Julian Sage:                         00:00                     In this episode, we’re talking about the processes to be able to optimize your short term rental Airbnb business. So stay tuned.

Julian Sage:                         00:07                     Vacation rental machine helps hosts like you learn how to start, grow and scale your short term rental business. The show’s all about creating systems that help you automate your business, give any more time and money freedom. If you’re ready to start living the vacation rental life, then subscribe to this podcast today, come and join us on our Facebook group, the host nation where we’ll be talking about starting automating and scaling a short term rental business. Now onto the show.

Julian Sage:                         00:34                     Hey, welcome back, host nation to another episode of vacation rental machine. I’m Julian Sage and I’m with Jon Bell and we are talking about processes to optimize your short term rental Airbnb business and what does that look like at a scalable professional level. So when you’re first starting off, you’re probably going to be having a lot of different mishmash. It’s going to be like a little probably macaroni paper plate where you’re just throwing things on there and hoping that it sticks and you’re going to start collecting money. And getting all the little crumbs and that’s what you’re going to be doing when you’re first starting off. Hopefully you’ve been following the series and you’ve been following all the episodes because we’ve laid out everything really step-by-step for you guys to be able to know and, and really have a system to be able to follow to be able to start getting this right.

Julian Sage:                         01:15                     But if you just threw everything on there and it was like a macaroni splatter, you do need to start reorganizing these things to be able to set your business up for success because the scalability of your business is going to be dependent on your processes and your systems. That is the foundation of your vacation rental machine is the system that you do have in place. Because if you can manage one property, like you can manage 10 if you get everything right for one, you can scale up and have the systems in place to be able to manage multiple. But as you scale up, things are going to have to change what you are going to be having to scale at a different level. And there are gonna be different systems in place, but the foundation will always be the same. So Jon, what are the processes look like when you had one property to now where you have over 34 properties that you are managing?

Jon Bell:                               02:02                     You know it’s, it’s definitely one of those things that comes with scale, right? So when you first start out, things are gonna be a little bit different than what they’re probably going to end up like when you’re scaling. The most important thing that you can do within your business is to document how you want things to go. That documentation really needs to be, I inclined enough to just hand off to anybody and anybody could follow whatever process that is. We all need to start and start running our businesses as if we don’t need to be there to do it. So if that means I am the only person that can do blank, well then that is a problem. Because if I’m not available to do it, then it doesn’t get done. You want to make sure that you’re building systems and standards that are very, very easy for anybody to go in.

Jon Bell:                               02:49                     If that means that you have to color code different things, like you need two blue and one red and four yellows to make whatever you need to make, then you need to have that in a process and just say, “Hey person, here you go. This is what I need done,” and they should be able to replicate it to no end with no problem because it’s overly simplified. So when I first began, we kept a lot of our linens and other items directly on site just because we didn’t have to take them off anywhere. We were washing everything in unit. So time wasn’t really a big concern at that point? But after we scaled and started growing a little bit bigger, we couldn’t spend that same amount of time to, Hey, go put this stuff in the washer, go put it in the dry or now put it back on the bed.

Jon Bell:                               03:38                     All of that stuff had to change. It became very hard to make every day’s turns just with that long process in between where you’re really just wasting somebody’s time. So we had to come up with another way to kind of do that, and for me, that was moving over to a centralized storage or basically a warehouse of stuff where things get fed in and out and things get to move along a little more quickly. So that’s probably one of the biggest thing that’s going to happen to most people when they start to scale. But there’s a ton of other little things that will just become harder to do over and over again as you grow. And that’s when you really got to look at it, pull that same sheet of paper right back out and just look at it and say, all right, what changed? How can I make it better?

Jon Bell:                               04:23                     Do I need a person? Do I need another process to make this one better? Or is it already too complicated? Maybe I can strip away some layers. Let’s talk about just standard cleanings, right? Your standard cleaning should be processed enough down so that somebody really could just be brand new with whatever cleaner that you’re trying to employ or you got a new person coming on, you should be able to give them either a checklist or they should have an app or they should be able to follow something that just shows them, Hey, do this, do that, do this to this, do this, do that, confirm with this reference and then all of those things are done and then when you go back, it should look picture perfect every single time. You have to make sure that this is replicatable over and over and over again.

Jon Bell:                               05:10                     Along with that process, you might need a separate detailed cleaning process. This might mean not your average 45 minute cleaning that can happen in an apartment, but maybe a standard deep clean that could take up to three hours to do certain things. Well that process needs to be identified and separated. So the person that goes there that you say, Hey, go give me a deep clean. They’re not doing the same 45 minute process and getting out of there and you’re paying double or triple. Whatever you’re paying that person to do that extra long tasks that they think they’ve satisfied completely and maybe you think it’s done because it looks back like it’s supposed to look. So you want to make sure that they’re even checks and balances in this process. This might even mean somebody is out there to

Julian Sage:                         05:58                     Inspect the place to make sure that all these things were done. So as I grew, that stuff became very important to me to have a person that can go out to each and every unit after they’re cleaned and say, Hey, yes, that looks right. Maybe that doesn’t look right. Oh, let me check this thing. Oh this light isn’t functional. Let me change this light bulb. Certain things like that became an issue. Now I’ve also kind of veered away from that itself just because I can have one person go out to 10 different units in a day whenever they get turned off. So we have other things that we are actually testing and growing into just because we are expanding.

