Mike Bayer
You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success Podcast, and I'd like to know if you've looked into the Vacation Rental Management Growth Accelerator Program yet? It's easy to find out more. Simply click on the link in the description of this episode or visit vacationrentalformula.com for more information.

Mike Bayer
Now, we know you must be excited to have a little bit of a breather now the summer is winding down. But before you put your feet up, consider this. Now is the best time to review, revise, and invest in your business and set yourself up for greater success in the years ahead. The end of the summer season is when the challenges and successes of your business are still fresh in your mind. This is the ideal moment to reflect, analyze, and strategize. And by joining the Vacation Rental Management Growth Accelerator Program, you'll gain the insights and tools to address the issues you faced this season and create a plan for improvement before the next high season hits. Think of this program as your opportunity to recharge your business while you recharge yourself.

Mike Bayer
Over eight weeks, you'll receive expert coaching, actionable strategies, and personalized advice that will help you fine-tune your operations, enhance guest experiences, strengthen owner relationships, and so much more. Are you ready to make the most of this downtime? Register now and take the first steps towards the next year being your most successful yet. So one last time, click the link in the description of this episode or visit vacationrentalformula.com for more information.

Mike Bayer
Okay, enough from me. Let's get started. Here's your host, and hopefully future coach, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer
Some property management companies just stand out from the crowd. They do things that set them apart from the rest. The Cottages on the Key is one of those, and in this episode I talk to vice president and COO Nick Russell about their credo, the set of values that underpins their relationships with guests and owners and their team, and how these values are translated into positive actions and memorable events. This is a great part of our successful property manager series, and I think you're going to really enjoy it.

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, 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 as ever, I'm super delighted to be back with you once again.

Heather Bayer
As we get on through the month of August, talking about schools, going back, and do you know that that really throws me. I'm thinking, here we are in the middle of summer, and all the ads on TV are talking about back to school. I don't know where the summer's gone. I say that every single year, time just seems to whip by so fast. But you know, I'm quite looking forward to the Fall and heading in towards the winter. Always love a change of season.

Heather Bayer
Anyhow, that aside, in all the episodes I've done on the really successful property managers, one thing that really stands out is that they talk about their values, those underpinning principles that guide absolutely everything they do. Deb Furlong, from Beach Getaways, shared that having a booklet that states their values left in every property just helps to set them apart. And that same booklet is given to every new hire, so they're aware from the start what drives the business.

Heather Bayer
The Cottages on the Key in Florida call it their credo, from having a Yes Policy to creating a Wow factor. Every aspect of their business operation is reflected in the values that they share in their credo. And they don't keep them hidden away or just pin them up on an office wall. These values, like Deb's, are out there for everyone to see on their website. And you know, I'm often asked what should be on a company website that will attract direct bookings.

Heather Bayer
It's unfortunate that so many sites aren't that much different from an Airbnb or Vrbo listing. They describe the amenities and the features and they have lovely photos, but they fail to create any differentiation. Or they don't talk about themselves and their businesses. But this is the 'Why'. Why should a guest book directly with you instead of having the confidence in booking through an OTA? Because after all, the OTAs spend billions on creating trust. But you have to give the those potential guests a reason to get over any trepidation they feel in going off platform. And once again, the OTAs are creating that nervousness. They're telling people don't go off the platform, it's not safe. You don't know what you're going to get. And they're trying to convince guests that booking direct is a really risky business. So you have to use your online real estate to tell your story to create a relationship with a potential guest, because you're speaking directly to their needs, their desires, and their pain points.

Heather Bayer
When you finish listening to this, take a really critical look at how you present your company on your website. Imagine you're a guest visiting it for the first time. What does it tell you about how the business operates? Could you actually place your trust in that business? From the story that's told, I can actually list over three dozen things you can do to show trustworthiness on a site. But there are two that really make a difference. The first is an 'About Us' page that tells a story. The second are the values that define how you run your business.

Heather Bayer
So in this episode, I'm talking to Nick Russell, the COO and VP of The Cottages on the Key. I know a lot of property managers and the ones I interview on this show are the ones that are doing something really different and special, so we can share that uniqueness with you. Earlier this year, I moderated a panel for the Breezeway Elevate event, and we were talking about guest experience and wow moments. And Nick Russell was on that panel and shared something that The Cottages on the Key do for every guest group that was so different and unique; I had to talk to him and find out more. This is a masterclass in professional vacation rental management, so listen and learn. Let's go over to my interview with Nick Russell.

Heather Bayer
So I am delighted to have with me today Nick Russell from The Cottages on the Key. I first came across Nick at the Breezeway Elevate event where I was moderating a panel, which didn't actually go as well as we wanted, because we had some real echo issues. We are not having any echo issues on this podcast this morning, so I think we can safely have a great conversation without having any technical problems. I probably shouldn't have said that, Nick. Anyway, thank you for joining me. A huge welcome to the podcast.

