‍Mike Bayer: Welcome back. You're listening to the Vacation Rental Success podcast. And today we're diving into the power of hiring and nurturing a virtual assistant as part of your property management team. And there's not a better tool to help with the onboarding than THRIVE Essentials. The THRIVE Essentials Course is officially launched, and let me tell you, it's the ultimate shortcut to onboarding success in vacation rental property management. Whether you're a property manager struggling to onboard staff quickly or you're out looking for jobs in the vacation rental industry, THRIVE Essentials is the knowledge base and certification to help. 

The course offers a comprehensive introduction to everything from trust building to creating a vibrant and efficient work environment, and it's designed to get new hires aligned fast or make you stand out as a candidate if you're job hunting. The course is available at a special launch price for the month of October, but you have to act fast because the price goes up once the month ends. Click the link in the description or visit vacationrentalformula.com and enroll today to secure the October pricing for up to 10 registrations. Don't let this opportunity pass you by. Whether you're building a team or a career in short term rental, THRIVE Essentials is what you need.

Now, let's hand the show over to your host, Heather Bayer.

Heather Bayer: Hiring a virtual assistant is tough. I know this from hard experience because we've had a lot more failures than successes, which costs way too much in time and money. In this episode, I'm joined by Tammi Sims, the VP of Partnership Experience at Extenteam, and we're going to be talking about getting it right first time.

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.

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer. And as ever, super delighted to be back with you Once again.

I am having serious FOMO right now. I'm recording this and we'll be publishing this episode this week during the VRMA Conference in Phoenix that I am missing. It's the third one I've missed, actually, in the past 15 years of going to these conferences. I mean, two of them were in the COVID years, but this one, we made the decision a while back that we had so much going on this fall that we had to cut back a bit and not do the conference circuit this year. I'm really feeling it. Not going to VRMA, not going to Cancun, which seems to be the 'in conference'. I haven't been across to the UK for the Short- Term Rentals Conference and may probably not go to DARM either. So yeah, FOMO is in full flow, particularly as we missed the pickleball tournament that was hosted by HostGPO yesterday. That would have been so much fun.

My son Mike is pickleball obsessed. He and I are actually playing together in a tournament next month, but that's locally. So we would have enjoyed that. But that's all for next year. Anyway, we've been working on so much stuff this past few weeks. We've just completed the THRIVE Essentials Course, which you will be hearing a lot about over the next couple of weeks, so excited about this. I think this is a first for this industry, a foundational course for newcomers to the industry, for people who never knew anything about it until they saw a job ad for a job in a property management company, or with a vendor. And this course tells them what the business is all about, teaches them about what a property management company does, the sort of technology that underpins everything we do. It talks about the values of the industry and the responsibilities of the industry and what hospitality is. So you will be hearing more about it.

When we decided that we were going to launch the course this month, we knew that we had to focus on hiring and onboarding a lot more. And that's why I'm really pleased to have with me today, Tammi Sims from Extenteam, to talk about all aspects of hiring virtual and remote staff. And just to give you an idea of my experience, my executive assistant has worked for me since 2016. She's in the Philippines, and we've never met face to face, but she's an integral part of our team. She manages my emails. She does a massive amount of research. She monitors all aspects of the podcast, makes sure everything is working, everything goes out on time, and she connects with the guests and keeps She keeps me on track. And she happily turns her hand to just about anything I ask her to do. And we meet in slack huddles, and she's often the very first person I talk to in the morning before my day really gets going. But I didn't find Hana by accident.

We used a company way back then called Virtual Staff Finder, who did all the background sourcing, they did personality testing, and all that pre-interview legwork. And she was perfect for the role we wanted to fill. Since then, I've gone a bit rogue, and I've tried to do it myself with Upwork, and it's never quite worked out. So it's been great to see the growth of companies that specialize in finding VAs for our industry, and Extenteam is one of those.

So back to Tammi. She brings years of experience from the short-term rental industry. I've known her for a long time, and she's going to share some of those most valuable lessons she's learnt throughout her time in the industry. And we'll be talking about the evolving role of virtual assistance in the short term rental space and how you can effectively define the tasks you need help with, and then what to expect when integrating a VA into your team. Plus, we'll explore some of the cultural aspects of hospitality, like whether you can teach someone from a different background to deliver top-notch guest experiences. So there's lots packed into this episode and this interview.

