Mike Bayer
You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, and we don't have a sponsor for our episode in March for a very important reason. We need your help.

Mike Bayer
In Canada, short-term rentals are under attack from regulations being imposed by legislators, including a full ban in the province of British Columbia. These decisions are being made based on biased reports with inaccurate data generated by lobbyists from competing industries.

Mike Bayer
In an effort to make our voices heard and start the conversation with top-level decision-makers, the CanStays Rental Alliance Conference is happening April 20-22 in Banff, Alberta. This is the first time in the history of short-term rentals across the world has an event like this, and on this scale, been created so property managers, individual owners, and other stakeholders can have their say out from the shadow of Airbnb.

Mike Bayer
This event may be focused on Canada, but if we don't all stand up and support this initiative, your local legislators could follow the lead of these Canadian regulations that will find their way to your tourist area. We need you to attend. We need you to share this message, and we need you to get involved. Visit canstaysrentalalliance.com to book your ticket and join the fight for our right to a fair and responsible future for the short-term rental industry. If you need extra incentive to book, use the coupon code VRF100 to take $100 off your ticket. Also, check the CanStays website for discounts on flights with WestJet.

Mike Bayer
Without further delay, let's get to today's episode. Here's your host, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
Today's episode is the first in a series talking to some of the great property managers down here in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, Alabama, and across the border, a little bit into Florida, because there are so many fantastic companies down here that it's definitely worthwhile hearing from them and hearing how they make their businesses successful.

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. And 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. I've been coming down here to Gulf Shores for the last 15 years in the fall and winter. And for the last few, it's been for five months between November and April. It's like a second home, but it's on wheels and just gets parked in one place. We absolutely love it. I truly am a snowbird and very happy to be known as one. I have no requirement or need to spend my winter shoveling, and while I'm still able to drive the four days from Ontario down to the Gulf Coast, then we're going to continue to do this for the foreseeable future.

Heather Bayer
And you know, while I've been coming down all these years, I've always noticed all these property managers with offices along the coastal roads, and they range from the huge Vacasa building to many, many smaller units. And it's always been fascinating just seeing them and checking out whether I've met the owners or founders or any of the staff at some of the conferences we've been to. And driving from Gulf Shores to Fort Morgan, which is along the coastal road and about 26 miles, just about every single home has a rental sign outside. There's such a huge concentration of rental properties in this area, and this year, for the first time, I've had the pleasure of meeting quite a few owners of these companies. And we've met for lunch, we've met for dinner, or coffee, and I've enjoyed hearing about how they work in such a competitive environment.

Heather Bayer
It's also been fun to see behind the doors of their working spaces and to meet their staff and to hear about their values and their mission and their vision for the business. So I thought it would be really interesting to invite them all onto the podcast to share their stories. So over the next couple of months, you'll be hearing from them.

Heather Bayer
These are businesses that are entrenched in this area with owners who have really deep connections with the community. And today I'm talking to Deb Furlong, the owner of Beach Getaways. And I have huge thanks to Deb for letting my company have one of their properties for a week to create some video and do some podcast recording and to just experience the great hospitality from Deb and from Beach Getaways. So without further ado, let's move on over to my discussion with Deb, which I'm sure you're going to find really valuable.

Heather Bayer
I am so excited to have Deb Furlong of Beach Getaways here with me today. Deb and I, we've met before at conferences, but we finally got the chance to sit down and have a long coffee in a coffee shop in Gulf Shores a month or two ago, and I learned more about her company. Since then, I've been to the offices, I've met the staff, and Deb is the first of our Property Managers that I'm bringing to you in the podcast.

Heather Bayer
I don't know what I'm going to call it, Property Managers of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach? But this is the first in a series where I am interviewing some of these founders that have been fully entrenched in their communities for years. And we're going to hear from them and hear their stories. Deb, thank you so much for joining me.

Deb Furlong
Oh, thank you, Heather. I've been looking so forward to this chat.

