bigger. But it's funny that you ask, because the name of our company is Newman daily resort properties, and Randy and I opened that up when I took a two week Crash Course, got my broker's license, and we opened it up. And every day, the real estate teacher said, if any of you fools think you're going to open up a real estate office, you've lost your minds, you will go broke. You're just insane. And every day I was like, yep, that's all I want to do. Yeah. Anyway. But we opened up Newman daily resort properties, and then when I bought Randy out in 1988 I kept the name for exactly the thing you're talking about, Annie, and the ladies can relate to this. I was a young female in the south, so I was 25 or 26 years old, a young female in the south, and I always felt that, generally, it's a man's business. And so if people thought there was somebody else back there because I wasn't married, I didn't. I've never had Randy was my partner. I bought him out until Ken Wampler has come in and become our president. It's been me and and I've always had amazing people that I've worked with and hired and things, and had great, you know, accountant and attorneys and things like that. But, um, but I did have that very conscientious thought it was needed. It was a smart it was a smart move without knowing. But I had the instinct in the thought. But I because I was young, and I still had really long hair down my back and looked like Tiffany, you know, so for people to take me seriously then too, it was Newman daily resort Properties, Inc,

Alex Husner  22:54  
yeah, yeah, no, hindsight is 2020. Makes perfect sense, and they're just listening to, you know that story I remember when I first moved I'm from New Hampshire, so close, closest to Audrey, for sure, originally. And I also, I used to vacation in Booth Bay. So tons of memories that heard. I need to, we need to catch up on the

Audrey Miller  23:13  
thistle in. Did you go there to the West in the thistle in? That's where everybody went.

Alex Husner  23:20  
We would always go to the one, like the main resort. That's like, we're not resort. That's, I mean, it's one level, but right there on the bay, I hate that. I can't think of the name of it, browns, war, browns. Browns, yes, yeah, amazing place. But I think back to when I moved down from New Hampshire to Myrtle Beach, very similar that. It's like, you know, just hearing what you just said, Janie, I mean, I was about 2425 and I didn't know anybody in this area, and it was very much similar to the panhandle, very much a men run destination as far as leadership. And also, more than that, it was the people that ran this town. Were from this town, like they, you know, they owned the land, and they owned the institutions, and they had been here for, you know, last 60 years. And who was I coming here from New Hampshire to try and get into this industry? And that was a challenge. And I remember thinking back though in my mind that I maybe I was blinded to this, but I didn't feel like it was as much of an issue of me being a woman that was hard to get started in any sort of business I wanted to. It was more of just being young and not understanding the area. And it's like, it just, you know, to anybody listening to this, if you're in that position, it's like, it does just take that experience of like, then you get over that hump. Like, it's possible, but like, it's, it can be very frustrating when you first, you know, try and get into business and in those types of areas that it's not new and emerging, everybody's new to the situation. Well, that

Jeanne Dailey  24:47  
was one of the beauties we all had, is that we started when the industry was just starting. It was completely male driven. You know, the Abbott brothers and Tim Taylor with Ocean Reef, those were always some of my. Main competitor, Southern hadn't started the beach and Schultz boys hadn't started southern yet. That came later, probably in the 90s, all men in me,

Annie Holcombe  25:09  
yeah. And that branched over to Panama City, when the gentleman that built Sterling came over to the Panama City Beach market. And that was that

Jeanne Dailey  25:18  
Johnny MC and then you have Paul Warford and now Mike stange. Well, they sold out. But anyway, yeah, yeah. Kind of

Annie Holcombe  25:26  
kind of all migrated over. But I think one of the things we talked about when we talked to the male version of the OGS was kind of the innovation that came out of the Panhandle. And this is not to leave Audrey out by any means, but there was just so much innovation that happened in the panhandle. But I also think, like from women in the business, you three ladies, saw a lot of innovation and a lot of creativity that it took as a woman to be a leader. But what do you think are some of the, you know, standout things that from women within the industry, that you've seen overall that have, like, made you a better leader, made you a better operator. And