So without further ado, let's go right on over to my conversation with Tammi Sims.

So I am super delighted to have with me today, Tammi Sims, the VP of Partner Experience at Extenteam. Welcome, Tammi. It's so great to have you back on the show.

Tammi Sims: Thank you, Heather.

Heather Bayer: I know it's been a few years now, and you've gone through a few changes over those years. Just give us a brief recap of your background in the business.

Tammi Sims: Yeah, sure. I started accidentally about, I guess it's been a little over 10 years ago when the vacation rental industry— I had a home in Seattle and I was traveling a lot, so I just started renting it. Through that process, I came to really love the act of hospitality and hosting guests, and guest communication. That led to getting involved in the industry in a bigger way. I eventually worked for a tech company in the vacation rental space. I did that for about five years and met a lot of people in the industry and got to be a part of really good conversations about hospitality, guest communication, guest experience, and all of those things that we love about our industry—best practices. I then took a bit of a break for a couple of years. And about a year ago, I met Extenteam through Michelle Marquis, and they were looking for someone to come in and look at their Partner Success department and see how they could expand and make some changes to that. I started as a consultant, and since that time, we’ve continually been growing our relationship, and I started full-time with them officially in January.

Heather Bayer: So just give us a bit of background on what Extenteam actually does.

Tammi Sims: Yeah. Extenteam started about five years ago, and they were the first company on the scene to solve the problem of connecting property managers in the short-term rental industry, primarily with virtual remote staffing, mostly based in the Philippines. But they've since branched out to Mexico and Latin America. So that's, in a nutshell, what Extenteam does. There are three main services: our dedicated team members, which I'm mostly a part of; we also have accounting services, so we can manage trust accounting; and in the last year and a half, the company has been piloting a 24/7 shared guest communication service called Tailwind, and that officially launched on a tech platform last week.

Heather Bayer: That is great. I’ll put information on Extenteam in the show notes if anybody wants to check them out. But in this conversation, we’re going to be talking about a whole raft of things to do with virtual assistants. I mentioned that I have an executive assistant, her name is Hana. She's been with me for eight years, and she’s in the Philippines. She started out working for Cottage Blogger and Vacation Rental Formula when that first kicked off in 2016. She was just so good that we brought her into the property management company, CLRM, and then I managed to poach her back last year. So we've seen her through her children being born and growing up and house moves, but we've never met her. We’ve never met Hana face-to-face. 

I said in the introduction, she’s probably the first person I talk to in the morning. When I get up before I even start my day, it’s a conversation with Hana, and we know each other, we know what each other does, and it’s just such a great relationship. Now, I credit that relationship to the fact that I didn’t find her myself. I actually used a company 10 years ago, nine years ago, called Virtual Staff Finder, because there was nothing in our space that was specializing at that time. So, Virtual Staff Finder was, indeed, what Extenteam is. They connected anybody and everybody to a virtual assistant, now mostly in the Philippines. Hana’s in Manila. Since then, I’ve gone rogue. I’ve gone on my own and I’ve made such a mess of it. We have been through so many virtual assistants that I am 100% in favor of having somebody else do that legwork and find me the right person, because my goodness, do you—we’re going to talk about this—but you honestly waste so much. You think you’re saving money by going through Upwork or anything else and doing it all yourself, but you spend so much time, and then the money you spend on training somebody that lasts with you for a month or two months before you realize that they actually can’t do the job, that they’re not doing what they promised, and the actual outcome is very different from what you’re seeing on an Upwork profile. But anyway, I just wanted to get that out there that I’ve seen both sides. I am firmly on the side of what my mom used to say, operating the GAMI principle, which is ‘Get A Man In’; don’t do it yourself.

Tammi Sims: Yeah, you can call it GAPI!

Heather Bayer: That’s probably better.

Tammi Sims: We’ll modernize it!

Heather Bayer: Yeah, I think that’s a much better one. My mom was born in the 1920s.

Tammi Sims: Totally understandable.

Heather Bayer: So let’s just start with, over the past five years, what changes have you seen in this VA landscape, particularly in the way that short-term rental managers are using their virtual assistants? Because way back, it was just like, “Oh, I’m not sure what I want somebody for, but I do want them for something.” But now, I think it’s probably a bit more focused. Can you just share what that landscape looks like now?