Heather Bayer
Well, when we met, you shared your story, and I've always loved people's origin stories. Where did you start in this business? Because I think it's so important, particularly for those people who are just jumping into it right now, and the only history they've ever seen is Airbnb from about 2014. And it's like there was no history before that. So this is why I want to start each of these sessions by asking what your origin story is. How did you start and what inspired you to get into the business in the first place?

Deb Furlong
Well, the main inspiration was we needed to make a living. That was the biggest inspiration. What can we do to make a living? It was 2008, my husband was in commercial real estate. No one was doing commercial real estate in 2008. I'm an interior designer, and no one was doing any interior designing. So we had to find a way to make a living.

Deb Furlong
In 2005, my husband's father passed away, and he had two properties that he'd put on a rental program with one of the larger companies here in the Gulf Shores area. And we weren't super happy with the rental income. So we were taking care of all the owner things, the deep clean, the buying, and all of that. So that was our toes dipping into vacation rentals. And so in 2010, my husband put these properties on VRBO and fed all of these reservations to the property management company. So he made them a lot of money for the year, but of course, for his mom as well. But he realized, well, this is a lot of work. And if I'm going to do it, I think I need to do it as a job and build a company.

Deb Furlong
And Ken comes from the service industry background, and he's great with that. And of course, we know this is a people-facing job, and it's all about how we're going to serve them. So it was a good fit for us to do that. So we started with these two family-owned properties. My husband said, if I could sell my mother on it, I probably could sell someone else. And so she agreed, and off we went, and it was a slow start. But it started picking up after about 18 months, and we've steadily growing through the years.

Heather Bayer
How did you, in those early stages, because of so many properties in this area, how did you get to... getting these owners to trust you enough to give you their properties in the first place, in those early days?

Deb Furlong
Well, the early days that we were in there was still the Mom and Pop idea of vacation rentals, right? And so marketing was sending letters out, sending them to owners. And the buildings that we were part of were the Phoenix buildings [seafront condos] in Orange Beach. And so we just marketed to those buildings. We knew those buildings. We were in two of those buildings. We were property owners in the new owners' minds. They knew we understood all of the ins and out of that. He did have a background in property management anyway on a commercial level. And the other thing is Ken's integrity. Once people met him, they knew he was going to do what he said he was going to do. And I think that's what really won him over. And really, the ones that we brought on in those early years are still with us. One passed away, but the others are still there.

Heather Bayer
That is fantastic. I mean, that is testament to how well a business has maintained the trust of owners if they're still with you after all these years. So coming right up-to-date, how many properties do you have and where are they? Because I know you're expanding outside of this area.

Deb Furlong
So we're in the low 400s and we are in Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, Perdido Key, Pensacola City, the city of Pensacola, Pensacola Beach, Gulf Breeze, [State Road] 30A [coastal highway along what is known as the Emerald Coast], and Panama City Beach.

Heather Bayer
Wow, you are extending. It's like tentacles, isn't it?

Deb Furlong
It is.

Heather Bayer
Pushing out along the.....

Deb Furlong
It's a lot of markets, but it's so exciting. It's such an exciting time in our business.

Heather Bayer
It was really interesting that you mentioned Mom and Pop, because I interviewed Matt Landau a month or so back. And I think the title of that episode was called 'Beyond the Mom and Pop'. And it stemmed from a meeting he had in a car park in Miami with a group of attendees at the IMN Conference, which is one that attracts the real estate investors. As he said, it was more men in suits than the type of people that you'd meet at maybe a VRMA conference. It was all talk about investment.

Heather Bayer
He said, These guys were just giddy about the money they were going to make in the business. But then they started to make derogatory remarks about how ripe the business was for disrupting the traditional Mom and Pops. And I actually mentioned Beach Getaways in that, and I said, This is the epitome of beyond the Mom and Pop. This is what you started out with. It's what I started out with in Ontario back in 2003. We started out as Mom and Pop, but we grew through it and beyond it. And I love to see that businesses like yours are doing so well and still growing, but still maintaining the same core of those Mom and Pop values.

Heather Bayer
And that's what we're going to talk about today is values. Because one of the things that you gave me when we met and had our chat was a little booklet that you give to all your staff. And on the front, it says Core Values. And there's four or five pages on the values that are now enshrined as the core principles of your company. So can you talk a little bit about what those values are and how you went about selecting them?

