Mike Bayer
You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, and this week's episode is brought to you by the kind sponsorship of Minut. Are you worried about noise complaints and unauthorized parties or smoking in your rentals? Meet Minut, your peace of mind solution. Minut sensors discreetly monitor noise levels, occupancy, and even detect cigarette smoke, all while respecting guest privacy. Easy to install and managed from anywhere. Minut integrates seamlessly with your smart home devices and enhancing the guest experience while ensuring a property's safety. Say goodbye to sleepless nights and hello to happy neighbors and guests. Protect your investment with Minut. Check the link in the description of this episode to find Minut in our virtual vendor showcase.

Mike Bayer
Without further ado, let's get this episode started. Here's your host, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
If you're serious about branding, you need to make it stand out. That's what today's guest has done with his company in spades. The magenta shirts, supported by Casiola's staff, stand out wherever they go. You can't miss them. Today I'm joined by Casiola's founder, Dennis Goedheid, and we're talking branding, using OTAs, franchising and standardization, and a whole lot more.

Heather Bayer
This is the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, keeping you up-to-date with news, views, information, and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business.  I'm your host, Heather Bayer. With 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new, and what will help make your business a success.

Heather Bayer
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success Podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer, and welcome back to this last episode of 2023. Where has this year gone? It doesn't seem any time at all since I was talking about the last podcast of 2022. I seriously believe that these years just keep going faster and faster. The clock is just moving faster. I just wish it would slow down, because I was thinking back about being in the business as a property manager, as I was for 20 years. This year, this upcoming year in 2024, I would have been free of that business for two years once we come to June. Once again, time's moving way too fast. But we're talking to a property manager today, and I was in the business for 20 years as a property manager, and it took so much time to build up an inventory in those early years. There were so many RBOs (rent-by-owner), and they weren't interested at all in using a property management company.

Heather Bayer
In those days, we didn't have that many investors who wanted to simply buy a property and go hands off. The rental business was such a different animal then, and it just took a long time to build that inventory. But nowadays we are seeing so much more in the way of rapid growth and dynamic companies that have got robust systems and automated processes that offer owners the chance of much broader marketing, while using revenue management strategies that optimize available nights and shifts in demand and everything else that is just so much more to offer an owner who does not want to do that management themselves anymore.

Heather Bayer
Today I'm focusing on one of these companies and I want to start by reading a portion of an article written by Amy Hinote back in June of 2021 and published in VRM Intel. Amy uses a lot of vacation rentals. She's a critical user of vacation rentals. She talks about it, about what she likes, what she doesn't like. After all, she's been in the business a long time and her thoughts and reviews are really relevant. In this article she said.... I'll read it verbatim....

Heather Bayer
This past February, I pulled into the driveway of my Orlando vacation rental about 9:00 PM on a Saturday night. It's always unsettling to arrive to a dark home at night, so it was a welcome relief to see that the front porch lights were on. I opened my text messages to find my key code, entered the home and found lights tastefully on, soft music playing from the TV and curtains opened to the lit pool and patio area. Exhale. Finally, after a year of not traveling, my vacation had begun. As many guests do, I set out to explore the home, both out of curiosity and to make sure everything was okay. I was happy to see that all the beds had fresh white hospitality bedding, tight-tucked corners and white towels folded perfectly and stacked on the beds. The bathrooms were spotless with white bathmats folded and ready for use. Moving into the kitchen, I opened the cabinets to find that all glasses, dishes, pots, pans, flatware, utensils and pot holders were matched sets and were placed intentionally and carefully on shelves or organized in drawers. After unloading the car, I put on a swimsuit, made a cocktail and took a dip in the perfectly heated pool. The experience was so beyond my expectations that I had to call Casiola to find out more about the company.

Heather Bayer
I'll put a link in the Show Notes for you to take a look back at that article if you wish, because my talk with Dennis Goedheid of Casiola is going to be more up-to-date and we're going to be talking about a lot more that he's been doing over the past couple of years since that article was written, because this is a company in fast-growth mode right now. Without further ado, let's go on over to my conversation with Dennis.

Heather Bayer
I'm so pleased to have with me today, Dennis Goedheid from Casiola. Casiola, if you haven't come across them you need to go to a conference, because you would know the Casiola team from anywhere, because of their magenta, I'm not going to say pink, Dennis, their magenta T-shirts, the branding is there wherever they go. This is something we're going to be talking about. But thank you for joining me. Welcome.

Dennis Goedheid
So happy to be here and we're off to a great start pronouncing my name.... magenta.... you're scoring points from the get-go.

Heather Bayer
I've done my research. Dennis, let's kick off with the fact that you are in Orlando. You manage a property management company in Orlando. You also manage similar in Aruba and also Miami. Am I right?

Dennis Goedheid
Correct. Yeah, that's our latest destination that we have in the last year.