Nick Russell
Thank you so much. So excited for being here and looking forward to this conversation.

Heather Bayer
Well, tell me - the question I ask everybody that comes on the show, how did you actually get into this industry?

Nick Russell
Okay, so it's a kind of a cool story. My origin story, it was about probably eleven years ago or so, and I'm from Chicago, so I was living in Florida, and I was visiting some friends back in Chicago. And on my way out of town, I was  on a train, and I was on a dating app, and I made a connection with somebody on my way out of town. So over the course of say, two, three months, we were speaking organically. And as time went on, I realized, wow, I'm really into this person. And she felt the same way about me. And I was supposed to go to Chicago for a wedding. Something came up I couldn't go. And I came up with this kind of crazy idea, this proposal. I was like, look, I know we haven't been on a date, we haven't really met, but I've got a wild idea. Would you be interested in flying down to Siesta Key, because in our conversations, I learned that she was from San Diego, she loved the beach, we had all these things in common, let's get a house together.

Nick Russell
You know, there'll be two bedrooms. It'll be. I know, I know, it's a wild story. So it'd be two bedrooms. Like, we'd have privacy and just get to know each other that way. And she was like, yes, I'd love to do that. So that set the stage for me. We're trying to find a vacation rental. And I was kind of like, okay, I have to find the perfect place in order for this to work, not get awkward, you know, that kind of thing. So I started searching Siesta Key. I looked at a couple of houses, found this house called Sophie's Cottage. And I was like, I think this will be perfect. Started communicating with the management company. They were responsive. They even gave me a tour of the place so I could take my own pictures of it and send to her.

Nick Russell
So fast forward, four weeks later, it was time to have this day. Picked her up at the airport, came down, came in at night. We'd stopped somewhere to see the sunset, so it was dark when we got to the house This is an island, so the streets are dark, and you get to the house and it's got all the lights on, landscape lights, it was so inviting. So that was a nice way to start, as opposed to coming to a dark house. You'd open the door, walk in, and the first thing I saw were cupcakes which said, Welcome, Russell Family. And I was like, oh, my gosh. I was like, wow, they think I'm so special, I can't believe they did this for me. And it was a good look for her, too, because it kind of set the stage for what ended up being an amazing trip, even.

Nick Russell
It was Memorial Day weekend, and we had a wedding next door, which we don't do anymore [The Cottages on the Key], but our owner owned the house next door as well, and they're having a wedding. And at the time, it was Heather, our CEO, very involved in all the day to day, and she came over to check on us, because she was worried there was a wedding. She was worried about us being disturbed. We didn't care. We loved it. We loved watching it all happen. It was kind of a cool experience. And even in that conversation, we told Heather our story a little bit, and she was like, why don't you guys extend your stay, stay for two, three more nights? W e won't charge you. So the level of hospitality was very high, and we took on our offer, and we fell in love on that trip.

Nick Russell
So fast forward to nine months later. We're living with each other in Chicago, and we both determined that's not really where we wanted to set roots down or we wanted to be in warmer weather. We're exploring different destinations, and we made a list and we're like, okay, top three places, Chesapeake was number one. But you know, it's a hard place to start a career or to go and branch off. And I was getting out of the industry I was in previously.

Nick Russell
So she was a recruiter, so she found a job immediately, which caught me off guard, because I thought it was going to take some time. So I had some pressure on myself to find something. I'm going on job post, and I saw a post for guest services manager, and I said Oh, my gosh, I think that's the company that we stayed at. So I tracked Heather down. She had an interview with me, laid out the vision for what I was going to be doing in the beginning and what I was going to do, what she thought I could do later on.

Nick Russell
At the time, the company was small, to be honest with you, at the time, all she could offer me was 15 dollars an hour for 20 hours a week. And then there's some supplemental income through inspections at the time that I could do. And I was like, you know what? Let's take a leap of faith. I'll give this three months and we'll see what this can turn into. And, you know, I would say everything she envisioned has come to reality. As big as those dreams were you're seeing them happen every day. And our daughter is six years old, and her name is Sophie.

Heather Bayer
That is the best, by far, origin story I've ever heard. It's amazing. And, yes, and now you are vice president at The Cottages on the Key, and I'm sort of a little bit speechless after that. That was so great. Tell me what a day looks like in your role as VP.