Deb Furlong
Okay, so primarily, well I'll tell you what the core values are. If you want to say our mission statement is heart of hospitality, providing happy connections and lasting memories. So how do we do that? We do it first with respect and then integrity, teamwork, trustworthy, empathy, and servant leadership. So these values really were things that Ken and I, 45 years ago, when we got married, had worked on in our family, in ourselves. And so it was what we would share at work. We never had these written down until 18 months ago, until Matt Landau and Steve Schwab inspired us to get this done through a retreat we went to, and it just has taken off. It's just amazing, but really it just started with what our values were. And so as we sat down as a team and started discussing our own personal values and then talking about core values as a company, it just came up over and over again, these six core values as the basis of what Beach Getaways is about.

Heather Bayer
I love that you say you've always worked with these values, but in your head and just shared, I would suppose, verbally with your team. What difference does it make to you to actually do this exercise. As you say, kudos to the Key Retreats and Matt Landau and Steve Schwab for inspiring you to get ahead of this and put them all down and publish them, I guess, because I was just blown away when I saw this booklet. It just took me back to my 20 years as a property manager and thinking, Oh, I wish we'd done this. I wish we'd done this. I wish we'd had the time or really thought about it to write everything down. Because so much of what we do in this business is in our heads, and certainly in the founder's heads.

Deb Furlong
I think one of the things that it's done is it's in print. And so when something's in print and you hand it out to someone, it makes it real. It's not a concept. It's something that we're agreeing to as a company that we're going to abide by these core values so that, as Steve said, if someone can't get an answer to something, all they have to do is look at these six core values and make a judgment based on that. And so I think the thing that's great about it is it empowers people to grow in their own core values, to grow in what they're representing on a daily basis.

Deb Furlong
And so to me, this has catapulted our culture in our company, because people will talk about, well, if we're in a meeting, we need to work on our teamwork because this didn't happen the way it should have happened. They're bringing it up, so they're buying in. Or if you're helping someone with something that didn't go well, you can go back to the core values and say, Where do you think you fell short in these core values that it might have made a difference if you had thought about it?

Deb Furlong
And what's wonderful about that is you're, again, empowering people, be people of character. And to me, that is more valuable than anything that we have done as a company because it's clear, it creates a safe environment, it creates an opportunity for people to be trained in character. So it's wonderful. I just can't say enough. And I'm like you. I wish we had done it years ago.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Just to make it a little clearer for those who are listening, the booklet talks about each of the values and has a couple of bullet points. So let's take Integrity for one. The bullet points are, I will be honest and fair in all my actions. And, I will always do the right thing, even when no one is looking. And I love that one. How did you come to that one? Is that just part of that value of integrity that you still do the right thing even when you're away from anybody who might care?

Deb Furlong
Well, I think some people think integrity is if I look good enough, maybe they think I've done a good enough job. But ultimately, integrity is about who's within you, where you lay your head on the pillow at night. So true integrity is I'm going to do the right thing, whether anybody ever sees it, acknowledges or knows it. And the first statement is just a statement about what integrity is. The other is an actionable item, something very practical they can walk away with and say, Oh, this is what this means. There's no confusion over the definition when you know, do the right thing when no one is looking. That's where it comes down to.

Heather Bayer
I love the descriptions underneath each one of these as well. I mean, for integrity, you say, by choosing integrity over profit or recognition, it sends a message that the organization is committed to doing what is right and building a positive reputation based on honesty and fairness. There's a lot of new businesses popping up these days, and their core value appears to be making money, as I mentioned about this group of guys in the car park in Miami that Matt was talking to. And I think, and you've done it, so of course you'll agree, by writing this down, by printing it, it builds a confidence, I think, in your team, your staff, that the business is going in the right direction and it has a true foundation to it.