Tammi Sims: Yeah, I did an internal survey about six months ago just to see of all the Extenteam members that we have, what roles are they filling in for property managers? And predominantly, it’s what we put under the umbrella of vacation rental specialists. So that’s someone who’s either working in guest communications, guest services, or guest reservations role. So that’s predominantly what property managers come to us for, but we have people working in other roles as well. So operations teams, back office, some property managers decide to hire a dedicated bookkeeper with us. So we fill lots of different roles. There are marketing roles, graphic design, website, all kinds of things, but predominantly it’s guest services. And I think that shift probably happened with the pandemic, that everyone was scrambling to figure out how to keep their businesses running during that time. People couldn’t come into an office, and everything was going to remote work. Revenue was down, at least initially, and so people were trying to figure out how to make things work. I think traditionally, virtual assistants were doing more backend, behind-the-scenes work. And now, for many of our property management companies, our team members from Extenteam are the face and voice of the guest services departments. We see people taking a much more front-and-center role, and in some cases, leadership roles. We’ve had team members who’ve blossomed and been really standout. So now they’re the people training, managing, and mentoring new people who are hired to the team. So I think the roles that people have played have really expanded.

The other thing back to what you were saying is just that there's a real professionalization of this space in general. So my history with remote staff is similar to yours. This was before Extenteam started. I had been running the Partner Success and Support department of a startup tech company, and of course, there were limited resources, but there were programs and things I needed to have in place. And I found someone through Upwork. Initially, I hired her just to do one project—my Monday.com board—that was all she was doing. She was so fantastic and smart and on it that I kept adding more and more things. And pretty soon, through her, I had a team of 12 people, and they were running my customer service department, my customer success department. We were a technology company, and we were able to build services on top of our technology layer. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of those things without that remote team. So I’m a big believer in remote staffing, and I understand firsthand how you can do so much more. I tapped into her network, and had I not had that experience—and I had other experiences with people that I found on Upwork and it was just so hit and miss—but now that there’s a company that will help with all of those steps, we have a team of about 20 people in our corporate team in the Philippines, all dedicated to every sort of step of the employment process from recruitment to IT services. We have wraparound HR advisors, so every team member with us meets with someone in our HR team on a monthly basis. So we have just a lot of wraparound support for both our team members and our partners. I think the professionalization has really shifted.

Heather Bayer: That’s a great point. When I first started doing this and going out to remote staff with whatever software there was out there, it was very random. Nobody knew what this business was. It was very different. That initial stage of telling them what short-term rentals actually were—this was before Airbnb—so they had really no idea. Now, I can see that change. That professionalism has come with the expansion of our space and making it mainstream.

Tammi Sims: Absolutely.

Heather Bayer: For a short-term rental manager who is thinking about hiring, how do they know what to hire for first? Is there a tried and trusted method of saying, "Okay, I'm overwhelmed, I've got so much on my plate, what do I offload? And what do I keep?" Because sometimes I want to keep things—if I was doing this, I love messing around with Canva, and I can spend hours doing that stuff, but I know it's much wiser to, if I'm making a presentation, offload that to somebody else. How do you make that decision on who to hire and what to hire them for?

Tammi Sims: Yeah, that's a great question. One of the things I think about is, in general, people in the vacation rental industry and the short-term rental industry are very much ‘take-charge’ kind of people. So it is difficult to consider handing things off to someone else. But what comes to mind for me all the time is the idea of opportunity costs. What is the opportunity cost of me spending my time doing XYZ tasks that someone else is perfectly capable of doing? And what does that free up in my own schedule that I can be doing more strategically that's going to help the business in bigger-picture ways? Whether that's, for a property manager, marketing to bring on more properties or finding the best PMS system, any of those kinds of things that can really help scale and improve the business in different ways.

As I said, most property managers come to us with guest services in mind or guest reservations in mind. Starting with a really good job description is important. Our sales team goes through a process with all of our partners to identify what are those tasks that are taking up your time, and how do we bundle those tasks into one team member profile. For property managers who come to us that don’t have a job description—maybe they’re expanding guest services or guest reservations for the first time—we have a job description generator. We’ve taken all kinds of data points from past job descriptions and what we know our team members are doing and created sort of a kitchen sink of a job description. And we have a tool that people can use to create a job description so that they're thinking of all of those tasks that might not come to mind. So they can pick and choose what their team members are going to be doing or what they need people to be doing.