Nick Russell
For me, I've been with the company for almost ten years and started at the ground floor. So I had my chance to work my way up to the company, learn the industry, and be a part of how it's evolved with technology and software, all those things. So it's been nice to be able to organically do that. I try to be the first person in the office or one of the first people, just so I can maintain focus before bullets start flying, because in vacation rentals, you don't know what might pop up, which makes it exciting. But I try to review all reservations that came in overnight. We track everything here. We try to track as much as possible. We're constantly tracking more. So we track every complaint a guest has, so I look at what complaints came in. What are the issues? Do I need to ask questions? Literally, we track every escalation in detail, what their issue was. I have an operations background, so I always have my Breezeway tab open. I read messages that are coming through, make sure people are communicating the way we want them to.

Nick Russell
I will go on Key Data probably once a week, spend 30-45 minutes there, maybe more. And as I'm doing all this, I'm taking notes in a software I use, so I can bring them up whether we're in a leadership meeting or one-on-ones with people to stay organized. And if I want to discover more or dial into something I think isn't working or working and understand it better, then I go to the appropriate teammate. Typically, I would say KPIs are a big part of my daily cadence, at least how I start my day. And I try to look at that for all departments.

Heather Bayer
We're going to go on and talk about the credo. When we were doing that panel at the Elevate session, you know, if I'm moderating panel, I'm always going to go and look at the websites and look at the people who are on the panel and make sure I've got some background information. And I was just taken with The Cottages on the Key website and the fact that your values, which I guess I mean, I would call them values, you call them a credo, which is the guidelines, I'm guessing, that underpinned everything you do.

Heather Bayer
And I went through those and I put myself in the shoes of a guest. And I thought if I was a guest coming to this company and perhaps booking direct for the first time, booking direct with a company instead of going onto a platform, and I found this, I would feel so confident in booking because you're out there telling what the company is all about for the benefit of listeners. And I'll just very quickly go through what's on that credo. And it starts with Our Yes [Policy]. And we're going to cover these in more detail, but Our Yes Policy, always an open door, empowered employees, a holistic approach, perfecting the experience, proactive versus reactive. The wow factor and complete transparency.

Heather Bayer
You've just talked about the wow factor that started a long, long time ago. You know, coming to a property and having all those lights on and walking in and seeing the cupcakes, that is a wow factor. And in fact, that was something you said when we were on that panel that said, I've got to interview Nick about the company and how you operate. And that got me back to the whole credo. But I love these values that are in here. They just say so much about how you operate. So I want to go into a little bit more detail and ask you about those. So you talk about a Yes Policy. Can you explain what that actually means?

Nick Russell
Yeah, I mean, as far as hospitality is concerned, you really don't want to say no too much. Of course, you can't say yes to everything. But something I was taught right away from Heather is, the guest is sitting the standard. They might ask for something a little bit outside the lines, but we're not going to say no to it. And one thing that stands out to me is, it was a Christmas week. Traditionally, guests are a little more needy, there's usually a lot of pressure on the person that made the reservation. There's stress involved in going to houses. But I remember they requested a bunch of lobster crackers, or crab crackers, because they had a huge dinner, and it was a very strange time, and they needed it within 20 minutes. And we made it happen. And we're just taught, you just don't say no.

Nick Russell
So, of course, you look at factors, and there's actually...., this is another good one. We just had someone stay at our house for two weeks. And it's a big house. It's not inexpensive. I believe it was probably $25,000 for two weeks. But one of his requests he said, I like to take an ice bath every single day, cold plunge. Can you get me ice every morning so I can do it? So we basically, we had a little meeting thought about, how do we do this? Okay, we're going to purchase a standing freezer, put it in the garage, and just make sure it's packed to the brim with ice. Monitor his consumption on a daily basis, because he only goes once a day in the morning, and just make sure that thing is full. And we had that for the full two weeks. So you find ways todo it. It becomes a kind of a game, like, who can execute the hospitality within the company, and it becomes part of the culture.

Nick Russell
And same thing for owners. You get to know what an owner cares about and likes and what's important to them, and you keep records of that. And you can use tools like Breezeway to store those for inspections. And you make sure that that happens. We have one owner that has a lanai, which is like a screened in outdoor porch, and there's just always a little bit of dirt that goes into the corner. And we just noticed over time, it drives him crazy every time he stays. So it's on our hot list. So no matter what, when that owner comes in, that lanai looks flawless every time. So it's never saying no. It's trying to figure out, how do we do this for them? Because in the end this is hospitality, and we want everyone here to have a hospitality heart.

Heather Bayer
I love that. And just that great story about the ice bath, because it's not a huge expense. You know, a small freezer, not that expensive and can be repurposed anyway, and then ice every day. But what a great gesture, that's just going over and above. It's what we call hot dog moments. Coming from Will Guidara's talking about that hot dog moment where he supplied the hot dog to the group of five foodies who are in his restaurant, having tried all the Michelin-starred restaurants in New York. And he overheard them say they'd never tasted a New York hot dog. So he went out and got one and brought it back. And apparently, from what he said in that book [Unreasonable Hospitality], and which is a must read by the way for everybody who's listening, what he said there is that those guests in that restaurant said that, that hot dog moment when it was brought to them and presented to them as a New York street hot dog in a Michelin-starred restaurant, that was the best part of their whole trip. So it's amazing what impact those small might seem small to some, but it's massive to the guest. So I love it.