Heather Bayer
But you haven't always done this. In my research like, Oh, my goodness, you're Belgian. You started out with a printing company in Belgium. What got you to the happiest place on Earth, Orlando? I'm putting that in brackets, the happiest place on Earth, because I have to say it's....

Dennis Goedheid
It is. Absolutely. For many it is.  Well, the reason I ended up in Orlando is because I also did some market research before I got into this industry. I probably didn't do my research good enough, because I would probably have never started in this industry. But once I decided, after selling my previous business, I wanted to do something with real estate, but didn't want to become a real estate agent. I thought, property management sounds easy and fun. You sit all day at your pool with a cocktail and a laptop waiting until someone needs you, and that's about it. I actually started my search in Silicon Valley. After selling my business, I went to Silicon Valley. That was the place to be to start a business 10 years ago. Figured pretty quickly that without big VC funds or investment money, there's nothing you can do there. I really wanted to self-fund my business when we started. I drove down to LA, I was staying in Anaheim, not far from Disneyland. That's where I came across vacation rentals for the first time, basically, in my life and I thought, Mmmm that's interesting. I had an e-commerce background, a degree in marketing, I thought I can use that skill set to sell stays in vacation homes and managing a home.

Dennis Goedheid
I had a home. How hard can it be to manage someone else's home? Then I started to do some research, found that the greater Orlando area around Disney World is probably the largest vacation home market in, for sure, the US, but maybe in the world, there's more than 100,000 vacation homes within a 15-20-minute radius. Visited Orlando, really loved the place. It's a big city where you have everything to keep yourself entertained, but still it feels like a small town. There's a lot of green. I live at the lake. It's beautiful, not too crowded as long as you stay away from the theme parks. Really love the vibe, the environment, the weather was great. That's how we started.

Dennis Goedheid
We started looking to purchase a small existing business. Didn't want to start from scratch, so we found a business that was for sale with 20 homes or condos, actually, all in one resort and that's how we started.  So packed my bags and came over with my wife.  In the beginning it was just me and her doing everything. I was doing all the back-end, guest relations, the promotion, owner relations. My wife, Liliana, took care of the inspections and making sure that the homes were ready for the guests.

Heather Bayer
That was a smart move to actually not start from scratch. So many people do that. I'll buy my first house and then I'll grow it from there. But having said a smart move, you buy 20 homes, it's not like you've worked up to know exactly how taxing and challenging it is to manage 20 homes.

Dennis Goedheid
It is. I'm going to be honest. I was running a company, we had offices in seven countries, production facilities, like big factories as well in Belgium, Europe, and in North Africa, in Marrakesh, 120 people on the payroll. I thought I knew a thing or two about business, so property management was going to be easy. In all honesty, I've never worked so hard in the first two years in this industry, so I underestimated it completely. It's just so demanding. It's 24/7 non-stop. It just never stops. You can never let your guard down because when you do, you're going to get that call at 2:00 AM at night for a guest that's locked themselves out or an AC that stopped working. That is what makes it really hard for small business owners and small property managers.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Jumping in like that with a lot of properties, that must have been tough. There was no sitting by the pool then with the margarita and just waiting for the occasional call to come in.

Dennis Goedheid
No, not as much as I was hoping for now.

Heather Bayer
What had to change for you? You're working 16/17 hours a day. It's not the dream that you perhaps imagined. What had to change to help you scale and grow and get out of that grind, if you like?

Dennis Goedheid
Yeah. Well, in all honesty, I'm so glad that I went through it. It was hard. If you would have asked me eight, nine years ago, I probably wouldn't have told you that it was a great experience. But I really learned the business from the ground up. I have been dealing with every single owner, signing on contracts, doing the marketing, creating listings, researching OTAs. Airbnb wasn't a thing 10 years ago. We were one of the first property managers on Airbnb. All those things really gave me a good understanding of the business. I'm really glad that I went through it and I wouldn't change it for a thing. Now, it would have been great to have some weekends off and nights off, absolutely, but it's just part of the process.

Dennis Goedheid
Now, you said it's a smart thing to start with an existing business. Just to give you an idea, it took a full entire year for me to sign on the first new owner after starting that business. I thought like, Okay, we have a business, 20 homes. I'm going to double it in size in the first year or two, that was my plan. I started to almost panic in the first few months when it didn't happen.

Dennis Goedheid
There were no leads coming in. No one was interested in our services back then. No one knew us. Obviously, they didn't reach out to us. Then when I reached out to other people, they were happy with what was going on and we didn't really have anything unique to offer at that point. It took a full entire year to sign on our first new owner. That has been a learning curve too. Now, one needed to change to really make it a little bit easier. It's growth in units and in revenue. That was the only way really to change it. After six months, we were in an inflection point. I told a story on some other podcast, too. I remember the day like it happened yesterday. We finally scheduled the day off for us. We were going to go to Clearwater Beach, which is a two and a half to three-hour drive from Orlando if traffic is not too bad. We looked like, Oh, there's not too many arrivals today. There's no departures. This is the perfect day to go to the beach. Had a few guests staying in-house, but no arrivals, no inspections to do. Let's go.

