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[00:00:00] Sarah: Hey, listeners, welcome back for another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian.

[00:00:03] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we’re–

[00:00:04] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:00:05] Sarah: And this is the–

[00:00:06] Both Annette & Sarah: Hosting Hotline. 

[00:00:07] Sarah: If you want to be on the Hosting Hotline, all you got to do is go to hostinghotline.com. Record your question. We’ll answer it here on the podcast. You’ll help thousands of other hosts. Go you. Today, we have a question from Megan.

[00:00:20] Questions: Hey, Sarah and Annette. Thank you, guys, so much for all that you do to support us hosts. I love the podcast. My question relates to goals for next year. So I’m working with my business partner to begin setting goals for our rental property, but we’ve never really done that before. What advice do you have on where to start, or what should we be looking at to begin? Thanks so much.

[00:00:41] Sarah: Great question. Honestly, asking that question and setting aside time with your business partner is already, I would say, 50% of the thing that you’re tackling.

[00:00:53] Annette: Yes. And that’s our tip number one, is carve out a specific date and time, put it on your calendar, and also give yourself more time than you think, because Sarah and I do this. We actually do it for days. Yeah. It started out afternoon, and now it’s like we actually book a place. Actually, go stay in another short-term rental.

[00:01:12] Sarah: It is nice to remove yourself from your day-to-day, if you’re able to. You don’t have to do this, but to we like to go somewhere inspirational. We’ll support another host, and we stay someplace nice and just remove ourself from our normal surroundings.

[00:01:25] Annette: And let you think big. So definitely carve out a date and time. Put it on the calendar. Do some planning ahead also. 

[00:01:32] As much as we want to dream and just set all of these goals, we like to base them off of historicals. So we’re a huge proponent of printing out that P&L and reviewing your income and expenses. And honestly, going line by line on all of them. I would advise that’s a great place to start and just get anchored in your P&L. And if you can go month to month, and then if you have year-over-year historicals too, I think that is an excellent, excellent place to start, and just going, again, line by line, review all income, review all expenses.

[00:02:08] Sarah: And I will take that a step further and ask yourself– so a P& L is profit and loss. And at its core, profit is after you pay everyone, truly including yourself for just keeping the business running. What’s left over? And what’s left over, you should have a goal because the goal is not necessarily to end at zero.

[00:02:33] You want to have some extra to invest back into the business that takes you above and beyond the expenses that you have, i.e., paying your cleaning team, paying yourself, doing those sorts of things. And so maybe one of your goals is looking at that amount, and is it an amount you’re proud of? Is it an amount that you can survive on? Do you want to make it bigger? Do you want to defend it and keep it the same for 2024? 

[00:02:54] So I like to say, yes, bring your P&L sheet, your profit and loss, but look at what you had left over. If that isn’t big enough, then go back to what Annette said. Go line by line. What isn’t serving your guests, serving your owners, serving your family, wherever you’re at, if you’re a co-host or a rental by owner, whatever you are, and really ask yourself those tough questions.

[00:03:17] Annette: Again, it’s just like, what are all the improvements? What do you want to do? Is it marketing? Is it your team? Is it buying another property? I encourage you to also have this time to just dream also and see what’s realistic. I like to set super realistic goals and then some that are big, giant, like, oh my gosh, if we can make that happen, that would be awesome.

[00:03:40] I think this is a time to really let that stuff flow and figure out– sometimes when you dream big, a lot of times things come your way, and I think you have to let yourself do that. But the second part of planning that date and carving out time is, while you’re there, we like to carve out time to follow up on everything that we went over in that goal setting session.

[00:04:01] So setting the next time and the next date that you’re going to review and make adjustments. See if you’re on track with the goals that you have set. So try to set those up quarterly for yourself so you can make sure that you’re on track. And also take notes, so the next time you do the goal setting, you’ll have like, hey, this is how we laid it out last year.

[00:04:21] Each year that Sarah and I do this, we fine tune it because it’s like, oh, this is how we did it last year. And we even have time slots, like, we’re going to talk about this. We’re going to talk about that. And this is a time to, good, bad, ugly, look at it. But the historicals really help you define what those goals can be for the future year.

[00:04:40] Sarah: As you’re looking at your business as a whole, and I think as a whole, it’s really that profit line that we talked about just a few moments ago, but then obviously your business has so many different facets. Do you have maintenance goals for your property? Do you have guest relations goals for your property?

[00:04:56] Do you have improvement? So maintenance is one thing, but are there areas of your property that you want to improve? If you’re a co-host, do you want to improve how you communicate with your owners? So take your business as a whole and section it out.

[00:05:08] And then I think here’s where a lot of people misstep as well. How are you going to track that success? Let’s say, for example, you want to redo the bathroom in your rental and you need to set aside a certain amount of money so that you can do that above and beyond the expenses that you already have set for next year.

[00:05:30] So that’s how you’re going to know that you can renovate your bathroom. And so then Q1 of that following year, okay, I wanted to save $10,000 up. We’re at $5,000. Is that where we were hoping to be? If not, do you want to fast track it? Do you want to slow it down? Are there areas suffering? How can you make sure that you’re on track and route that in some KPI, so key performance indicator, so that you know whether or not you’re on track?

[00:05:54] And if you’re off track, you get to decide whether that’s okay or not. You don’t have to beat yourself up because you can look at your business and say, okay, this is off track. We’re not going to renovate the bathroom, but my gosh, our reviews are way up.

[00:06:06] And we wanted to raise our reviews from– I know you all– 4.91 to 4.97. And we did that without renovating the bathroom. So you know what? We can slow down this goal. It’s all interconnected. That’s why Annette’s tip of writing down and getting organized on what you talk about.

[00:06:26] And sometimes it’s a spreadsheet, and you can make different tabs for all the different areas of your business and have that first tab be the overarching snapshot of your business. I’m hoping this gives you some ideas on how to tackle this because it’s a big undertaking, but it’s so important. 

[00:06:40] Annette: Yeah, just start. That’s the biggest goal.

[00:06:42] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:06:42] Annette: Just start.

[00:06:43] Sarah: You asking and just having that time with your business– even if you guys look at each other over a coffee table and just talk about how the year went and where you want it to go, that is leaps and bounds, what a lot of business owners do. So don’t discount just talking about it as well and getting your feelings about how this year went and how you wanted to go out in the open.

[00:07:01] Annette: Yeah.Onthesamepagefor2024.

[00:07:02] Sarah: Right. So do it right now. If you can, after this episode’s over, call your business partner, or make a calendar event with yourself, and schedule off a couple of hours. Again, like Annette said, schedule more time than you think you need, and just look at your listings. Look at your profit and loss statements, the very least. Do that right now. With that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

[00:07:22] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:07:24] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting. 

[00:07:25] Sarah: Talk to you next time.