Julian Sage:                         06:34                     Jon, those are all really good points and one of the things that we do have to keep in mind at this point of the business, once you have been operating, once you have been cleaning the unit yourself, definitely you should be maybe cleaning your unit at first just to get that experience, just to know so you can create those processes for the cleaners to be able to follow. But there comes a point in your business where you have to remove yourself because we are not letting the business be dependent on our success. We might think that we’re the best cleaners or that we’re the best person that can do these things, but we have to be able to replicate our standards and what we expect to other people. So one example of that was when I first got started, I was calling the cleaner and I was asking them, Hey, how’s the place look? Did you do this? Did you do that? And it was very stressful. Not knowing or not being able to see what it is that I was doing. I would have them send photos of things I wanted and I didn’t tell him specifically all the things that I wanted him to do the my way.

Julian Sage:                         07:29                     But once I had that system in place, once I did document things and make it very clear for him to be like, Hey, this is what you need to do, this is how it should be done. It really relieves so much stress. And then he was actually thanking me saying, wow, this is just so perfect. Thank you so much for having everything clear cut because this makes my job easier. Now we’re talking about cleaning, but your processes comes all the way down to how are you even building your framework? How are you doing your market research? So all of these processes comes down all the way through the chain steps one to 10 of this VRM formula. It is all process systems oriented and if you want to be able to scale this business, you have to be able to remove yourself from the business.

Julian Sage:                         08:10                     So Jon, there’s probably a lot of people that have that kind of macaroni plate systems in place and processes and maybe it’s working, maybe they’re making some money off of it, but what’s the benefit of having a very clear, highly refined process and system in place?

Jon Bell:                               08:24                     It comes down to accountability, painting a process off to somebody else. Now that they’re able to follow it from A to Z, they should be able to replicate it over and over again. You really have accountability for that person, that position that you’re able to just say, Hey, you’re hitting all your marks perfectly because this process is done flawlessly. If the process isn’t done flawlessly, then either there’s something wrong with the process or that person needs to be accountable for whatever. Let’s take this example. If you got a cleaner that is

Jon Bell:                               08:56                     Cleaning the unit and they seem to always just do stuff just a little off. Maybe it’s not absolutely wrong, but it is a little off. Your process either needs to be tweaked or they need to put in some type of accountability standard for them to just say, Hey, this stuff isn’t acceptable and it’s right here in this process that you’re supposed to do blank. That could be “Empty the dishwasher.” Maybe every time somebody goes in, they’re like, Hey, there’s dishes in the dishwasher, but they’re clean, but they’re just not put away. If that step is missing from the process, then you need to add it because somebody is following what you said and they probably didn’t apply common sense that they need to take it out because you provided them a detailed list. Your cleaning checklist could be 75 to a hundred items, so that means really don’t do anything outside of this because I’ve thought of it all. In that case, you want to change that. In the other case where it’s just forgotten every single time, there’s some accountability that you have that you can either put a grading system on that person and just let them know, Hey, this isn’t acceptable. This isn’t something that we keep as a company standard. We need you to work on this area. It just helps because now you have the data to back up what’s wrong.

Julian Sage:                         10:10                     So Jon, part of optimizing is always looking for things to be able to better enhance your business. And I know that you love testing things. You’re an IT guy that is just always configuring and trying out different systems. So once you do have a system and process in place that is working, what are you doing to be able to make your business even better?

Jon Bell:                               10:28                     You got to keep your eyes forward, right? Don’t get stuck in just a certain process. One thing that I know being the IT realm is software always changes. It always gets better, right? At one point, back in the day, software was way behind hardware. Nowadays, software moves so fast, the hardware really can’t keep up. So with that, you just need to keep your eyes forward, test new stuff. I’m always testing new things, pulling in different tools, trying to pull different data points, or even just kind of trying to come up with better ways I could serve my guests just by adding in a next level thing, whatever it might be. But we always need to keep our eyes forward. We always need to think about, Hey, our growth. If I know I’m going to grow or continue to grow, I need to make sure that my mindset is, Hey, this is a little bit hard right now.

Jon Bell:                               11:19                     It’s going to get worse when I move forward, so how do I mitigate a lot of that risk earlier before I get there? Maybe there’s something out there. Maybe there isn’t, but just knowing that, Hey, this is a pain point and I need to start working on a fix. You don’t let it hit you in the head when you get right there and it’s just unbearable. We all want to manage our businesses to scale with the little bit of input from us. We want to let systems and standards pretty much operate everything that we can operate.

Julian Sage:                         11:48                     The reason why this episode is a lot longer than the ones that we are typically doing is because this is really what it comes down to when you are planning on scaling this business. Your processes is going to be the foundation of your business, of your vacation rental machine and with the machine you do have to fine tune it. The people that are going to be left behind in 2019 and moving forward, let’s say you’re listening to this in 2020 and beyond, it is all going to come down to the people that were refining their business, being able to implement the best systems to be able to scale, to be able to make sure that their place is the best when it comes to hospitality, when it comes to cleaning, when it comes to all these things, it all comes down to your systems and that’s why this is so important and we’re drilling this into you right now.

Julian Sage:                         12:35                     So question of the day, I want you to be completely honest with us and let us know in the comment section, where is your business processes right now? Are you trying new things to be able to better enhance your business? What are you stuck on and what’s keeping you from being able to reach that next level? Let us know because we really do care. You can leave a message on the host nation Facebook group, in the comments section down below. We go through everything, but until next time, host nation, keep on hosting. Hope you hosts found value in this episode. If you did, please go on over to iTunes and leave us a review because that would greatly support the show. If you’d like to connect with Jon, the community, and I then go on over to our Facebook group, the host nation, talk to you hosts in the next episode. Keep on hosting.