Deb Furlong
We didn't create these values for our bottom line. That's not the reason we made them. We made them because this is who we need to be in order to service and to make right on the agreements we've made with our guests and our owners, and our vendors, and our employees. So yes, it probably cost us a bit to do the right thing, but I sleep better at night by doing the right thing. And I think people feel safer in this environment as an employee. They feel protected. They feel looked after. They know we're going to address things if we see they're not going well. And that creates a culture that is healthy. And I just can't tell you how many interviews we've done, and we use the core values in our interviews, that people said, Does this really happen here? My company has core values, but we don't really do it. And then we're like, no, this is the only way we can run this company and be happy there, be encouraged there, enjoy your work.

Deb Furlong
This is a hard industry. I mean, it takes a lot of self control to be in this industry. And if you don't have some good character, it's not going to go well or you'll burn out. And we certainly don't want that for our employees.

Heather Bayer
So how have you integrated these core values into the everyday operations of your business?

Deb Furlong
Well, we use them in everything we do, actually. It starts when we are taking on a new owner. We share with them a booklet. They get to take it home with them. This is our core values. This is how we run our companies. When we do interviews, we talk about this is our core values. And you can kind of get a read on people. And I even ask them sometimes, which of these are the hardest for you? Because we're not all perfect in any of them, of all of them, but we all have to work on them. And so that tells you a lot about people.

Deb Furlong
I think the other thing is we talk it with our vendors. When we hire new vendors to work with us, we let them know what our core values are. So there's continual accountability in that as well, because we're putting ourselves out there to say what we are going to do and people will say, well, this didn't happen according to what you said. And then we're like, you're right. So the integrity in us has got to make it right. So I think those are the ways that that works.

Deb Furlong
We use them in meetings, in team meetings every week. Every week, there's team meetings that we talk about core values. And whether it's one team member picks a core value they want to talk about, or if they caught somebody doing a core value that they saw and it made an impression on them, they share that and encourage that person. We talk about it in our leadership group. We talk about it one on one. I had to have a talk with one of my managers about how she had gossiped in the office. And really, it came from frustration and she was in her mind venting. But she said it in a way, and in an audience, that it created mistrust. So I talked about the respect and the trustworthiness of our teammates, and of our owners, and of our guests. We can't do that now, you need to come in my office and vent for 10 minutes? Come on in, and I'll have a listen because I understand that. But at the same time, we're using these core values to help people with the decisions they make, and how to work through the frustrations, and what to do with those frustrations.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, talking through frustrations then, there must be challenges sometimes in maintaining the values in your business. I know that we had them, and maybe it was dealing with a guest who perhaps had unreasonable expectations and trying to have that empathy, trying to have that respect for their opinions and work through an issue. Do you have any example of the situation where this occurred, maybe in a guest situation?

Deb Furlong
In a guest situation, yes, I have a doozy for that. When we failed in, actually, a guest had rented a really beautiful home in the 30A area. And while they were there for the week, the owner called and asked if they could have the contractor drop off some equipment that they were going to remodel with the next week when the guests left. So they agreed to it. And then, whenever the next day came around, the contractor decided that they were just going to go ahead and get started on this project with the guest in the house. So we worked through that. Well, I really didn't know about it until the tail end of it, but as they were working through it, they were trying to accommodate the guest, accommodate the owner. The property manager got in the middle of it and didn't know who to answer to the most, which, of course, she needed to have advocated for the guest, but ended up just being a mess. The guests left early, and so since my title on the website is Guest Services Manager, I get a really long, very well thought out, well written letter to me about his experience and what they had offered him in compensation for his really ridiculousness.

Deb Furlong
So what I started out in my letter is I wrote down our core values. I put them all, listed them all out. And I said, we have failed you in every single one of these situations. But what I'd like to do is completely refund you your money for your time that you were there - which was a lot of money - and what I hope is that we can have a conversation about this. And so please let me know if you would like to converse. I would love a chance to talk with you. So he emailed back and said, yes, I'd love to talk to you.

Deb Furlong
We ended up having an amazing talk. He'd been a guest two times before with us. He said, I've always had a great experience with you. So I thought something must be wrong if that happened. So he gave us a chance to make it right. And so after the conversation, he told me, he said, Well, I'm going to tell you what, you are my company from now on, because I know you'll make right what was done wrong. He said, I know mistakes happen, things happen, people don't know how to handle situations. And so that was an opportunity for me to talk about how we had so failed in those core values and yet went on, and now we have a customer for life.