Alex Husner  25:56  
I'll add to that too. What did you do back then, when you didn't have anybody necessarily to look to, you know, I mean, like, there wasn't LinkedIn and and Facebook and podcasts, like, how did you become the leaders that you've become? What happened was,

Audrey Miller  26:10  
I went to my first vrma meeting in about 1996 I think it was, it was down in Charleston, and that's where I first ran into Tim Cafferty, and my husband and I went and we had a we're going to, we stayed in the hotel where Amy's going to have the next vacation rental, women's. Yeah. Francis Marion, unfortunately, it's in August, and you know, that's our busy time up here, so I won't be going. But, yeah, I know I'm just devastated. I love those conferences. Anyway, we we came back, and I realized that I needed to find some other people in the industry, because there wasn't anybody else in our town. We were it. I had gotten some names and met a couple of women at the conference, and so I called them up, and we got together and had lunch, and then we started having our own little meetings. And there got to be about six of us from all over the state, and we all had our own territories, if you will. We were all in different towns, and we all kept to ourselves. I mean, Maine is a big state, and you know, it's two or three hours to get to some of the other places. And so when we wanted to get together, somebody had to travel that distance. So we used to do overnights and people, you know, we'd we'd go to each other's places and stay in one of our houses, and we'd have our meetings and go out to dinner and had a nice time, and we got to know each other very well and help each other. We had black lists of of guests that shared and things like that. And so that was how we got started, and it was all women. We didn't have any men at all in our

Valerie Hawkins  27:50  
group. Pretty similar. I was thinking, Oh, my God, I don't remember feeling intimidated by a man, because men didn't do what I did there. Was nobody doing it except al meadows that we bought the business from. You know, you had three vacation rentals, and there was only one long standing century 21 office on Perdido Key, very small, one owner and operator, and he had bought a condo in every new construction property. Remember, at this time, we had maybe eight high rise condos, and that was it here. So Mr. Lobb kind of stayed to himself. Now he was intimidating if he walked in, if he walked into an open house that you were doing, you know, I almost fell to my knees because he was just such a unpleasant presence. Let me just put it that way. You know, he owned the room, and he was like, okay, just tell me what's going on here. And most people didn't, didn't approach me that way because, you know, I'm Southern, and so I didn't have that. Now, the pressure that I felt was twofold. One was I was pretty much doing everything myself. Within that first year, I hired my bookkeeper, and then it was the two of us, and it was, it was better. I was also selling real estate almost full time to support the company so that we would be successful. You know, Alan was not really doing a whole lot. It was what, you know, he brought in from the golf course was pretty much, you know, he brought him

Unknown Speaker  29:26  
in off the

Unknown Speaker  29:29  
golf course, so, you

Valerie Hawkins  29:31  
know. And then the other thing was, it was quirky. Here there were developers, and I mean, the most colorful people I have ever met in my life. So they were all living, let live, and they were not competitive at all. They were just here to build, build condos and make money. So I guess I had a, had a great, you know, thank goodness I wouldn't in Destin. Sounds like the men lock

Jeanne Dailey  29:56  
that up. Yeah, it can be cut through. Up here? Yeah,

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
I think

Jeanne Dailey  30:01  
that's still the case, too, but Audrey said, too. My first vrma conference was 1988 and Sanibel Island that Al Williams hosted. I loved him, me too, and he taught he was the king of revenue management and how to get more revenue out of your Yes, he was the king, but Audrey just like you. So my first conference was 88 my son, Ryan had just been born in March, and I went in October. It's my first time out. So you know how we like to party at VR may conferences,

Alex Husner  30:41  
I would give equity to be, to go, be able to go back in time and go to a VR my conference in the 80s, I bet

Jeanne Dailey  30:47  
we fit in conference room. There were only about 25 of us, and great conference. But I've made some lifelong relationships from people in VR May, and it was one of the greatest blessings I had, because it helped teach me more about the industry. That's where I've learned about all the technology that we've utilized. I didn't always adopt it immediately, because I wanted them, like the online booking, I think Valerie mentioned I didn't do it the first year, I was too afraid people sneak in on us and so but I'd wait till year two or three, when they worked out the kinks. Same thing with like cavallocks and things like that, but vrma really the relationships you could make. Hey, how do you do how do you handle this owner contract? Or how do you do that? And I think it was, it helped give me more strength and confidence in the whole industry. But yeah, I would go to those and then the user forums for first resort up in Aspen. I'd go every year. You

Audrey Miller  31:55  
know, Pedro mendoki was the one who taught me how to set up a basic maintenance plan for our homeowners.