Nick Russell
Yeah. And we all read the book Unreasonable Hospitality here. And I would say we were good at those moments before, but since that book, now I think we're all actively looking for that wow factor. And we've had more of those moments since the DARM Conference and Will [Guidara] spoke, because a lot of us went to that. We all immediately read the book. And honestly, that conference was very impactful. And his talk was very impactful. And since then, everyone's looking for those moments. And there's dozens of stories, I think, since December, that I could share with you where we're doing those types of things. And it's fun. You have to have the right kind of company and the right, I would say, visionary, like we have Heather, who's our CEO, that wants to do those things. And when you have that, the execution is easy.

Heather Bayer
Yes. Yes, indeed it is. And everybody gets involved and it can almost become competitive, you know, who's getting the greatest wow moment this week?

Heather Bayer
Right onto the second one, which is Always an Open Door, which is talking about communication. In so many companies, and I go into a lot of property management companies, people seem to be, you know, in their space. That's what you're doing. You're in guest relations, you're in business development. And it doesn't seem like there is much cross-departmental communication, but this is a foundational value for you. Could you share a story about a time when something has happened that has generated really good communication between different departments?

Nick Russell
Yeah. Yeah. And I will. I'll touch on what you said, too, I think, in vacation rentals, again, that's where we do have it. We talk about being holistic. I was taught from the very beginning, when I got here, everything matters. You have to look at everything. You can have the best guest experience ever and a guest team. But if you don't have an accounting system, because there's a lot of transactions in this industry, much different than other ones, it's hard for people to understand that until they get into it. If you don't have an accounting team that can track all your expenses and make sure they're going the right places, you're going to have some really unhappy owners. So it is really important for all departments to communicate together, work together at all times.

Nick Russell
I'm a big fan of having everybody in the office together. We just had a new hire who came in the office. And one of our things is we go through the credos with every new hire, and I sit with my office, talk to them, orientation, I go through every single one, explain every one to them, what it means to us, where it originated. And one of the items she gave me, because I asked her, what is her first impressions? Because we loved her, we hired her remotely, and so she didn't come in person, and so she hadn't seen our offices yet. And she said she thought, exactly what you just explained, that she's in admin and that she'd be tucked over in a corner somewhere. And she was really surprised about the collaboration. And that made me feel happy when she told me that.

Nick Russell
But to answer your question directly, it was in June, and we do track weather pretty closely here, especially at this time of year. But I track it all times a year. It's almost kind of become a hobby for me. But in June, there's a little tropical depression popping up that might produce some weather, some rain, and it was something we were monitoring, but nothing anyone was overreacting to, or needed to. But what ended up happening was like a once in a 500-year weather event where, and I had never heard of this term before, but they call this a rain train, where basically a very intense, you know, when you look at a radar, you've got green, yellow and red. And usually it passes through a geographical area quickly, while in this circumstance, the red just set over Siesta Key and even Sarasota, and just dumped an enormous amount of rain. And there was flooding and it was impacting guests, and a few houses had water coming inside of it.

Nick Russell
I would say in the past, I was very involved in all these types of things. But as we scale the company, we have implemented EOS [Entrepreneurial Operating System], which I would love to expand on later if you want to hear more about it. But I'm a little further removed and everyone's in place. They know their roles, they know their responsibilities. So I was watching all of our departments communicate together on our Slack channels, you know, the guest experience department, the operations department, the maintenance, and the sales team, because we had to move guests out of places. And I was watching all this happen in real time, and I was really blown away. And even the next day we came in, we had a meeting, everyone was organized, they knew their place. They moved the guests that were impacted by the flooding to new houses. We took care of all their luggage, we took care of them.

Nick Russell
The operation team was immediately in the homes that had flooding and started working with the owners and dealing with those issues. Owner communication was amazing. Emails went out to all of our owners, explained what was happening, was giving updates in real time. Our owner experience manager was in the field facetiming with owners that had some issues from the flood, like pools flooded, things like that. So that was, I would say that moment, I was like, wow, everybody's working so well together. Everyone knows their role, too. And everyone knew exactly what they needed to do. Because sometimes, without people understanding their roles, there's confusion. You know, everyone wants to help, but they don't know exactly what to do. So that was a great moment and hopefully we don't have any of those in the next few months, but if we do, I feel we'll be well prepared.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Good story. So I just wanted to mention something, because whenever I'm researching a company, I'll always go to Google, check out the Google reviews and you at 363 reviews and 4.9. That is phenomenal. I think we made it up to sort of 4.7, I think, with my company, but you don't see much above that, because there's always those who don't actually understand the review system and will give you a single star, because they think that is excellent. So they get it the wrong way around. But I wanted to sort of tie that in to a couple of the reviews that I read. And so many of them said, where there was a problem, it was immediately dealt with and that the team were responsive. That word responsive came up in so many reviews, and that is just great, so great to hear, because often you see in reviews that, you know, I contacted the company, nobody got back to me, and that is, it would have been heart stopping for us in our company if we heard that.