Heather Bayer: It’s better to do that than the “I’ve just got so much on my plate, I need someone, I just need someone.” And I was putting together a presentation that Mike and I are doing for the Vermont Short Term Rental Association conference next month. And we are going from Brooke Pfautz’s book Vacation Rental Secrets, “The 10 Mistakes that Property Managers Make.” If you’re familiar with that book, then he got 50 responses, so that’s 500 mistakes people made. And so many of them were about teams, and one that just comes to mind is, “My biggest mistake was hiring because I just needed somebody, but I had no idea what I needed them to do.”

Tammi Sims: Yeah.

Heather Bayer: It just feels that’s something that impacts a lot of people.

Tammi Sims: Absolutely. And we see on our side of things—Extenteam has been around for so long—when we initially started, we had some of those quote-unquote job descriptions or requests that were pretty vague. It was like, “I just need someone to do things,” and we find that we run into challenges if it’s not really articulated, because we have a hard time knowing who’s the right person to source for a partner. So, it really is important to start with that. And then as team members, as candidates, are reviewing the job ad and the job description, if it’s really thorough and clear, it gives them the opportunity to really assess for themselves, “Is this a role that I could do competently? Is this a role that I could excel at?” etc. And then when people start having that clear list of job descriptions and expectations, people will be clear about what’s expected of them and how to perform well. So it really is key, and sometimes it can be time-consuming, it can be a bit overwhelming to consider putting all of that in writing, but it really is the core, foundational piece of making sure we get the right person and that people can be successful in the role. Our sales team is good at helping people walk through that process of identifying what they need.

Heather Bayer: So when a new hire starts up, what do you find that property managers are expecting? Are those expectations being met, or do they have expectations that are a little bit...?

Tammi Sims: There are certainly people on a continuum of expectations. And so we try to be really clear from the very start of the process about—it’s an interesting relationship because, on the one hand, Extenteam is the employer, but really the majority of the employer-employee relationship is between our partners and our team members. We try to be really clear about what that delineation is. And there are some property managers that certainly come with an expectation of a more out-of-the-box, plug-and-play situation. And it’s just not—we can recruit someone who has experience in the hospitality industry, which is a standard for us. We can recruit specific, sometimes even to a specific PMS system or tool that people have experience with, etc. So we can find a really great candidate. Extenteam provides some basic training for people before they ever start with a partner. So we do everything that we can upfront, but then, partners and team members—no matter how much experience they’ve had—if a company hired you, Heather, who’s arguably one of the people who has the most experience in the vacation rental industry, you’re not going to know the partner’s properties, you’re not going to know their geographical area, you’re not going to know the tools that they use or how they use those tools. So even if someone has used a specific piece of technology, every property manager uses those differently. You’re not going to know necessarily the ethos of the company, their values, and what’s important to them. We do everything that we can to get team members ready to start that relationship.

And then I think most partners understand that when we do the introduction—when we make the first introduction and a team member starts—we really try to prepare people for what’s going to be required to onboard that person, to train that person, what is necessary and helpful to have in terms of training materials and SOPs that are in writing. We really try to set expectations that no one learns something right off the bat for the first time. People are going to need time. So I would say that one of the biggest challenges is if people have an expectation that they can just, “Here’s access, run with it.” That’s going to be a recipe for disaster, no matter how much experience a team member has.

Heather Bayer: Let’s talk about hospitality. I was going to say, “Let’s talk about hospitality a little,” but let’s talk about hospitality a lot, because that’s what we’re in. I’m interested in teaching the nuances of hospitality to someone who perhaps has never worked directly in the industry. Are there cultural differences that you have to overcome?