Jeanne Dailey  32:04  
Yeah, and people would be open with information to share. And actually, Al Williams is who introduced me originally to Ben Edwards.

Audrey Miller  32:12  
Al Williams and his wife showed up in Carmel, California. My husband and I went there after a conference in Vegas or something, to visit friends, and we all ended up in the same restaurant, and we all had dinner together, and had quite a quite an evening. It's very memorable. It

Unknown Speaker  32:31  
was always fun with Al,

Alex Husner  32:33  
oh yeah, you know what's so funny now? Because when you first said that, he was just like, you know, this major person, revenue management, I'm trying to think, why do I know that guy's name? I remember Sarah and T podcast that T was talking about Al Williams. And now this all makes sense. Yeah, is this so So, so interesting? We'll be back in just a minute, but first a message from our premier brand sponsor beyond

Valerie Hawkins  35:28  
You know, for for me, it was, I was really into what I was doing and sort of figuring out as I as I went. You know, we did have in tech, and so I got a lot of information from them. Alan was dealing with the web, end of it. But I did not start networking until we joined live res, which was in you don't believe this, 20. It was 2015 so literally, we operated a business for 10 years, and I never networked other than our software people. And it was true with live res too. But what an eye opener, you know, you go to that first motivational speech, I felt like I was, you know, at an Amway conference, because everybody was so excited, and I left there with just hundreds of things my head, you know, in my head, okay, let's get it all out. Let's get it all out. And then that's when the innovation began, and I realized how far behind the power curve I was. And then at libraries had advisory boards, and so I was on advisory board six, and in a group of eight unbelievably accomplished people. First meeting, I sat down after and said, Damn girl, you gotta get your stuff together, because I realized how much work I had to do to get where I needed to be, you know. So, yeah, it's peer. Peers are really important,

Alex Husner  36:58  
yeah. And I mean, that's such a theme of of our industry that, you know, obviously these the industry conferences, the software conferences, have played such a role in how everybody, both personally, professionally and as our companies, have progressed over the years. But it's interesting to know, even back then, that that that was still such a thing, and it was probably even more impactful back then, because, again, there wasn't podcasts on LinkedIn, and there, there were no other resources. And I think the first VR may we went to was 2009 maybe 2009 or 2010 when it was actually held in the East Coast. One was in Myrtle Beach. And we went, and our biggest takeaway was, Wow, we like, we're already these things that people are teaching, like, we're already doing all this. It's like, we kind of felt good, of like, All right, we're doing good. But then a few years later we go and we're like, oh boy, you know, like we had built all of our own tech at Honda world, and it was great for what it was. But all of a sudden we realized, like, Okay, we've got to really level up to be able to take it to that, to that next level, because there's so much that happens so so quickly. But kind of, on that note, I'm just, I'm curious. So when you move from the whiteboards and the notebooks and the different ways of writing things down, what did it look like when you decided to make the switch, not the switch, but to use a property management system, how did that process go? I mean, because it's from like, you know, day to night, or night to day, kind of,

Jeanne Dailey  38:23  
well, like I said, I I switched, I bought my first computer, my first software system, in 86 and actually, Carmela gell water then I bought first resort, first resort in 88 Carmela Gillen water installed me. Okay, you all know her with VR Ma, yeah, I've

Unknown Speaker  38:43  
heard the name for sure with verbo, verbo.