Heather Bayer
That is such a terrific story. I remember doing this years ago, in the early stages of our business, and we had a $4,000 booking for two weeks. Now, we're talking back in 2004, 2005.

Deb Furlong
That's a lot of money.

Heather Bayer
That was a lot of money then. And unbeknownst to us, the owner had been in the property prior to the guest arriving. We did not know this, we thought the property was all ready. The owner had been there, they'd had some of the owner's friends. The owner had left and the friends had promised to clean up. Of course, they didn't, they walked out, they left it in a mess. And guests arrived, and they just flipped. They really did. We probably didn't handle it well at all. Basically, they said, We want to leave. We want to find another property. We're saying, Well, we can send a cleaning team in. No, he didn't want that at all. In the end, we said, Look, we appreciate we have not met our commitments to you. We want to give you all your money back. You can find another property with us. You can find another property with another company, but we have failed you.

Heather Bayer
That $4,000. The owner, of course, was apoplectic about this, because they wouldn't take responsibility. That was a difficult situation. I think in retrospect, it was 20 odd years ago now, we would have done it in a very different way. But still, taking that decision way back of refunding all the money and just saying, We'll rehouse you or you can find somewhere else. I think we wanted them to go somewhere else, but anyway, these situations happen all the time. And you have to make that value judgment about how you're going to deal with it. And I love what you did was to start with saying, These are our values, and we have fallen down on each one of them. It's such a great way of creating a relationship, because so many people would come back and be completely defensive about it. You had no idea that they were going to start.

Deb Furlong
Correct.

Heather Bayer
So kudos to you for that one.

Deb Furlong
It's valuable to realize that in the end, whether you lose the money, and like I said, we started this business out of necessity. We have been seconds away from bankruptcy a couple of times. And so letting go of money in a situation like that, you're like, whoa, this might really mess us up with the owner. I mean, there's a lot of implications there. But at the end of the day, the owner didn't hold up to those values either. She let them go ahead and work on the house when she didn't honor that guest that was in her home. And so I think all of that around, we all learned a great lesson in how to handle that in the future. But at the same time, it was good to know that at the end of the day, doing that right thing for that guest kept a guest for us for future vacations. He comes twice a year. So that value, the money, if you're worried about that, it's going to come back if you do the right thing.

Heather Bayer
I remember a book from years ago called A Complaint is a Gift and saying customer loyalty is built through handling challenging issues in a good way. And if you handle a customer issue well, then they will become more loyal to you. Yeah, great example of that.

Heather Bayer
When I've come down here each year, I'm always blown away by the amount of property management companies there are. You've got that big Vacasa building now. Then all the smaller ones, and some of them are little more than little cabins. But everybody in those buildings are working to the same end, to create magical vacations for their guests. But you have grown fast, you've grown continuously over time, but you're still in a very competitive market. Do you find that these values make an impact on that growth, on that success, and your reputation as well?

Deb Furlong
I do. I think the thing that we find that in our community, whether it's the vendors or our guests or the owners or even building managers that are taking care of properties, that we have multiple properties in there, or even one. They know us. They know that we're going to do what we say we're going to do. We're going to show up in the right manner. And even when we don't, we're going to resolve that conflict. And there were two situations where one of our employees backed into a condo building's lights and left. Didn't tell them they did it or anything. Well, we had to go back. We had to apologize. We had to make it right. And since then, the property manager loves us, so she recommends us to everybody. Right there, that gives you the opportunity to show what you're going to do when you've done something wrong, because we're all going to do something wrong. We're all going to mess up.

Deb Furlong
And then there was another situation where, unfortunately, one of my maintenance guys lost his temper with one of the building managers, large building companies, a large building. And the guy told me he could never come back to his property again. Well, we had 30 properties there. He needs to go there because he's our maintenance guy. So Ken went with him, made an appointment, went and met with the guy, and made it all right. And so that reputation, even though we did something wrong, it shows how do you handle conflict, how do you handle things when you've done something wrong? How do you handle it when things aren't going right? And everybody can have a bad day and say the wrong thing. And I think they equally were having bad days.