Tammi Sims: Yeah, it’s a great question. We have started doing some webinars for partners, and we’re talking about best practices for remote management and best practices for performance management and performance improvements and that sort of thing. And one of the things that we did in framing that, is we talked about Filipino culture, because most of our team members—starting to branch out—but most of our team members are based in the Philippines. And we have one person on our partner team who’s based in the Philippines, so he started us off with this framing of Filipino culture and how that relates both to the hospitality industry but also how it relates to a team member and manager relationship. And it was such a helpful framing. One of the things that he talked about so much was that hospitality is inherently part of Filipino culture—everyone is a guest, and you treat people with empathy and curiosity and a sense of welcome. That’s one of the things I really love about the model, is that most people are hired to be interacting with guests and/or owners, and they come with this foundational value of hospitality.

So that’s one thing—we’re starting from a good place just with that. And then, as part of our recruitment process, we always hire people who have experience in the hospitality industry. It could be short-term rentals or it could be the hotel industry, but every team member has some experience with hospitality in general. And then, as we’re training people before team members ever start with a partner, they go through Extenteam University, and Extenteam University includes modules about guest communication, hospitality, the short-term rental industry, phone etiquette when you’re talking with guests. A lot of our modules came from Doug Kennedy of Kennedy Training Network. So we really vet for people who come with that experience. It’s inherently part of the Filipino culture, and then as part of the training that we provide to team members before they start, that training is steeped in guest communication skills.

Heather Bayer: Yeah, that’s terrific. So what about—you’re moving off into other cultures, into South America—are there going to be differences there?

Tammi Sims: One of the things that I have been thinking about is, as we grow, we will have to—most of our educational materials and conversations that we have with partners are based in the Philippines. So we’ll have to expand some of those conversations. Certainly, the training won’t be different. We’ll still recruit for people who have been in the hospitality industry in some form, and they’ll still get training on the basics of guest communication and hospitality. But yeah, there might be some tweaks that we need to make to...

Heather Bayer: Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because it’s fascinating that you move into a different country, there are different cultures. As you say, Filipinos are hardwired to be hospitable, but that’s not the same in every culture. So I’m sure that that has to be worked into it in some way. Moving on from that, what are the downsides? There have got to be some downsides to working with remote teams. How do you prepare your partners for the potential drawbacks?

Tammi Sims: I think the biggest pitfall, potential pitfall, that I’ve seen is if partners and team members don’t establish enough of a relationship and rhythm with each other. For any remote team, whether it’s a remote team member who’s in the Philippines or Extenteam—a lot of our corporate team is—I work remotely, a lot of our other team members work remotely as well. One of the biggest pitfalls, in particular, is people working overnight or covering different hours, and so sometimes there’s not a lot of overlap with their on-site staff or their managers and themselves. So one of the things that’s really crucial is establishing a relationship and having regular time together.

We always recommend to people that relationship building is important. I think in any employer-employee relationship, it’s especially important in the hospitality industry that we extend those same values of hospitality internally with our teams as well. But when you don’t have a chance to meet someone in person, really spending the time to get to know who they are—similar to what you’ve shared about your relationship with Hana—your day starts with her. Your relationship is not just based on your work relationship; you know about each other’s lives and families and that sort of thing. So that’s important. And then making sure that people are integrated into the larger team so their relationship isn’t just with their reporting manager. Those are all key in the company culture—relationship and connection building.

Tammi Sims: And then on the more practical logistical performance management side of things, it’s also really important that people have regular—we recommend that all of our team members should be meeting with their reporting manager on a weekly basis. It gives people an opportunity to ask questions, it gives the manager an opportunity to provide feedback. And when we see that a relationship has gone sideways, and we’re helping a partner and a team member diagnose and root cause—how do we get things back on track in terms of performance? It’s one of the first things I ask about: “Are you meeting on a weekly basis?” So that, I think, can be the biggest downside.

Some other downsides that Extenteam solves for are not knowing your team member—how do you know that your team member is online? How do you know that they’re working? How do you know that they’re not off-task, etc.? Our workforce team has monitoring tools that we’re using to monitor attendance and people being on task, internet and Wi-Fi. There can be some tech issues that are pitfalls, so we have a whole IT team that’s based in the Philippines, too, that can work directly with a team member if they’re having power or connection issues. So those could be some of the downsides. But I think the real core one that we focus on is the relationship and just making sure that remote team members are really integrated into the team.