Jeanne Dailey  38:50  
With verbo. She's with verbo now. Um, so she came down and installed me, and I went cold turkey immediately in 86 and then an 88 and I only had about 25 units at the time. So it's a piece of cake to convert then now converting to track in 2020 because we went from that to V 12 to track. And when you got 300 units, it's in a lot of years of accounting and data to Yeah, that's a whole nother thing. Yeah, way back then, it was a piece of cake,

Alex Husner  39:30  
probably easy. Yeah. And were

Alex Husner  39:36  
Did your was your staff excited, though? Like, did they see the need for technology back then, as you introduced it, I had

Jeanne Dailey  39:43  
nothing to do with us. I just knew I said, we're changing softwares, and I don't think we want to go to escapia, but look at it and see and look at live res and streamline and all the others. And I sent them to a conference, and I sent my rental. Accounting Manager, reservation and revenue manager and my reservations manager, and they picked track. I said, okay, because

Alex Husner  40:10  
I love that. You gave the power to the people too,

Unknown Speaker  40:13  
implement it and figure it out.

Audrey Miller  40:18  
Both of these ladies are using track. Is that right?

Jeanne Dailey  40:21  
I am. I think that's what Valerie said, too. Yeah, I'm still

Audrey Miller  40:24  
on live res. I started with them in 2012 and now we're in Ignite, and the jury's out, well,

Valerie Hawkins  40:33  
live res, you know, I'd probably still be with live res, um, you know, had they not been acquired, and it was the most amazing group of people ever. And they were brilliant. You know, Tina Upton was taking it like wherever who you know, as far as it could go. But you know, what killed me was the there was no, no pricing tool of any kind. You could do, static rates. We integrated with rented Dear Lord in heaven. My revenue manager turned it on, and everything just blew up. Owners calling me and, you know, and I'm not, I wasn't used to that, you know, it's the steady, you know, yeah, owners trust what I'm doing. Everything's steady. They know I'm doing, and I've never experienced anything like that in my life. So we had to go. And I wish that we had honestly gone to track when the brothers first, you know, it was 2021, because it was a year after the end

Jeanne Dailey  41:34  
of COVID, in November of COVID, because the day we installed, I was at home with COVID, yeah, yeah, that's

Valerie Hawkins  41:39  
when we did it. It was the worst experience of my life. I literally turned it over to my staff, and we had somebody come on board us, Brett Wright, which was He was amazing. We have now broke. Are y'all using the Property Care module. I have a new general manager who was trained with Southern. They had a seat at the table. So he was with Southern for 15 years, and he kept, grew up with track. First thing he said was, breezeway has got to go. You don't need an integration. Track His truth, track his truth. And he is so right. Stuff changes immediately. There's none of that, you know, lost stuff in breezeway. Anyway, yeah, no, I've

Alex Husner  42:13  
been thinking back, you know, to those days. It wasn't a choice of, if you had multiple, multiple choices and multiple systems bolted on. It was, you had to make one choice, and that was basically it. But, you know, now, obviously technology has gotten super complicated, and there's so many different systems, and it just obviously, we all, we all live in this world, and it's not an easy one to be in now, but as you guide your teams, I think it's been interesting. Listen, all three of you that like you've, it sounds like you've really put a lot of value in the input of your team and making these decisions. But how do you have you raise the people that work in the business to make those decisions? Like, what have you done to make them feel confident to make the right decisions? What are maybe some tips you could share

Jeanne Dailey  42:58  
so they make the decisions I go to my whenever I'm making a change, like I just said, with track, they can help make the decision. Or we do strategic planning annually, and I do it with each department, and I may know what I want our goals to be at the end of it, but because they've helped to create the plan, They've analyzed our strengths and weaknesses and our opportunities and found where we need to get better and stronger. They've created the plan. So I've got their buy in right from the front end. So I always work really hard to get the employees buy in and their input into anything we do. So the softwares. I think that when we switch to point central locks, I pretty much just said we're doing it, but we had the Caba, and this was a better plan anyway for us, because Wi Fi goes out all the time, and cell service works better. Again. It's very expensive, but what it has saved me in efficiency and fewer employees and guest service management by managing the door, the thermostats, everything. So I always analyze it that way, but when I make those changes, like when we implemented breezeway, I had somebody in the house in house in accounting, helping to teach the team in house, and somebody out in housekeeping, leading that team, and so they could help get the buy in from their teams. And we just said, this has got to be done. It's a communication tool so that we didn't come up against some of the problems that Valerie was having. We did have them, but we overcame it, but I think it's mostly because I work hard to engage the employees and let them write the plan and the process. I may know what I want in my mind, and I help lead them down that path however, it's the path they've chosen. Does that make sense?