Dennis Goedheid
We packed all our gear, jumped in the car. We drove three hours to the beach at Clearwater. We set everything up on the beach. Literally 10 minutes later, we got a call from a guest that locked himself out. He exited the home through the garage. They closed it, they locked it, and the dead bolt on the front door was on, so they couldn't get back in with their code. Literally 10 minutes, we had to pack everything back up, put it in the car, and drive three hours back to Orlando. We spent six hours in the car, 10 minutes on the beach. That was like, for me, Okay, we need to change something here. This is not something I want to keep on doing for the next 10 years or the next year. We either sell the business and look for something else that we can do, or we grow it so that we can hire staff, that the business doesn't depend on just the two of us, but that we can have people working with us so that we can disconnect once in a while and take some days off. That's basically what needed to happen.

Heather Bayer
We had to grow so that it did make sense to hire staff. What you see in those businesses, you're actually buying your freedom by hiring people in the beginning. Then when you grow more, you're hiring a management team. Again, you spend a lot of money on those positions. But what you're doing is you're buying your time back. You can't do it yourself on your own and you make a lot of money, but you don't have a life.

Heather Bayer
Yes, indeed. I've been there, not with anywhere near as many properties as you have. I think we got up to about 200. But yes, it's the team that makes it. But I'm really interested. You said it took a year to get that new property on board. How many do you have now?

Dennis Goedheid
Right now in total, we're between 350 and 400 properties.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. So quite a lot of growth along the way. I read in Vacation Rental Secrets, that's Brooke Pfautz's book, and I read your 10 mistakes. I read everybody's 10 mistakes they'd made growing their property management companies, but yours really resonated with me, because you said that one of your property management mistakes was focusing too much on the guest experience instead of on the owner experience. I know from being a property manager myself that standing out to owners is just of such importance because you said it in the book that owners are the foundation of your business. If you don't have them, you don't have a business. So tell me your philosophy on getting your owners. What do you tell them? What makes you stand out from all those myriad other property managers in Orlando?

Dennis Goedheid
Yeah, I know you're absolutely right. When I started in this industry, I really did not know anything about property management or hospitality for that matter. My assumption was just like, if we take great care of the guests, they have an amazing time, they're going to come back, we're going to have a lot of bookings, the owners are going to make a lot of money and they're going to be happy and that's how we are going to grow. We were very guest-focused. We also spent a lot of our time and effort on the marketing side to get more bookings and do direct mail campaigns and then email campaigns to get more guests. It took a few years for me to realize like, Hey, actually, the real key to our growth as a business or owners. You can do everything you want on the guest side and then the marketing side. You can do the best revenue management in town. You can be on the most channels, but the best you can do is probably increase your revenue for that property with 10-20%, and then you're probably maxed out on that home. But if you add one additional home, you've already doubled your revenue if you go from one to two homes.

Dennis Goedheid
Once we realized that, we thought, Okay, what are we doing better here or different than most of our competitors? We really came up with ideas on how to stand out and reviewed the whole owner experience, what we saw back in the days and what we could do better. A lot of it involved technology. We created our own owner app, basically our owner portal that provides 100% transparency. We have it now, I think, for six years. We share everything that happens in the home with our owners. From the moment the guest checks out, they can see when the housekeepers go in, how long they're in the house to clean. They get a full photo report of the clean when it's done. They see when our team goes in, we inspect after every clean. They see, again, the whole inspection report. They see any damages that happened, any cleaning issues that they had to resolve. Same with maintenance tasks, everything is available for the owners in real time. Over the years now, we kept on adding on that owner interface. I think we have one of the most complete applications now and we stand for 100% transparency, which is not always easy because we make mistakes and we make a lot of mistakes.

Dennis Goedheid
We just don't hide them to our owners. Some owners have a problem with it because they blame us for making mistakes. Of course, we solve them and we have to. But they see what happened. With another property management company, they probably would not have any idea that it happened. It's not for everyone, but we really like it and it has been a great marketing tool. Owners want to have that feeling of having control, although they're not here, so they still depend on us, but knowing what's going on in their property without bothering or waiting for an update from us. That's definitely one of the key differentiators that we have used.

Dennis Goedheid
Another one, which is very surprising, when I started in this business, but from day one, we always have been very, very focused on revenue and generating revenue. That sounds very obvious, but most property managers, especially 10 years ago, bookings was something they did, but that was not their core business. I remember having a conversation with a property manager, a competitor, and he was sitting in his office and the phone rang. That was the days that there were still landlines. He said, You hear that?  I said, What's going on? That's the phone, that's money, that's harm, that's calling. Every time there was a call, and he would take out his notepad to charge the owner. I need to go and unblock the toilet, do this, do that. That's how they made their money. They had some commission on bookings, that was fine, but the main revenue source was charges and the work that they did.