Heather Bayer: That was definitely my experience over the years. And I take a lot of the blame for some of the relationships breaking down because we would take somebody on and say, “Okay, here’s what you do,” and then almost forget that they were there. And all of a sudden you go, “Has anybody heard from so-and-so in the last week?” And you suddenly realize that they haven’t been in connection at all. That’s where it becomes economically not a great thing to have a remote worker if you don’t have that connection with them. So not necessarily me monitoring their minute-to-minute working but just keeping that “hello” thing going—"Hello, how are you doing? What are you working on? How’s it going?" And just getting them to be part of a team.

Because it can be very easy to take somebody on and not involve them in a team in the same way as you would if they were sitting in the office. And that’s what we learned. Just imagine they’re in the office with you. What do you do in the office that you’re not doing with them? It could be just the water cooler stuff.

Tammi Sims: Yep.

Heather Bayer: And that’s why we have the weekly meetings where we get everybody and we talk about nothing but what you did at the weekend and what’s planned and what the kids are doing, and you know, “What big events have you got coming up?” So it’s those things that you talk about in the workplace, but when you’ve got remote workers, you tend not to include them in that. And it took me a long time to realize that you’ve got to have that involvement to generate loyalty, to start with. Because if they don’t feel part of it, they’re not going to feel loyal to a team.

So yeah, I learned the hard way on a lot of things, Tammi.

Tammi Sims: Yeah, what you’re saying is so true—that people want to feel connected, both on a personal level and know that the people they’re working for care about who they are. And there’s this personal relationship. And then people want to know what’s important to your company and how the things that I’m doing are contributing to the goals of the company. People want to know when they’ve made that contribution. So one of the things we really stress with partners is letting people know when they’ve done a good job—sharing a guest review with someone and knowing what the impact of that is. Most people are motivated by wanting to do a good job, by wanting to provide, in our industry, a good guest experience. So all of those things are just—it's the right thing to do, but it also becomes internal motivation for people to continue to show up and do their best.

And my favorite times at Extenteam are when we’re meeting, when we’re getting feedback from our partners. We’ve started meeting with partners on a regular basis to do a very simple but meaningful review of their team members’ performance. We include questions like, “How is their internal communication? What’s the connection—how connected do you feel to them? How connected do you think they feel to the team?” And we always also stress letting people know—we provide lots of opportunities for our partners to provide kudos to our team members. And then we have things that we do internally to post those publicly. We provide opportunities and facilitate ways for partners—if someone’s having a baby or a birthday or some life event, or if they’ve really helped out, we’ll help partners send gifts to team members, or we’ll provide bonuses. So all of those things provide internal motivation and incentives for people to do their best. And who doesn’t want to be part of something that they feel connected to and that feels purposeful and meaningful?

So I love those conversations that I get to have with partners where they’re just doting on their team members and gushing about the contributions that they’re making.

Heather Bayer: I think, going back to the very first question I asked right at the beginning about the significant changes you’ve seen in the landscape of VA and remote working, I think what you’ve just said is at the core of it. Way back, you were hiring somebody just to do a job, “Go over there, do your job,” but we never really thought of people being part of a team at that time. And that, to me, is what has been a primary change over the years. Do you have a favorite success story where one of your partners has really transformed their business by adding remote workers?

Tammi Sims: Yeah, one that comes to mind through all of these conversations and interviews that we’re having with our partners. One partner that we met with has two team members on his team, and they mostly work in guest services and guest reservations. One woman in particular had experience—she worked for Airbnb customer service previously. One of the things that he shared with us is that she has all this information, and she’s taught us what to do when it comes to responding to guest reviews but also any guest conflict situations—what’s the word I’m looking for—guest complaints?

Heather Bayer: Just issues.

Tammi Sims: Yeah, just issues. And she has come in and totally transformed that part of their business and educated them on how to handle those situations. I love times when our team members have knowledge or expertise that they’re able to contribute to a partner—it’s this totally unexpected icing on the cake that team members are providing. And so many stories come to mind. I met with a partner yesterday, and they were talking about—we were doing the review—they have five team members with us, and just every team member that they talked about—how much empathy they have for their guests, how much they excel at responding to guest communication, how they balance guest communication with the needs of the onsite team. So we have so many partners who have been able to expand their reach and responsiveness with regard to guest communication, which as you and I both know, is such a cornerstone of the industry.