Heather Bayer
But clearly, you are responsive. But how do you keep your team motivated to do this, to be really responsive? Because I know from my 20 year's experience in property management that there's times when problems can come in, particularly, as you say, with weather, with other things out of your control, that can be overwhelming for a team. So how do you keep them motivated to find those solutions?

Nick Russell
So, a couple things. Well, I think one is hiring. It's the hardest thing to do, but you want to hire, right? So I think as time goes on, you start to be able to identify traits you're looking for. A big game changer for us is working with Better Talent, Steve Trover and his team. Predictive Index is amazing, because you can get the right people in the right seats based on what they like to do. But it's also, I would say, and that's part of it, you need to identify - Steve always talks about grit factor. It's one of our core values, too, but you want to find people that are not afraid of work and like to grind. But I think finding people that are high achievers. High achievers like high achievers. So I think you start to find a group of high achievers, and they will help weed out the ones that are low achievers, that just don't fit within your culture. And then before you know it, it's like a snowball. And it's just kind of the way we do things. Honestly, this has been almost by accident, but we do have collegiate athletes who are all amazing people to hire.

Nick Russell
Not necessarily division one athletes that were at big schools, but division two, division three people that really had to grind to get where they were at, and nothing was handed to them. And balancing school and athletics in college while living on your own, trying to figure out how to do laundry and go to meals, waking up on your own, all those things. That to me, I think we've had great success with those kinds of candidates, when they come through. So, basically finding people that are self motivated.

Nick Russell
We're a company that has experienced a lot of growth since I've gotten here, I think around 20% to 30% year over year. One thing I explain to people is, Hey, because of this growth, sometimes it's going to feel like you're building the plane as you're flying it. And that's okay, that's just part of it. And if you get the right kind of individual, instead of feeling maybe frustration by that, they should be seeing opportunity, because they have opportunity to make an immediate impact here. So again, you get a high achiever that wants to make an impact.

Nick Russell
This is an unbelievable ecosystem for someone like that. And, you know, those are the ones that tend to flourish here. So they come in, I would say, self motivated. That's the idea, at least. It doesn't always work, but I do think that, over time, you start to identify variables, that helps identify the right people.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, that's perfect. So you've got all these different things coming into play. Better Talent, working on finding the right people, but you've identified all those traits that you need to have in those persons. Then Predictive Index comes along and just makes sure that they get in the right spot.

Nick Russell
Right.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, we're working with the Better Talent, too, and also EOS, so....

Nick Russell
Oh, nice. Oh, excellent.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. In fact, yeah, our L10 is this afternoon. And, you know, really weird since we adopted that, I really look forward to meetings, and we do have them every single week at exactly the same time, and nothing gets in the way of that. And everybody turns up and it's like, I don't really know how that happened. You know, we say, oh, we should have a team meeting. All right. And then it gets put off and somebody can't come. But now it's, Yes. There's something about the whole process that is so seamless.

Nick Russell
I agree. Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing how many issues you start solving and how simple it really is. It's an amazing tool and it's made a huge impact on us, for sure.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. Yeah. It's something that's definitely changing the way we work. Then working with other companies that use it, you sort of have that same language that parallels right the way through all these different companies and everybody's doing the same thing and going along the same process. So, yeah, very useful for us.

Heather Bayer
I wanted to talk about standards and excellence, because you talk about perfecting the experience and quality and consistency. How do you maintain that? And what interests me, Nick, is how you get the owners on board, because we found that owners could be just..... They would lose it at times and come and stay at their property, and then during the time they were there, they would change something and then not let us know, and then we were in there after they'd left going, oh, this doesn't quite look the same as we've presented it in the pictures and we've got people coming in in 6 hours. How do you maintain that, those standards and consistency?

Nick Russell
So there's, O man, there's a lot of...., again it's a holistic approach, so everything matters. But with the owners, it's starting with the right owners, making sure you're partnering with the right owners. And again, I'm thankful for our owner CEO Heather, where she might not have to deal with every owner like everyone else does, but if they don't fit what our standards going to be, then they're not the right fit for us. And I remember very early on Heather going to stay at one of our houses and this particular owner was  really intense about their expenses. And I was managing that account while being the operations manager. So I was keeping her expenses low by not updating things that should have been updated. And she stayed at that house and she came back and called myself and the director of quality control. Now at the time, I'm not sure what her title was, but into our office and she had like a hundred pictures and she went through them all and just went through every single one and showed where she was disappointed, where it should have been, what should have been better.