Dennis Goedheid
We have turned that around from the beginning. We were one of the few management companies that did away with management fees 10 years ago. We went with 100% commission, so we sell it as we only make money if you make money. It's just important that we keep our interests aligned with those of the owners. We were one of the first ones doing revenue management in Orlando, really helped us a lot. That effect is now going down a little bit because everybody's doing revenue management, so you don't really stand out there. Our newest thing is now really ranking optimization, all the OTAs where we're working. With the startup from Europe helping us with that. We really want to focus now. How can we provide you the most visibility on websites like Airbnb, Booking.com, Vrbo? Not by lowering the prices, but by doing other things. There's a ton of things that you can do and change and update frequently to stay at the top of the ranking there. That's why we're really focused on now to drive that revenue. Revenue, transparency, those are main key points that we want to do better than the most others.

Heather Bayer
Many people I talk to on this podcast are focused on direct booking, but you're not. Not for your Orlando market. Just explain that, because I have heard this explanation. I think it's good to have this out again because we've always tried to get across that direct booking is not the be-all and end-all. It's not an either-or in some markets. It's just not worthwhile. I believe that's where you stand.

Dennis Goedheid
Absolutely. I hear that now almost for 10 years at conferences like OTAs are bad. The big enemy, first was Homeway, then it's Airbnb. It's always someone. But here in Orlando, it's not that we didn't try. Let that be clear. We tried everything to get more direct bookings, but we're also very analytical. I think not everyone in this industry is really looking at the numbers. Of course, it's great to get a direct booking, but if that direct booking costs you more, and sometimes, especially in Orlando, because it's such a saturated market and you're competing with all the big brands as well, the hotel space and the theme parks. Doing paid advertising is very hard. Trying to rank high in an organic way with all the blog posts about Disney and fan clubs that already exist. There's people, I think they live in the parks, they stream everything live. That's something that we just can't do, so it's very hard to get up there. We just realized everything that we try to get direct bookings cost us almost twice as much as getting an OTA booking. We still focus on getting repeat bookings. Once a guest has booked with us, we remarket to those and we send email campaigns.

Dennis Goedheid
But we learned how to best use the OTAs. That's also something I think that is a little bit underappreciated. Every OTA is different. A lot of people in the industry think, Oh, distribution, it's my PMS, and I can turn on Airbnb and Booking.com, and I'm doing distribution and I'm all the OTAs. That's not how it works. Every OTA is different. You need to really learn how they work, what demographic books on them, because that's also different. You need to learn how to master those OTAs. In the beginning, when I purchased that business, they were at 30, 40 different sites. Back in the day, there were a lot of listing subscriptions, so you paid a fixed amount and then you were on there. You didn't pay any commission when you got the booking, but you paid a fixed amount. I just canceled all of them and I focused all my time and effort on our top five booking channels and really learned how to work with them. It took a while because you think that you know how things work, but they may be much different than what you expect. It took a little while, but I think we're really good at it now.

Dennis Goedheid
One thing to watch out for, for sure, is don't be dependent on one specific channel. What I would never do is having 80-90% of our business coming from one OTA. We have a mix. Our top three channels are around between 20-30% of our channel mix, and that's how I want to keep it there. Sometimes we have a certain channel really spiking. During the pandemic, it was Airbnb. They were at some point, I think, 65% of our bookings coming in. I didn't feel comfortable with that. We made some changes there to balance it out a little bit and increased prices on that specific channel to give the opportunity to other channels to perform a little bit better. We really watch that channel mix that we have. We always try promising new channels. Good example there is Marriott. We were one of the launching partners of Marriott Homes and Villas, and it has killed it. In the beginning, we were getting 150 new bookings each month from them. If we hadn't tried it, that would be a lot of revenue that we would have missed. It has come down in the last few years because they added so much more inventory on their website.  But we're now partnering and launching partner with American Express. We were the first ones on Hopper. All those channels that we think like, Hey, they can really make a difference, we want to be the first on there and see if they work or not.

Heather Bayer
Sounds like you're very intentional with all this marketing.

Heather Bayer
I'm going to break into the interview for just a few moments to hear about our sponsor, Minut. We'll be right back with more of this great conversation shortly.

Heather Bayer
Welcome back, Nathan. We're talking now about outdoor sensors because I managed properties in Ontario and Canada for 20 years, and outdoor noise was always way more of an issue than indoor noise. So I love the fact that Minut has an outdoor sensor. What types of properties benefit from an outdoor noise monitor and how does it actually work?