Alex Husner  44:56  
Absolutely. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker  44:58  
Brilliant. I. Perfect,

Alex Husner  45:01  
but and Audrey, your daughter now works in the business too, so maybe, and I know you've many other staff also, but maybe tell us a little about how that's looked for you.

Audrey Miller  45:10  
Well, it's not easy working with your daughter, especially, or

Alex Husner  45:15  
selling the same thing of Jeannie, of like, how you equip your staff to just make those decisions and have that confidence, I guess. Yeah,

Audrey Miller  45:23  
I do the same thing, and we use a lot of subcontractors, and our challenge is to communicate our brand and make sure that they understand our values and what's important to us and what we expect of them, even though we're technically not allowed to tell them what to do. We do anyway. And it's wonderful because they do, they do want to please and they do want to do what we want them to. So it works, yeah,

Valerie Hawkins  45:52  
it's, it's the same thing. I think that really, as a woman, until Tim, we hired him in January, and so until then, it was all women. And I think that my big thing is lead by example. I don't ask anybody to do anything that I haven't done or that I you know, that I do now. I mean, I I want them to see what it's going to take. And I, you know, we have, we have had high turnover over the years. I think the smarter I get about doing, you know, the things that Jeannie is doing, because I'm a micromanager. So, you know, I've had to learn to just step back and say, okay, you know, L level 10 meetings we did Eos, and I think that was one thing that really saved us, because then we became collaborative and goal focused. And you know, that just worked for us. We made more progress in the two years before COVID than we had in 10 years. Just from you know that that collaboration and focus, I love it. Not many people came back after COVID, so we had to start. So

Annie Holcombe  47:12  
wanted to kind of pivot, because I think we could, we could go down a rabbit hole in all your experiences. And definitely want to have you back for a part two to talk about more of this and maybe some more specific learnings, but one of the things I think that everybody's struggling from we talk on the show about is advocacy. Jeannie, you've been at the forefront of the advocacy for a very long time. Just wanted to kind of get your your thoughts on where the industry's gone and where it's going, maybe where you see it going and kind of just in the advocacy realm, because it is an ever changing animal. You have to kind of be on top of it. It feels like a whack a mole game all the time that we're just always like, looking for something to pop up. But in your, you know, in your experience, it feels like, probably, I know, when I started, there wasn't a worry of that. It was just like we were doing our business, and everything was fine, and then all of a sudden, it's just, I think COVID kind of added on onto things. But from each of your perspectives, what do you think is, you know, advocates, that advocacy that you've been involved in, that you feel very proud of, and maybe like, what do you think is coming down the pike that we need to be aware of?

Jeanne Dailey  48:13  
Well, yeah, I, I started working on it way back in 2003 and four, when they misinterpreted an ordinance in the city of destin and we're going to try and completely do away with vacation rentals, and it's the bread and butter. I mean, we have military here, but it's tourism. So and in Walton County, it's only tourism. So I went before the city council. It's all about building relationships with the back end. So you got to build relationships with the city mayor, the city attorney, the county mayor, the county attorney, the city council, in that and you're right, it's Whack a Mole. There's something coming up. We got more stuff coming up in Destin and we got more stuff coming up in Walton County. And anyway, we were able to successfully pivot to so that vacation rentals were not only accepted, they were allowed, and we created some good neighbor policies and things in a registration. And so you got to be willing to lose a battle to win the overall war. And I use that term all the time. Let's give up some parking spaces, and we got to register, and we got to pay a fee so they don't demand low level occupancy or only limited amount of vacation rentals like in California. I mean, some of the stuff my daughter Tiffany goes through on the advocacy side, what that's happening in all these different states, and especially California, it's unbelievable the amount of restrictions they're putting in. And truthfully, we kind of got to go along on our own before the explosion of vacation rentals due to Airbnb, and then Airbnb started getting a bad name, and it came on to us, but we're still involved. We give to K. Of pains. We started the pack here in Florida to help try and do some things on the state level. We're giving to campaigns. We're talking to leadership. We're reading the language, and we're saying, we'll we can live with this. And once again, we accept, we want to be good actors. We want to be the professionals. Let's get rid of the bad actors, because they're making us have a bad name. So it's, again, I think it's being willing to compromise and lose the battle, to think about what's winning the overall war, and winning the war is we continue to stay in business.