Deb Furlong
But to me, that reputation exceeds what you can just see on a billboard, or what you can see how big a building is, or what you can see in VRBO or your website or whatever. When you have those real interactions with people in your community, it builds trust. Owners refer us all the time, realtors refer us all the time, guests refer us all the time. We've had guests buy properties because they liked our company. One guy came down, he's a medical doctor. He said, If I was a property manager, I'd do exactly what you all are doing. Because he said, I trust you.

Deb Furlong
And I think that's what it's all about, right? Do people trust you? Because you're entrusted with a big financial portfolio for them and the guests as well. Their one year vacation, one week vacation out of the year, they live for. People do. We did. And we want it to be the best it can be for them.

Heather Bayer
I love that you talk about trust because that trust is the core of what we're teaching in the Vacation Rental Formula Business School. It's one of our, what do you call it, the triangle, which is trust, responsibility, hospitality, and how the three intertwine to create a truly successful business.

Heather Bayer
In our SSTIR Crazy Month that we held in February, we had a complete week on trust, because that is so important. You have trustworthy as one of your values, and this is about your team being trustworthy so that others will trust them. And you say when you are trustworthy, others are more likely to trust you. And this can lead to greater opportunities for growth and success. How do you teach your team about trust? What is important when they are speaking to guests and when they're speaking to owners in terms of getting them to trust them?

Deb Furlong
Part of it is having on the page opposite is empathy. And empathy requires understanding where someone else is coming from. If you're quick to be defensive, you're quick to give a reason why something's not going to work, to me, that's not exhibiting trustworthiness. Trustworthiness requires humility. If you're going to be trustworthy, you've got to be humble enough to listen to something that's gone wrong, or to explain why you're doing something some way. Right? That you want to build trust with people. And when you don't build trust, then the defensiveness and the questions all come. And so when you think about what you read, when you are trustworthy, others are more likely to trust you. Well, that goes back to the conversation I had with the manager that she had gossiped, and so she lost trust with the people that heard it. That's where we have to be careful and really take ownership of who we are. Are we dependable, are we reliable, are we being honest? And I just think that it builds on itself, the continual trust. Whether it's going back to integrity and making it right if you've done something wrong builds trust. Don't ignore it. You don't pretend like it didn't happen. You confront it.

Heather Bayer
To us, trust is at the core of absolutely everything we do. And it's true in life, it's not just in this business; it's true in life.

Heather Bayer
You talked about empathy. I just wanted to share a video. I wish I could find this video again. It was on Facebook. I'm just going to have to search around to find it. It was a door cam video of a guest arriving at a vacation rental. It's an older gentleman, and he's arrived and clearly he's very early. Clearly, from what the remote voice is saying from the door cam. The owner, who he's talking to is not there. There is nobody in the property. The guest arrives and he says, Hey, this is me. I'm here. The disembodied voice comes back and says, You're here for what? He said, I've rented this place. I'm here for my vacation. The voice says, Well, you might be there, but you're not there at the right time. You're four hours early, and the place isn't ready for you. The gentleman says, But I booked this two months ago. You've had plenty of time to get it ready for me.

Heather Bayer
So clearly, when I heard that, now I don't know if this was a manufactured video or not, but it's a great teaching tool, because these situations happen all the time, because the guest was saying, I didn't know I was going to arrive early and it wasn't going to take me much time to get from the airport to being outside your door, but I'm here and I'd like to come in.

Heather Bayer
He said, Well, you can't come in because it's not ready for you. I'm two hours away, and I'm not going to get there for 2 hours, even if I leave now. It just struck me that that situation could have gone so differently, because it went on and eventually the gentleman, the guest, walks away from the door. He's really upset. They're not going to let him in, not even to drop his bags off.