Nick Russell
And, you know, she wanted to understand, hey, why was this like this? And I explained about the expenses and she told me, look, Nick, if that owner is not willing to like keep their house to our brand standard, then they're not the right owner for us. And like the brand comes first before the money. So that made it very clear, easy for me and clear to me about owner fit. Now I'm empowered. You can empower employees to go talk to the owner and explain to them what our brand standard is and have confidence that Heather's going to back me up on that and if they're not a fit, they're not a fit. So then you start to identify. So then either owners come around, which most of them do, once they understand what the vision is and what we're trying to do, because again, someone comes into a nice house, they're willing to pay higher revenue; it does come back. We try to explain the ROI to owners on everything. So I think that's an important part of it. Like you're meeting with an owner, you should pick up red flags of what kind of owners they're going to be, and you want them to be aligned with the brand.

Nick Russell
But also when an owner comes in, you build out, you know, for the standards for them. You build out a list, like I spoke before, of what they care about. And you make the goal, which is when the owner comes in, they should feel like no one's ever stayed in their house. There's never been a guest in their house. Now, you know, that's an ambitious goal, and it's almost impossible. But you do hear that from owners sometimes say, I feel like no one stayed here. So you're really dialing into when the owner is coming into the house and making sure that everything is perfect for them, because you only get two or three opportunities to give that. Give them that impression of how you run your operations and how you maintain their house. And that is how you build equity. If those don't go right, then you have a loss of equity in your relationship for months until they come back again, and then you get a chance to prove it to them again. So that's a big part of it, in my opinion, is just finding the right owners that align with what your business model is.

Heather Bayer
Okay, I want to skip forward a little bit, because I don't want to miss out on what I think is the really meaty part of this conversation, although it has been pretty meaty all the way. But we want to talk about this wow factor. And you say, 'At least once during their stay with us, we want to provide them a moment to be described as a wow factor. This entails getting to know each of them, their likes and dislikes, special events in their lives, and what makes them happy in thought and life.' That is a lofty goal, how do you reach that? How do you get there and get everybody's buy in on this?

Heather Bayer
Just before you answer, it just takes me back to John DiJulius, who gave the opening keynote at a VRMA conference a number of years ago, and he's the author of The Customer Service Revolution. He talks about this in detail, about collecting information on guests and clients. And he calls it FORD, which is family, occupation, recreation or relaxation, and desires. And he says, if you collect information on those four pieces, then you have everything you need. So how do you do it?

Nick Russell
Yeah. Okay. So I would say there's two parts. There's a foundational part. So the foundational part is not, I would say, incredibly glamorous, and maybe there's two aspects of foundational. One is the cleanings. So you can have the greatest wow factor system in place, but if a guest comes in and the house isn't spotlessly clean, it doesn't matter what's going to happen next. So we put a lot of time and emphasis into that, you know, Anne, our director of quality control, Adriana, our housekeeping manager, they are both unbelievable what they do. So not only do they oversee the cleanings, they also oversee the inspections. And we use Breezeway for the inspection list, interior and exterior. We go inside the houses prior to every guest arrival day  and that's when we stage the house. We turn the lights on, but we inspect the cleanings. And one of the things in our L10s, you know, you're aware of the scorecards, one of the things we track, even at the leadership level is cleaning callbacks.

Nick Russell
If there's a single cleaning callback, I want to know about it. I want to know why. Because that to me is where it all starts. Once you do that, well, you can start focusing other things. And to your point, is data collection. You have to be willing to listen and train people that are, you know, and it's harder now, too, because you have OTA bookings, and a lot of people are very comfortable booking direct without ever speaking to the host. And so we have protocols in place that when the guest books, we have someone that's jumping on the phone, calling them and collecting data like you're talking about. And we don't say a reservation is complete until all that data is collected even up to the point of their arrival, if we still haven't collected it by the time they arrive, because sometimes it's hard to run people. We still have people trying to speak to them.

Nick Russell
And there's so many great opportunities. If someone's celebrating, those are the easy ones. You know, there's customized cupcakes that we send to them. We'll have bottles of champagne. We keep wine and all those things here. We try to find out what they really, really like. If it's returning guests, there's a whole deeper set of..... If you're a return guest, and our sales team has beat that into our head, that if you come back to the same place and stay with us, you're going to get treated. We're going to make sure we can take very good care of you, on an even deeper level.

Nick Russell
But I do remember recently, and I think I might have mentioned this when we talked before, but there was one particular guest that was coming in, and I think it was her daughter, I think she was special needs and heard she could not wait to get to the beach. And she was really into dinosaurs and searched for dinosaur bones. And they gave us this information. And this was after the Unreasonable Hospitality revolution in our industry, for those that read that or were at that conference. So we couldn't wait to take advantage of this.

Nick Russell
So we had our premier guest liaison, who focuses very much on the guest experience, work with the mom a little bit. And we had dinosaur bones. We put them in places in the beach, and when she came in there's a cake and there's a map. So her daughter was able to fulfill her dream in some way of going on the beach and hunting for dinosaur bones. So, I mean, that's one of the best ones we've done, but that's a good one.

Heather Bayer
And once again, just going back to the cost of these gestures, it is minimal. I think often people think, well, you're going to have to create this amazing event for a guest. It's going to cost a lot of money. But it's not. It's, you know, sometimes creativity is a lot of what contributes to these amazing wow moments.

Heather Bayer
I want you to tell me a little bit more about cupcakes, because that's the one thing that really started this all off. And I have a story of going to a cottage in the Peak District of England in Derbyshire, and it's an area of outstanding natural beauty. It's absolutely fabulous. We rented this tiny little brick cottage right next door to a pub. We actually shared the car park with the pub next door. I mean, what could be better than that? A cottage next to pub and a nice big car park for the car. But when we arrived there, there was this most beautiful cake in the fridge, and I can still picture it. It was covered in strawberries, but there was also a pot of clotted cream in the fridge as well. And that to me was just, I mean, I've never, ever forgotten that. And in fact, a couple of days in, there was a knock on the door, and I went to the door. There was nobody there, but in a bag that had been put over the door handle was a tin with some English scones, and they were clearly freshly baked. And a little note that said, you might have some cream left to go in these. And it's just, it was just, wow. Perfect.

Nick Russell
That's amazing.

Heather Bayer
And that was just amazing. But tell me, and as I say, that memory I've never forgotten it. And I have told so many people about that place and where it is. And so I'm sure they've had a ton of referrals, referred bookings from me talking about it. So to tell me about the cupcakes, do you have a local bakery or.... I can't imagine that anyone in your company is sort of in the kitchen baking cupcakes.

Nick Russell
No. No. You know, this was the vision of our CEO, Heather. And I think she actually started with cakes. And as the company grew, that was difficult to scale, and they quickly move to cupcakes. And yet we partner with a local baker, and we've continued to do it as we've scaled and we customize them. Someone has a birthday and they're in the reservation notes. We make like, a weekly arrival report, so we know who's coming in every day. And on those arrival reports, all the notes for the guests are on there, so everyone knows what's happening. And that arrival report goes to the baker. And the baker pulls information from the notes and customize the cupcakes based on what's on there. And it's interesting because it's actually a big logistical challenge because now, you know, we went from 2, 5, 10, 15, 20 properties to over 100, and I'm now on three different barrier islands. So the logistics behind it is a whole side operation within itself. But, you know, every guest that stays gets personalized cupcakes, and it goes a long way.

Nick Russell
They love it and they give us feedback. There was one time when, this is kind of a funny story, when I first started, we're a small company and the cupcakes are not, they're expensive, and we were in hurricane season, and the rates are low and the stays are short. But there are people that love coming down locally, because it's great value for them. And we decided to halt the cupcakes for those two or three months and within like a week or two, people were like, in the reviews were complaining about, oh my gosh, they didn't give me cupcakes. And we all looked at each other. We're like, well, we've learned our lesson. This is never happening again. So the cupcakes went back on and figured them into our budget a little bit better all years moving forward.

Heather Bayer
Yeah, I can imagine the scaling of this is quite challenging. And also exactly as you said, if you do implement something and then take it away, people will notice and make it known. But it was clear from my...... I went through maybe you've got 363 reviews on Google. I went through maybe 40 or 50 of them at random. And so many of them actually mentioned the cupcakes. So you can't stop now, can you? Because people are out there reading those reviews.

Nick Russell
Yeah, it's a part of the brand.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. The other thing that you do that I just love is the lights on at night. And this is something that I've noticed. I've been to a number of properties where I've arrived at night and it's dark and you get to a dark porch and you're trying to fumble for the instructions, because you don't get them out till you get to the door. And where is the keypad and how do you see the keys? That sort of thing. And it's such a simple thing, isn't it, just to ensure that those lights are left on and that the place looks welcoming in the dark.

Nick Russell
Yep. It goes a long way. This is a tough business. It's very, very hard to perfect. And every house is so different and there's so many circumstances that could lead to issues that come up. But if a guest shows up and the lights are on, we have music playing and there's, you know, customized cupcakes with their names on it and the house is perfectly cleaned and everything matters, then whatever is, if they do have an issue, you're getting a little more equity or benefit of the doubt to work through those issues, where if they came into a dark house, it looks like we don't care and that we're not, you know, because it's not. Again, it's not easy, especially when we're in season, you know, and we're in the middle of March and there's 100 arrivals and it's all on the same day and there's all turnovers to be able to reproduce that and scale. That is not a simple task, but it's an important one because, especially at those times, we have occupancy from Christmas through Easter with no gaps. So it's very hard to maintain that quality when you can't spend a day in the house.

Nick Russell
So, yeah, our effort as far as preparing the house, doing the inspections, getting the house ready for the guest, making sure when they walk in it, they're feeling a sense of hospitality is really, really important. You know, turning things around. If they do go bad or if things go great, then it's just a bonus.

Heather Bayer
Yeah. What you've talked about today really is a masterclass in how to do this business. And kudos goes out to Heather for just creating this and for you and the team, and it's been just amazing to talk to you about it.

Heather Bayer
I had a couple of other questions, and I think I'm going to have to shelve those, and we're going to come back and do a part two, because there's some other interesting parts of the company that we haven't really covered.

Heather Bayer
But before we go, Nick, I wonder if you could just give a couple of tips that, you know, for other property managers who might be looking to run their operations like you do. What are a couple of key things that you would recommend to them?

Nick Russell
So I would say one, it all starts with the cleaning. It doesn't matter how well you do everything we just talked about. If the house is not perfectly cleaned, I mean, every inch of that thing, like, our checklists are deep, and our training, we spend a lot of time on training. And again, we have two rock stars, employee control and our housekeeping manager, which make it a lot easier for me now. But cleaning is so important. You can't mess that part up. If things go wrong with the house, like an AC goes down, there's a pool issue, and the house is well cleaned. Again, you're buying equity into that relationship. It goes a long way. And I would say that's another thing that should, I think, pops up in our reviews all the time, is our cleaning. But I would say, honestly, and if you hire people, Better Talent is amazing. It's unbelievable value for what they provide. And with the Predictive Index, like, we could not live without that. Breezeway, I'm a huge Breezeway guy, even for Compass Collection, which I'd love to talk to you about in a separate time, but we're using that to help homeowners that just have one property.

Nick Russell
So it's not necessarily for even like the big ones, once they have one property, to really manage their operations of their home. So Breezeway is a huge one. Those things make it easy for you, you know. Listen, I would say listen to your guests and owners too. So when you're around them, it's hospitality. Like they're going to be dropping nuggets of information all the time. And owners do too. Like when we sit in meetings with owners, I listen to them, I don't try to do too much talking, because I start to learn about who they are, what they're looking for, and then, you know, you can provide explanation how you execute what they're looking for. But that's, I would say those are the big things that are success.

Heather Bayer
That's great. Yes, we will definitely wanted to talk about the Compass Collection, but I haven't allocated enough time to it and I think we need to do that. We need to come back and because that's a very different type of operation and I'm really intrigued about it. But for now, we're going to wrap this up, because I think there's enough here to keep people going, and I'm sure a lot of this has really sparked up their creative juices and they're really thinking about what they can do now to up their game and do it The Cottages on the Key way. Thank you so much, Nick. It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. I've really enjoyed this and I'll look forward to next time.

Nick Russell
Thank you so much for having me. I've enjoyed as well.

Heather Bayer
That was a fantastic conversation. There were so many nuggets in there. I really hope you wrote them down. But of course, you know, you can go to the Show Notes. We have a complete transcript of the entire conversation on the Show Notes. So you could go and scroll down through that and find the bits that work for you. In fact, you could take the transcript and you could put it into Chat GPT and ask it to find the most important parts that work for you, and it will probably do that.

Heather Bayer
This fascinated me because I love talking to owners, managers who do it right, who really understand hospitality and not just pay lip service to it. So I do hope you got a lot out of that. We will be coming back to talk to Nick and hopefully to talk to Heather as well in a few weeks time to talk about the Compass Collection, which is another arm of their company, and it runs on a very different model, and I am really interested to talk to them about it. So that will be a sort of part two of this one.

Heather Bayer
Thank you so much for listening. It's always so lovely to know that there are people at the end of my microphone. That seems funny. I can't imagine the people being at the end of my microphone. I'm looking at the moment there is nobody there. But I know you're out there and I know you're listening. And of course I'd love to hear from you with any feedback that you have. Please let me know, you can connect with me at heather@vacationrentalformula.com. and tell me what you think. And of course we would love your reviews on whatever podcast platform you listen to your podcast on. With that said, I'm away to enjoy the rest of my day, and I hope you do exactly the same, and I'll see you again next week.

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.