Annie Holcombe  50:31  
Audrey, what about your area? I'm curious. We know the Panhandle. We know the southeast, but don't hear a lot about the New England market. What are you facing up there?

Audrey Miller  50:39  
Oh my, my attitude is a little bit different than jeannie's, because we don't have as much competition, I guess. But my attitude is, you know, we should not be subject to all of these restrictions, and we are not affordable housing. And I was just in Augusta, and so is my daughter testifying last week about three different bills that wanted to allow a local options tax, and some wanted to just limit it to short term rentals, and the other wanted to include the hotels. And then there's another one that wants to increase the lodging the lodging tax from 9% to 12% with a 3% increase. And so, you know, we just go there. And you know, on the state level, we have a lobbyist. We have the vacation rental professionals of Maine that I started in 2013 when I found out that the hotel lobby was coming after us and trying to essentially keep us from renting because Airbnbs had come in and they had started doing two and three night rentals when we were doing seven night minimums, we had great relations with the hotels, until the Airbnbs came along and started cutting into their business. Anyway, we we have little restrictions and taxes, and people making a lot of noise about affordable housing problems and trying to blame vacation rentals. And yes, there are a lot of people buying investment properties and taking away in the cities, especially some of the places that used to be affordable and year round lodging, and turning them into Airbnbs. But for the most part, we go in and we're fighting. We're saying, No, we aren't regulated in Maine. We don't have the restrictions that you all do where you are. And we're trying to keep from having to have a registry, keep from trying to do anything. And you know, our argument is, we've been doing this for over 100 years, and we're all about hospitality, and we police our homes and our guests, and if you have a problem, you just call us and we're there for you. And if you need a professional agency in your area, let me know, and I'll find you one. Audrey,

Jeanne Dailey  52:57  
do you have one of our biggest problems is the locals, who probably used to be vacation rental guests, who've moved here, and now they got vacation rentals. So you must not have that problem up there, because they're the loudest voice. And guess what, they vote my homeowners?

Audrey Miller  53:17  
Yeah, we have that problem. And the other problem is our homeowners don't live in the town, so they can't get a note, so we have to go and advocate for them. We're doing that on Southport island right now, and it's because we do have some Airbnbs without professional managers and nobody looking after their properties. And people are, you know, the guests are coming, and they're setting off fireworks landing on the neighbor's roof, and you know, those kinds of issues that upset them. So they started having these meetings. And so we rallied all the other vacation rental managers. We have quite a lot of competition here now in our towns, not like it used to be. We were the only game in town when we started. But now we all band together here, and we go to these town meetings, and we try to listen to what the complaints are, and try to stand up for ourselves and say, look, what you need is professional managers like us. So don't ban us instead, you know, employ us. So we're, we're here for you know,