Nathan Smith
Yeah, we're so excited about the fact that the latest generation of Minut devices can be used indoors or outdoors, thanks to the fact that they're weatherproof. So it's the same device. When you're setting it up, you'll choose whether you're placing it indoors or outdoors. It will work flawlessly in either location. The average user for us may only need indoor monitoring for things like noise or cigarette smoke. But as you pointed out, we have quite a few customers who have beautiful outdoor areas like pools, hot tubs, maybe just a nice patio or something that's inviting to a guest. And obviously, these are big selling points when someone's booking a vacation rental. They may not be quite such a big hit with the neighbors, though. So it can be quite important to know if your guests are being noisy in those types of amenities late at night, or if they're just excessively noisy for quite a long time or something that might be a bit of an issue with the neighbors, right? So a device like this gives you the opportunity to ask them to quiet down before you get a call from a disgruntled neighbor at 2:00 in the morning.

Nathan Smith
And if you're using one of our integrations with a property management system, we can actually text or call the guest for you so that you can keep sleeping as we resolve the problem for you. Aside from that, there are some cities and counties that have very strict noise ordinances specifically for outdoor noise, like Palm Springs comes to mind. And in those cases, having a record of the decibel level can quite possibly save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars from noise violation fines.

Heather Bayer
That is brilliant. I wish they'd had that when I was managing all those properties up in Ontario, but it's great to hear that that's out there now.

Heather Bayer
I'm always very conscious of how time goes so fast when I'm having such a great conversation and I want to talk about Aruba because it's such a different market. Tell us, how did you get into Aruba? It's not what you'd think, Well, I'm in Orlando, now I'm going to Aruba.

Dennis Goedheid
No, absolutely not. It may seem like things are intentional, but sometimes it's just fate and good luck and this is a perfect example. I was at a conference in Vegas. I think it was RezFest, the Escapia User Conference. While I was standing there at the buffet waiting to get my food, I had someone that reached out and said, Oh, Dennis Goedheid. Your name sounds Dutch. Are you from Holland? I'm from Belgium, but I moved to Orlando.... and we started talking. They had a small company in Aruba, between 10-20 homes there also. They started the same year as we did in 2014. During our conversation, I could really hear all the pain points that we hit over the years and that we somehow solved. They were stuck at that point and didn't really see how to get past those points. We stayed in touch, I think, almost a year or two years. Every time she had a question, she would reach out. I would give them some advice and told them, Hey, this is how I would do it, or maybe try this.

Dennis Goedheid
Yeah, she also told me, Oh, you need to come to Aruba, I really want to show you what we're doing. I was like, Yeah. I didn't really have the time to travel. At that point, we were also really focused on Orlando and growing Orlando. It wasn't really on my radar to expand outside Orlando because, again, this is one of the biggest markets in the world. We only have a maybe 0.1% market share. There's so much growth here in our own market, which is usually cheaper and easier to get than expanding into different areas. But then the pandemic hit and everything shut down in most places. But then the beach areas, especially here in Florida, beach and mountain destinations, they came roaring back. They were killing it, I think, '21 or even the end of 2020. They were doing record sales and bookings and exploding. Here in Orlando, it was just dead. People wanted to go away. They wanted to leave their home, but they didn't want to spend time with other people in a theme park. Theme parks were closed for a longer extended time too to start with. But then even when they reopened, no one really wanted to go to a theme park.

Dennis Goedheid
That made me also realize like, Hey, we need to diversify our business a little bit and expand to different geographic areas. I was still in contact with the team in Aruba. I did have a lot more time because we were not doing a lot of business back then, so I finally took a plane. Plane tickets were so cheap back then in the pandemic. I think I flew for like 60 dollars, the price of an Uber ride to the airport now. I flew to Aruba, stayed there for a week, gave them a lot of advice. We really looked at all aspects of the business and helped them setting up entirely Google workplace accounts and stuff like that. Then at the end, they asked the question, they said, What if we partner up and we start a Casiola business here in Aruba? I was thinking like, Yeah, maybe that's not a bad idea. I'm spending all that time here with them, and I was doing it for free and I didn't mind because I always love looking under the hood of other businesses. We have done some exchanges with other companies here too, so I love doing that.

Dennis Goedheid
But I thought, Yeah, it's probably not going to end here. There's a lot more work to do. Why don't we do it together? We have so many more resources and things already in place that they don't have yet. It does make sense to partner up. Actually, in that week for me going there, by the end of the week, we did a hand shake. We said, Hey, let's do it. Let's start Casiola. We did legal, we started a new business, I think within the month and first of January.... I went there in December and first of January, we started Casiola Aruba together. In less than two years, we were able to grow them from around 12, 13 homes to over 100 homes. We have some of the most amazing, exclusive properties in Aruba. It has been a great ride. Not everything has been easy, don't get me wrong. It's still a lot of hard work, but we were really able to help them get into the next stage and then the one after that. In a time that was so much quicker than they would have figured it out on their own. That's also how we got to the idea of a franchise.

Dennis Goedheid
There are probably a lot of other business owners, property managers that are in the same situation, they love what they do. But it's just a lot. It's overwhelming. If you walk into the vendor hall at VRMA, you were there too, and you see what was more than 150 vendors. Where do you even start? How do you pick your PMS system? Or should you be using revenue management software A or B? They're also all still very involved in the operation. It's hard. We thought like, Hey, we've done it in Aruba. We also started our Miami destination in the meantime, which has been successful. Why not put it in an official framework and start a Casiola franchise? We need local partners to do the work on the ground and build those relationships with owners and realtors and local community. But there's so much that we can help with them. We're on the technology side, on the financial side, on the marketing side. The branding that we have in place is so strong. That's how we came to franchise. I really believe if you join us, that we can help you grow so much faster while keeping a better work-life balance than you would have if you do it on your own or the one that I had when I started out and was responsible for everything.

Heather Bayer
I know when we started and we got to about 13 to.... We always had these tipping points and around about 13 properties was the first tipping point. We had to do away with the spreadsheets and get something else. Mind you, we were still on spreadsheets and fax machines at that point, but we had to go and find the software. But at that time, I'm talking about 2005/2006, there wasn't the huge array of choices that there are now. I understand perfectly what you mean about being faced with that massive choice. Where do you start? There's a lot of work goes into making those choices and you can really make the wrong choices and I know this. That's where you'd come in.

Dennis Goedheid
Exactly. Because those points you have a couple of times. I never was at 13 properties, so I don't know about that one, but we had that at 40 properties. Now we had it again at 80 properties, around 150. You may make a choice and switch software providers to go from 20 to 40, but that may not be the right choice in the long run. By having a partner that already went through those different points that can really help you making quite a long-term choice. It may be a little bit of overkill at the time that you start using it, but it's so much more expensive switching later on when you have 100 properties and whatever system you picked out doesn't do it anymore. I think that experience comes in and not having it done once, but a few times with a couple of partners helps there too. I really believe in the system. If you join a franchise, of course, there are certain franchise fees, right? So we charge 4.9% of revenue and that's an objection. We get a lot like, Why should I pay you so much money? But I really believe that if you have to do everything that we offer to our franchisees, if you would have to do that yourself, you would pay not 5%, but probably 10 or 15% of your gross revenue just to get all those things done. You get them from day one, they're already up and running. I really believe it's going to be so much faster and so much cheaper than doing it on your own.

Heather Bayer
Well, one of the really important things is your branding. You just said, and I can't remember what you were talking about. You said it's more than.... Your branding is more than those magenta T-shirts and a logo. You look at your website and the branding is just so strong. What was your thinking behind it and how do you keep that branding consistent across everything that you do?

Dennis Goedheid
Yeah. I just want to be clear for everyone. This did not all happen overnight and from day one, because it's always easy to look back and see, Oh, what they've done. It looks great, but there's a whole evolution. And if you look at photos from 10 years ago, I'm almost ashamed to see what things look like.

Heather Bayer
Do you know, Dennis, I started this podcast at the same time as you started your company? And I wouldn't go back and listen to those first ones.

Dennis Goedheid
It's fine if you listen back to this episode. One thing that was very intentional from the beginning was our color and actually also the name. When I was doing my market research, remember back 10 years ago, looking at the Orlando market, one of the things I did is I was online researching all the competitors I could find. What I did is I grabbed the logos from the website, put them all on one big sheet, added some more information about the number of properties and the area that they were active in, and I had it all on one big sheet just to see, Hey, these are the companies that I should look at more, because they're doing great, and those are some other competitors to keep on a radar. Then when it was time to come up with our own branding, I was looking at that sheet and something that stood out to me was all those logos, they look so similar, no one really stands out. I mean, there were great companies and professional logos, but they're all green and blue and yellow. I think those three colors are 90% of all vacation rental businesses logos.

Dennis Goedheid
I thought if we want to stand out here, we have to do something different. We had a couple of companies that had red and purple and slightly different colors. I just picked something that no one else had, and that was actually the very bright hot pink or magenta. I placed that in the middle of the sheet. When you just look at it, the thing that really attracts your attention was that pink circle. That's how it started. But that was very intentional. But of course, it's not when you start a small business, it's not that everybody all of a sudden says like, Oh, we have a great color, can we join you? But a pivotal moment there for me was also, I remember one night, I had an industry event here from the local association. They had a drink or get-together. Usually, I would get a suit before I went to those events. But it's property management. I was busy, I was delayed, probably unclogging a toilet or whatever, so I didn't have time to change. I just went wearing my polo to the event and didn't really think anything about it. But then two, three months later, someone came to me and said, Oh, I remember you. I saw you at that event. They didn't know my name anymore. They didn't know what the company's name was, but they remembered that color. That was for me like, Oh, my God, this is actually strong. That was the last time I ever wore a suit to an event. You're going to see me now. I'm going to be wearing this and the rest of our team too. Our vans are bright pink or everything. It's part of the culture now. Everything that we do, all the communication, it's all very consistent. Pink is really what sets us apart even more than the name and the rest of the brand name.

Heather Bayer
I've just been reading an article about telling your story about a brand narrative that goes right the way through a business and through the website. Yours definitely does. It's about spreading the culture through everything you do. I particularly like, just about on every page, there is a person, there is a real person. You don't have a corporate culture look or feel about your site at all. It's about your people and your owners, which I absolutely loved.

Dennis Goedheid
Absolutely. People do business with people. That's something that I also see. Also in my previous e-commerce business, that was the missing piece. You want to rent a home, but who are you giving your three, four, or five thousand hard-earned money to? I have no idea. It's a website and a logo. If you're lucky, under the About Us page, you may see the C-level team, but you want to know like, Hey, who's going to clean my home? Who's going to inspect my home? If I have an issue, is there a real business behind it or the real people, or is it just the call center or an OTA that's 10,000 miles away? Bringing that personal touch in our industry, let's be very clear. I still have that e-commerce background in me, and our goal is to have as little contact with our guests as possible. That's our goal and our mission is accomplished  if a guest goes from booking all the way to checkout and they do not need to contact us, then we did a great job because that means that everything was good and perfect and clear and they didn't have any questions or issues getting in, so mission accomplished.

Dennis Goedheid
But still, how do you bring a personal touch in a customer lifecycle that you don't want to see? It's hard. We try to do that and compensate those with automated messages, but also having those photos in there on the vans and all the communication. That people still have the feeling like they know and they've seen us, although they may never have seen a live person during this day.

Heather Bayer
That's important because a lot of people want to go on vacation. They don't want to see anybody. One of the reasons they choose a vacation rental is they don't have to do that. They can have the key....

Dennis Goedheid
They don't want to see anybody, but they want to be sure that someone can be there if they need them. That's what we try to communicate in a visual way like, Hey, we're here, we're real people, we're a real team, and we're just a phone call or message away.

Heather Bayer
Before we wrap up here, I want to go full circle to what we were talking about, I think just before we started recording, which was about the introduction that I did to this episode, which was Amy Hinote's arrival at one of your properties. It was the most beautiful description of that first 10 minutes. It was textbook. To me, this is what every vacation rental should be about. You arrive and if it's at night, the light is on. You walk in, there's music playing, the temperature is just right. There is a good amount of light there. People go in, they look in bedrooms, they want to see beautiful linens, they want to see a clean bathroom, they go to the kitchen, they want to see everything laid out perfectly. That's what you did for Amy. It's what got her to contact you and then consequently write that article. Tell me how important you feel that first 10 minutes of a guest arrival is.

Dennis Goedheid
It's the make or break moment for sure. For me, that's what it's all about. It's the most magical moment for me in the whole vacation rental experience. A guest has planned and booked months in advance. They have been saving. A lot of them have been traveling for hours or maybe days, and then they finally arrive. They have an idea in their mind of what they're going to get, because they saw photos, of course, but they open the door, they walk in, and then you start exploring the whole home. I have that experience myself. Every time we go somewhere, it's a new environment, you're excited, you're happy, you're on vacation, you open the door and the whole family scatters around, goes to all the rooms, the kids find a games room, Oh, daddy, mummy, come and see what we found here, or, This is my bed and you're going to sleep there. That's really a key moment in the whole experience. I remember when I started in the business, the previous business owner, they took me around to a unit and said, Hey, we have a guest arriving here, but I'm going to show it. It was a beautiful lakeview condo on the fourth floor here in Orlando, and she opened the door and it was pitch black in the unit.

Dennis Goedheid
The blinds were closed, there were no lights on. I was like, Where is the light switch? Because I've never been in that home. Is it left, right, high, low? I couldn't find the light switch because it was not right next to the door, but two steps in on the wall. Then every room we walked into, we had to find the light switches and three light bulbs were burned out. It wasn't really an amazing experience. Then she opened the blind because she said, Here, we have a balcony and there's a lake view. She opened the blinds to go out to the balcony. Also then, Oh, my God, this view is amazing. That's probably the reason why those people book the whole column of it. So why are you hiding it? That should be the first thing that you see when you open the door. That's where we started creating that experience.

Dennis Goedheid
Remember also back then in the beginning, we were really guest-focused, so we wanted the guests to have the most amazing experience. I'm not sad that I did that because this is part of it. We really recognize that the great things about vacation rentals is that each home is unique. It's not like a hotel where you know, Okay, a Marriott here or on the other side of the world, it's going to look the same. No one is really excited when they walk into a hotel room, I think. But the home is unique.

Dennis Goedheid
But you have certain expectations. When I go on vacation, I still don't know, should I expect shampoos in the bathroom or do I need to bring my own? I'm a guy, so I use whatever is in the home, so I never bring my own products. I've been to so many vacation homes in the last few years still, where there's no hair products or soaps available in the bathroom. Most of them now have toilet paper, but even five years ago, not all homes provided toilet paper. Kitchen supplies, coffee, for example. There's still many, many homes that don't provide coffee, but if you arrive, if you have a late flight, and you arrive at 2:00 AM at night, you don't have time to go or you don't want to go to a store anymore. But yeah, my wife needs her coffee in the morning. If she doesn't have her coffee, she's not happy. I want to make sure that there's coffee in the home.

Dennis Goedheid
What we created is what we call the guest experience. Each home is unique and we want it to be unique, but there should be a basis that is the same for everywhere. Part of it is we want white linen triple sheeting everywhere. No like, Oh, this one has colorful comforters, this one has grey towels. White is clean. You can't hide anything on white. You see right away if it's clean or not, if it's ironed or not. So white bedding, we have a whole basic set of kitchen products. You can basically start cooking a meal without having to buy your salt and your pepper and your cooking oil and all spices. It's all there. Like you said, we leave light in each room because of that experience. People don't know the house, so they don't want to look around. We do not leave alarms armed when the guests arrive, because we know it's stressful, that's a magical moment. You don't want to ruin it like, Oh, we need to search where the alarm is, or it starts beeping and the guests are not prepared. They need to look in their phone or on their papers where the code is, and yeah, bang, it's too late and you ruin the whole experience.

Dennis Goedheid
We have a whole checklist of things that we do. The music is one of them. You have a calm feeling. It feels also very intentional, and that helps us also creating that better guest experience. Guests are not going to look right away like, Oh, what's wrong here? Or, Why is a light bulb burnt out? Because they walk in, they see the lake view now right away when they walk in, the lights, the music. It just makes them happier. That's what's key in this business.

Heather Bayer
Yes. We used to say we wanted guests to feel enveloped when they walked in the door with a warmth. It's like the house is giving you a hug. If a guest doesn't feel that house is giving them a hug, then we've done something... We haven't quite done this right.

Dennis Goedheid
I've walked into homes where I did not have that feeling. If you're already getting into a bad mood, you're going to focus on mistakes and that's going to come back to us. We want to avoid that at all.

Heather Bayer
Well, absolutely. People have had a long journey. When they're coming to Orlando, they're often coming by air. That's frustrating and stressful in itself. So, kudos to you. I talk to a lot of property managers and just hearing your first 10-minute story is music to my ears.

Heather Bayer
Dennis, we've come to, gosh, we have talked our timeout, but I think we've covered all the things just about that I wanted to. Your growth is just fantastic. What's the future for Casiola in the next five years?

Dennis Goedheid
Next five years. We definitely want to expand our footprint through the franchise model, help more small property managers or business owners grow their business and grow the brand together with it. I know it's probably not going to be easy years, so I think streamlining the operations and the software can also really help with that. That's something we constantly do. We look at what we can automate and streamline. That's going to be our main focus, growing into a few destinations, but also in the destinations that we're already active in.

Heather Bayer
Well, I wish you all the best fortune in the world, and next time we're at a conference together, we will have a face-to-face discussion.

Dennis Goedheid
Absolutely. I'm looking forward to it.

Heather Bayer
It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, Dennis. Thank you so much for joining me.

Dennis Goedheid
No, my pleasure.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much, Dennis. It was such a pleasure to talk to you and to hear about how a really well-oiled business runs and does it on some really great standards. Just in that last few minutes when we were talking about the first 10 minutes of a guest arrival, just how important that is, and the standards of having every bed looking the same with white linens. It's all in that article that Amy wrote. As I said, that is on the Show Notes. I will make sure that the Casiola website is also on the Show Notes. You can go take a look at that, take a look at Casiola Aruba as well. There were loads more questions I had for Dennis, but I never got around to asking them. We may do this again maybe in a year or two when perhaps the franchising has really got off the ground and we can talk to some of the franchisees. That would be super cool.

Heather Bayer
Okay, that's it for another week. That's it for 2023. Our next episode will be the first of 2024, and away we go into yet another year. I will look forward to being with you for that event.

Mike Bayer
We hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by Minut. Don't forget to check the link in the description of this episode to meet Minut and discover the best smart device you will ever integrate into your short-term rental business to help protect your investment and keep your neighbors happy.

Heather Bayer
It's been a pleasure as ever being with you. If there's anything you'd like to comment on, then join the conversation on the Show Notes for the episode at vacationrentalformula.com. We'd love to hear from you, and I look forward to being with you again next week.