Heather Bayer
It was just handled so badly because there was no empathy. There was no 'listening carefully', as you say here, I'll listen carefully to what you have to say. Consider other people's thoughts, feelings, and experiences. The fact that he said, I booked this two months ago, and therefore, you've had plenty of time to get it ready for me. So that to me sounded, Okay, this is the first time he's done this. This first time he's rented, he has no comprehension that somebody might have been in the place the day before. Somebody who has empathy is going to treat that person in a very different way. Treat them with kindness, treat them with grace, accept that they have inexperience, which is uncomfortable for them at the moment, and the person on the other end needs to find a way to get around it.

Heather Bayer
I thought about it afterwards. I thought, well, I could think of half a dozen different scenarios. Find a restaurant, even get an Uber to come and pick him up and take him to a restaurant, get a cleaning team in, get it done. That would have been my first solution. But that is all about empathy. I think there's a lot of people coming into this business now, particularly in the co-hosting area. Owners are putting their properties with co-hosts who say, We'll do all the property management for you, but the hospitality part of it is missing.

Deb Furlong
I think about a book that I share with our teammates, and every new reservation agent gets one, and every manager gets one. It's called Yes is the Answer. And the thing about it is, how can we find a way to say yes? You never know who you're talking to, what their experience has been, what has happened in their life, what does bring them to this vacation, what is happening. And if you can participate in easing pain or frustration or fear, why wouldn't you want to do that for someone? And like you said, there's half a dozen things you can do to say yes to that situation without saying no. And I think the thing that's important is that we're in the hospitality industry. That's what we're doing. So why don't we act hospitable? That's the goal is to be hospitable.

Heather Bayer
Exactly. And going back to the guys in suits in the car park in Miami, which I still... I forget, Matt talked about that they were in a huddle and smoking a joint. I have this picture of them, and I have a picture of Matt joining them and going, Okay, what's all this about? Why are you talking about vacation rentals? As he said, they were excited. They were giddy about the money. They were not giddy about the hospitality that they going to give their guests, about the experiences they were going to give their guests, and the memories and the dreams. That was probably not even a part of that conversation at all. They were going to leave that to the Mom and Pops.

Deb Furlong
You know, Heather, that's what we've seen in these large, large, large corporations, right? They're not able to operationally meet the needs of their guests at times. And I don't know all of them, of course, and I'm not trying to make a blanket statement, but I think that's what we're most concerned about as we grow. We don't want to lose what we've built. We don't want to lose the emotion and the experience that the guests have from start to finish. That it's a personal touch all the way through. And so that's why I think these core values are the thing that is just going to hold us to that. It's the glue that's going to make it really, really work. And it really creates a culture within in our company that people enjoy being there. They like to be there.

Deb Furlong
We had some interviews for a reservation agent. And as you came in our office, you could see our conference room has a door on it that you can see through. So Ken asked her, he said, Well, why would you want to work at Beach Getaways? She said, I've been sitting here watching everybody come in and out of here, and they're all happy. So I think I'd like to work in a happy place. And it's not that we're passing out happy pills, it's that we're creating an environment for people to enjoy. Work is hard enough. We spend more time together. Well, my husband and I spend all our time together, but most people don't spend that much time with their family. They spend it more with their work family, and that's how we try to put the emphasis in that.

Heather Bayer
It was very clear when I came into your office space, there was just an atmosphere of enjoyment. People seem to be enjoying what they do. It probably helped by the mountain of bottles of wine that you have.

Deb Furlong
That is a big help. It does help things. They explained what they were for, right?

Heather Bayer
They did. [Guest Gifts]

Deb Furlong
Okay, good. It's not Happy Hour every day, I promise.

Heather Bayer
So if you were advising somebody else that's coming into this industry right now and they want to build a value-driven business, what would you advise them?

Deb Furlong
It goes back to what I said earlier. Don't create your values for your bottom line. You have to decide, what company do you want to be associated with? And then don't wait 12 years to write them down.

Heather Bayer
That is great.

Deb Furlong
Please don't wait. I think it would have helped us so much in how we hired, who we hired, when we hired, all types of things, what owners we will and won't accept. I mean, even in our core values, we've had to let go of owners, because they can't adhere to them. And so I think having the courage to live out those values in your company is so wonderful. It builds a community in your company. It's a place of safety. It's a place where people feel valued and respected and they really don't want to leave. They want to keep working there, which I love.