Valerie Hawkins  54:21  
honestly, we are a six mile strip of beach, you know, barrier island, Alabama bridge, Florida bridge. We are almost like in this little bubble, you know, 95% condominiums, and we are built for vacation rentals. That's, that's, that's what we do. And if you there are condominium associations that make the rules now, we have had a number of buildings that have voted to restrict. Direct rentals to monthly and and that sort of thing. For me, that's a homeowners association issue. Get your people together, and I'll do I'll feed you all the information you need, all the resources you need, but we have no control over those associations. Are the members of those associations takes a 75% vote for most condominium associations to change their bylaws. So our condo docs, so, and it's very expensive, but a number of them have done it. The other thing for me and and then there's across the bridge. So then we go over into the mixed areas where I take personal responsibility for not accepting rentals in a problem prone area my neighborhood, Airbnb is popping up. It is a it is a residential community small children, you know, green green belts. I mean, we, we are again escaped. We're protected, but we're also we back up to the Pensacola Naval Air Station. So guess what? People have found they can make way more doing, you know, Airbnb, than they can by themselves. You know, not again with not a professional manager. So that's what we battle and and for me, I'm on the other side. I would never do a short term rental in my subdivision. So we banned, we banned in my subdivision, so, but that's a contained area. We were at a conference years ago, and one of our live res members from New York, was asked up on stage and said, my area, my down, whatever the downtown area was she was in has been shut down. We no longer can do vacate results. And of course, it was remedied. So it's, it is. And then there's then, then there the urban areas, which where we have an up and coming one in downtown Pensacola. I'm not really sure that. I don't agree with the opposition in in that case, housing is at a shortage downtown. And, you know, Airbnbs, I don't think in that downtown area of Pensacola enhance anything for anyone but the Airbnb owner. So, you know. And again, that's a little different. Take, um, you know, globally, I think we have a serious problem. And, you know, and I send money to, just to, to advocacy groups that are that know a lot more than I know.

Jeanne Dailey  57:48  
Florida professional vacation rental managers coalition, Florida Vacation professional,

Speaker 3  57:56  
Florida professional vacation rental coalition, sorry, there we go. We'll put a link to that yeah

Unknown Speaker  58:05  
in the show notes, for sure.

Audrey Miller  58:06  
Yeah. Link so vacation rental, professional, main, too, verbal.org,

Unknown Speaker  58:12  
absolutely. We'll list all of them in

Alex Husner  58:14  
there. Yeah, for sure. Well, to wrap up, we've got one more kind of important question that we're just curious to ask everybody. But you know, this industry and these businesses that you own and the people that you work with obviously have meant a lot to all of you in your lifetime, but what does the work that you do say about you as a person? And I'll start with Judy,

Jeanne Dailey  58:38  
all right, well, I'm a mush, so you can tell just thinking about my answer for this, I'm all emotional, but my greatest success that I see is when team members that I have are able to take an awesome vacation or buy a new car or get a new house, or, you know, just get great better quality of life. And when they have an aha moment that they never thought they could be who they've become, and we've been able to bring out their strengths and their amazing talents and gifts that they didn't realize they had, that's how I find success. Oh,

Annie Holcombe  59:19  
wait, we cry. Okay, ladies, top of that one. Oh, goodness. Audrey, what do you think?

Audrey Miller  59:28  
Wow, I don't see I don't have very much staff anymore. I have my daughter, and we do a lot of subcontractors, and I have some, you know, a bookkeeper, but that's really it for me, I think it's more community focused. I'm really, really proud of the contributions that we make to our community. Right now, I am on a committee. I have a meeting tomorrow where we're going to try and restore a world war two monument in town, and we're going to make sure that. All 700 veterans names get on that new monument, and we're going to redesign it and and it's going to be a good thing for the community. But you know, I think that what I've learned about myself over the years is that I like being able to reward people for doing good things, and I like to give awards. I'm also a daughter of the American Revolution, and one of the one of the wonderful things I've had the opportunity to do is to give out certificates of appreciation. I've given one to Amy high note for her work in the industry. I've given one to am Amber hurdle for her work, and I continue to look for opportunities, you know, in the industry, but also in our community, to reward people for doing good things. And you know, you're eligible Alex and Annie for an award too, for being the real women of vacation rentals. To the industry with this show, so I would consider you all as worthy of certificates of appreciation.

Unknown Speaker  1:01:11  
Oh, well, thank you. Thank you.

Alex Husner  1:01:15  
Yeah, very awesome.