We have partners that have asked about bringing their team members to the U.S. A couple of partners have done that. The team member’s been with them for so many years and is such a part of the team that they’ve paid for them to come here so they could meet the onsite team, go see all the properties in person. Another team member comes to mind—he’s in guest reservations in particular—and the partner just said, “We wish we could clone him.” He’s just so good at having a booking inquiry come in, and his conversion rate from inquiry to booking is just phenomenal. “We don’t know how he does it; we wish we could clone him.” So we hear those kinds of stories a lot, and I said, it’s my favorite part of my job—hearing about the relationship between our team members and their partners and how much additional value it’s bringing to both the partners and the company, but also our team members. It can be a really magical combination.

Heather Bayer: Absolutely. My experience with Hana over the years has shown that there are some amazing people out there, and it’s just a matter of finding them. And as I said right at the beginning, we did that through the support of a dedicated company that knew their job. And yeah, GAPI—Get A Professional In—is my new mantra to get somebody in to help me with my presentation skills, that’s for sure!

Tammi Sims: I love that!

Heather Bayer: Before we finish, Tammi, if you were to give three things that a property manager or short-term rental manager out there at the moment needs to do before they hire their first virtual staff member, what would they be?

Tammi Sims: The first thing is really starting with a thorough job description and knowing what they need the team member to do. And as I said, if a partner is not sure about that, our sales team will help walk partners through that. So being really clear about the job role is the first thing. We also hire based on—we use predictive index to hire, so that job description helps us find the right predictive index profile for what the property manager needs.

The second thing is really thinking about the onboarding and training of the team member, and being prepared with that cadence, having time set aside. Ideally, if SOPs are in place in writing or training videos are available, that’s really helpful. So just being prepared for that investment of time that needs to happen upfront to make sure that a team member knows what’s expected of them and how to do all the processes, etc. That training piece is really important.

Then, looking at the ongoing relationship—how are you supporting that person to be successful? Are you meeting with the person on a regular basis to give feedback about their performance, to answer any questions, to clarify, like you said, what the priorities are that you’re working on, and making sure that there’s alignment with what you need and want your team members to be doing and what’s needed for the business, and them being clear about that and figuring out how to establish that person as part of your team, how to bring them into the fold? So those are the primary things upfront that we see that create successful outcomes. And we have a lot of support for team members built into that initial 30-day—we call it a nesting period. So as that team member is being onboarded, they have a nesting coach who’s part of our Philippines corporate team, who’s meeting with them to make sure they’re comfortable, that they’re asking questions when they’re unsure of something, that they’re getting the training and support that they need. So we can intervene if there are any hiccups.

Then, with ongoing performance, if a partner comes to us and something’s not quite right, we’ll meet with the partner, do an intake of what’s not working, and there’s really a wraparound support between partner success and our HR advisors around the partner and the team member to really get things back on track or identify if we need to replace. So that sort of covers the full trajectory of how to make things successful and what support the partner and the team member can expect.

Heather Bayer: And I think those are all great. The one that really resonates with me is about SOPs because I was one who started my own business with a business partner who was a silent partner for the first three or four years, so I had everything in my head and never wrote anything down. So when we started taking people on, I was imparting it straight out of my head into theirs. And it wasn’t until probably 10 or 12 years later that we— it was my very first hire, Sandra, who started out as our bookkeeper and became our office manager, and she was full-time on-site. But she said, “I— if we’re going to get any more people, I’m not going to do this over the phone. I have to have some sort of face-to-face with them, or we have to have everything written down.”

And that’s when we started going through, okay, pulling everything out of our respective heads and putting it down on paper. Just the tiniest things, from somebody calls with a booking inquiry, or the phone rings and it’s somebody who says, “Hey, I’ve got a house I’d like to rent out, what can you do?” And documenting the process—how you answer that call, who it gets routed to. And it’s amazing when you start pulling all those things out and giving them their separate little entity, that you end up with 100-200 SOPs. And with the advent of Loom, where you can make really quick videos...

Tammi Sims: I’m such a fan of Loom.

Heather Bayer: Yeah, you just do not have to be 15 or 20 minutes long; it could be 30 seconds or a minute and a half just to show one tiny thing so that anytime anybody’s got a question, it’s in an SOP.

Tammi Sims: Absolutely. And you don’t have to take the time to plan for something. You can just—I have used Loom for a number of years. I love it for a number of things. One of the things that’s helpful is if you have an ad-hoc task, and this is just going to be a one-time thing, here’s a video that shows you how to do it. It’s also really helpful because people learn in different ways, and people like to have something to reference back to. So with our partners, we suggest recording those videos even when you’re doing the initial training, and then people have something to go back to. It makes it so much easier.

Heather Bayer: Over the years, Tammi, on our website, I’ve created so many lead magnets—little things that people can download. The most popular one—and it still is, we still get this downloaded a dozen or more times a week—is just a set of, and I can’t remember how many templates it is, maybe 10 or 15. And out of all the fun stuff that I’ve created, it’s SOPs that get downloaded the most, because people are obviously thinking about this and thinking, “We should be doing this.” And I would say, if you have not got your processes documented, start today.

Tammi Sims: We have some team members that have started with partners, and those things weren’t documented because, as you said, sometimes as people grow, there isn’t a need until there is a need. That makes perfect sense in a lot of situations, why people don’t have those. We have some partners where team members have started, and now the team members are the people doing the documenting of the SOPs. So they’re starting now that they’ve—that’s an extra thing they’ve been able to contribute: "How about I take on putting some of these things in writing and creating some videos?" It’s very helpful. And remembering that I don’t know of anyone who learned something and mastered it just by being shown it one time or being told one time. So many people have different learning styles, and some people— I’m someone who’s very experiential, so I need to see it, I need to hear about it, and then I need to be able to go do it. Then I’ll have follow-up questions, and then I’ll be able to master something. So just having videos is so helpful for that because it provides a reference for people to go back to without having to reach out to the manager. So yeah, big fan of SOPs. And it can feel daunting to engage in that exercise, but...

Heather Bayer: Oh yes, absolutely. And since I’ve mentioned it, I will make sure that I put a link to that download in the show notes. So if you want to download the SOP templates—which I’m about to start redoing, but they’re pretty good as they are—go to those and you can download those and do what you will with them.

Tammi, it’s been fantastic having you here. You are currently at the Verma conference in Phoenix. What are you looking forward to over the next two and a half days?

Tammi Sims: Well, it started with a half-day yesterday, and now we’ve got two full days. Mostly, I’m looking forward to meeting with our existing partners. I always like to hear more about how things are going—it’s not as simple as providing software; there are human relationships and human beings involved, so there’s a lot more to talk about and unpack. So certainly, talking with our existing partners is always helpful. And it’s been a couple of years since I’ve been at VRMA. We’re such a small community, so I’m certainly looking forward to meeting new people or reconnecting with...

Heather Bayer: Yeah.

Tammi Sims: And...

Heather Bayer: I always thought of it as a hug fest!

Tammi Sims: For sure! Yeah.

Heather Bayer: Just picking up on those relationships that you dropped off the last time you were at VRMA.

Tammi Sims: Yeah, yep.

Heather Bayer: Thank you so much, Tammi. It’s been a huge pleasure having you here. I will put information on Extenteam in the show notes and look forward to catching up with you in person at a conference near us at some point in the future.

Tammi Sims: Yeah, likewise. Thanks for having me, Heather. It was really fun. I love all of these topics—I love hospitality, I love remote work—it’s just the sweet spot of a lot of what I find is really important and valuable in our industry. So it was a pleasure.

Heather Bayer: And you're a great contributor to it. So thank you.

Thank you so much, Tammi. That was such a great conversation. We ended up after we'd pressed stop on the recording, we talked for another 20 minutes or so, just really catching up. Tammi has been around in my industry world ever since she joined the industry way back eight years ago or so, 10 years ago. And I love that opportunity to catch up.

Yeah, I was talking to her about my FOMO, about VRMA, but I'm going to stick my head in the sand now for the next two days, not look at Facebook or LinkedIn. If you're out there talking about how great VRMA is, I'm not listening. I know you're having a good time.

All right, that is it for this week. Really good conversation about virtual assistance and remote teams. We'll be talking to Steve Trover, hopefully, for next week, if he's able to break free from his post-VRMA time to talk to me about more to do about hiring and team building and everything that we're talking about this month, because this is so important in this new era of our industry. So once again, thank you for listening.

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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