Deb Furlong
So I would really say, really don't wait. I think it's so important. And I think one of the things that I loved from Steve Schwab in his Credo book that he created for Casago, I mean ours is like, I don't know, like a funny papers compared to his, but it's so amazing what he's done. And he was so encouraging and humble with me. And he said, Deb, this is about our 40th iteration. This is your first. And I thought, that's wonderful. I'm glad we had the courage just to start. And that's what I would say, just start. Start creating those core values.

Heather Bayer
I've mentioned to a lot of people that when you start in this business, you think about the end of it and you create a business plan that is updated every year. And it reflects the changes that happen because this is not a business that stays still. So I'm going to go back to my business plan. In fact, Mike and I are creating a new business plan at the moment for Vacation Rental Formula Business School. And I'm going to go back to that right now and build some core values into it, because we don't have them. And get them written down. You have inspired me.

Deb Furlong
Thank you.

Heather Bayer
So looking towards the future, Deb, you've grown to 400 plus properties. What's in the future for Beach Getaways, and how do you see those core values just helping to shape that growth and direction?

Deb Furlong
It's a great question, because Ken and I aren't spring chickens, right? So everybody's like, what's your end game? And we're like, we're still alive, I don't know, we're going to keep going. But I think our reputation as a company will only get stronger, because as we continue to embody these core values, it permeates everything that happens within teams, within owners, within guests, within vendors. And I think that it's just going to attract more of what we want. It's like, whatever you want to come to you, you've got to be, right? So if you want the type of people that embody the same core values, then that's what you're going to attract, and they're going to be interested in that.

Deb Furlong
I'm just super... We're so excited about the future of Beach Getaways. We don't really know where it is. We have a plan to add really as many properties as we can and handle in an efficient and responsible way. So we'll see. We'll see what happens. We're opening a new office in Pensacola Beach next week, and that's exciting. So we're just looking forward to the future. And I think that's what's going to happen.

Heather Bayer
I am sure it will be so successful. And I wish you and Ken and all your team every success in the future. And of course, we will continue to meet. This is not a one-off meeting. We will continue to get together and talk about how well you're doing. I shall follow it with interest. Thanks so much for joining me, Deb. It's been just a pleasure talking with Thank you.

Deb Furlong
Thank you, Heather. We just so respect you and so grateful.

Heather Bayer
Thank you.

Deb Furlong
Bye-bye.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much, Deb Furlong, for joining me on this episode. It's been such a pleasure this year speaking to so many property managers down here in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach. I'm really looking forward to sharing their stories because they're all different. They may all be in the same area down here, but everybody has a different story and has different strengths. And I just love their stories. So you will be hearing more over the next few weeks.

Heather Bayer
If you're listening to this on the day of publication, It's early March. I will be heading off to the CanStays Rental Alliance conference in Banff in just a few weeks time. The conference is the 20th to the 22nd of April, and you can find more details on the conference website, which I will put the information in the Show Notes. It's going to be a different conference, something that I haven't seen the likes of before, because it's bringing in politicians and decision makers, together with the people who are at the front end of this industry, the property managers and the independent hosts, because these decision-makers aren't hearing from them. They're only hearing from Airbnb because that's all they know to get hold of if they have a question about us.

Heather Bayer
We don't want Airbnb telling our story. This is what Catherine Ratcliffe is aiming to do, is to bring together these decision-makers, together with those of us on the front line, and we can have a good discussion, and hopefully, it will be able to shape some of the policy and the decisions that are being made going forward. If you're in Canada and you want to find out more about this conference, which dedicated to you, then please take a look at the website. I'd love to see you there. It's a great lineup of speakers, and Banff is the most beautiful place at any time of the year. It's just worthwhile going maybe just for that. As I say, information will be on the Show Notes, as will be the link to Deb's site and anything else we mentioned during this episode.

Heather Bayer
So thank you once again for joining me this time. I'll see you again next week.

Heather Bayer
It 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.

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