Unknown Speaker  1:01:16  
Valerie, what about

Valerie Hawkins  1:01:18  
you? This is so easy. Um, so the longer I do this and the more relationships I see. You know a guest who has been here for 35 years, sometimes twice a year, calls me on my cell phone that really southern Val. This is Howard val i gotta come to the beach. I'm feeling the beach and so, you know, I just can't even begin to say My thing is giving back to the Howards and to the owners that I have had for so many years. You know, I'm there for them when they have surgeries. You know, babies, whatever, their daughters have babies, you know. And they'll text me and say, Hey, she's not in labor. She's and I, you know. And I can say, don't, don't be scared. And she's had, you know, I was scared, and I said, I know you Barbara, you know that I would do everything for and it's an extension of hospitality, you know, we just one of my really big ones. Howard wanted his daughter to have a beach wedding. And two weeks ago, we did. He worked, you know, for the government, and couldn't afford a big wedding. We did it for him. Here chairs arch, you know, you know, just so that, just to get back. And he said, Yeah, you know, discounting his accommodations and covering the difference. And he said, You just spent too much money. I said, Howard, just stop it. Do you know how much money you have spent with Perdita Realty over the flat? You know? So it keeps me going. It makes me feel like a better person to know that I have these acquaintance, acquaintance, but also, you know, it's a family. This is just the family. And the same with my employees. I They're, they're my children. You know, most of them are in their 30s, and I'm not so, you know, I'm a natural mother, and I just, you know, do what they need. But that's it, you know, it's just, I have a degree in social work. I'm made to, you know, to to I did that, and I was drawn to that because I need to be with people, work with people, help people when they need it. And, you know, and it's, it's always just been so good to me. I think

Annie Holcombe  1:03:59  
that's what's great about this business and this industry, is that for the most part, you run into some people that aren't good stewards of it, but I think for the most part, everybody is hospitality driven and kind and caring and wants to help each other out. And I feel like the more i The more I meet people, the more I'm just amazed at the depth of compassion and love that we all have for each other, regardless of where we come from or where we live, and we're all and Jeannie, what you just said, like, you know, I'm so behind that, like, just lifting each other up is so important. And I think that for Alex and I, like, we came into the business at different times, but we didn't necessarily have a lot of people lifting us up. And I think we've learned that it's like we can all give back in our own time, in our own ways, and just help other people come into the industry and find the love for it that you ladies clearly have. And we just appreciate you sharing your time with us talking about it. No,

Jeanne Dailey  1:04:49  
thank you. Thank you all. Thanks for inviting us and doing this.

Alex Husner  1:04:54  
What a pleasure for us. And I just want to echo something on Annie's part two of our very first. Episode was called the aha moment, and I aired in two end of 2021 and in that episode, we talked about how, you know, we, we really like our mentors. We both had male mentors, you know, growing up at the industry, and you didn't see Annie's point. It's like we just, we didn't know at that time in our lives that there were other women out there. And so we hope that, you know, the podcast and some of the people that we've brought under the show, and just the connections, will help show people like, you know, there are a lot of people out there that that want to help, that they care. And you know, just hearing what's been important to the three of you and your business and how you've built it, it's this is this is going to be at the top of my list of episodes, but thank you. Thank you, three of you so much for coming on. I mean, this was definitely something we've wanted to do for quite a while, and we wanted to wait until we had the perfect group, and I think we found it today. So we appreciate you for coming on and everything that you've done for the industry. Thank

Jeanne Dailey  1:05:57  
you. Yeah, I was gonna say Audrey and Valerie. It was a pleasure to meet you both, yeah, and share this time. And thanks for making it happen, Alex and Annie. Absolutely,

Alex Husner  1:06:06  
absolutely. Well, if anybody wants to get in touch with the three of you, we're going to put your contact information in the show notes, so we'll get your LinkedIn or emails, or whichever way is the best way to reach out. And if anybody wants to get in touch with Annie and I, you can go to Alex and Annie podcast.com and until next time, thanks for tuning in, everybody.

Unknown Speaker  1:06:25  
You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai