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[00:00:00] Sarah: Hello. Welcome back for another great episode. My name is Sarah Karakaian.

[00:00:06] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:00:09] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:00:10] Sarah: Let’s start the episode like we do every week, and that’s sharing one of you our amazing listeners who’s using our hashtag on Instagram, #STRShareSunday. We’ll share you on our Instagram on Sunday. We’ll also share you here on the podcast. We’ll share you to our entire email list and anywhere else where we can share the love. Annette, who are we sharing this week? And this is a good one.

[00:00:28] Annette: This week we are sharing @dellcollective. That’s @D-E-L-Lcollective. Run to the Instagram.

[00:00:38] Sarah: What?

[00:00:38] Annette: Okay. First of all, I’m going to have you run to the Instagram, follow, but then I’m going to have you sprint to their website.

[00:00:46] Sarah: No, I’m engaged.

[00:00:47] Annette: Okay. Couple of things. One thing that I’ve loved about their website is the photos are amazing, but as you scroll down, there’s actually a property walkthrough, and that is their property walkthrough on YouTube. And I can absolutely tell they had a professional videographer come out, do the video walkthrough of their property.

[00:01:13] This is genius, and it is showing not only the layout, but the details. And I think video soon, I believe, will be on all the listings, I’m hoping. But they are getting ahead of the game and have this video ready. It is awesome. So check that out. The second thing is they have an animal experience.

[00:01:34] They have a petting zoo. They have chandeliers inside the barn, and they are– you got to see it. I’ve never seen chandeliers in a barn. Gorgeous. And last but not least, they have a barndominium with a silo attached. And I’m interested in building a barndominium, but now I’m really interested in building a barndominium with a silo attached.

[00:02:02] So the animal experiences are just incredible. I also love that they’ve done their own blog. It’s called Travel Well, and what a great way to blog a separate brand but then bring it into your own. So check out the YouTube video. Give them a follow on Instagram, and it’s really a masterclass on a direct booking site and having the website present your brand. So well done, Dell Collective. Thanks for using the hashtag, and we are waiting for one of you, our listeners, to use it again so we can highlight you.

[00:02:35] Sarah: I thought you were going to say we were waiting for Dell Collective to invite us.

[00:02:38] Annette: Oh, to the animal area.

[00:02:39] Sarah: Also, every bed was perfectly made in that video.

[00:02:44] Annette: Sarah is was looking at it.

[00:02:45] Sarah: I was very impressed.

[00:02:46] Annette: Yeah, it was good.

[00:02:49] Sarah: Today’s episode, we invited one of our Hosting Business Mastermind Members.

[00:02:57] Annette: VIP. She has a triple VIP.

[00:02:59] Sarah: Yeah.

[00:03:00] Annette: Because she’s been to all of our real live events. And we have just watched her grow and take action. And parts of this episode though, CrossFit and BNI, Business Network, something, I don’t even know what it’s–

[00:03:15] Sarah: International or something.

[00:03:16] Annette: I did a one, two punch. I wasn’t anticipating.

[00:03:19] Sarah: Yeah, it’s actually a great tip. We’ll give you a little, not even a teaser. We’ll just give it to you. If you want to grow your hosting business and you’re like, how do I do it? We get those out all the time. How do I get started or how do I expand it? Joining some sort of network referral program where you’d pay to play is excellent.

[00:03:33] But also, Colleen shares with us her tech stack, and we’re very excited for you to hear her air her concerns when it comes to technology. But I also think it’s going to give a lot of us permission to just do one thing at a time.

[00:03:52] All right, Colleen, we have so many questions for you because we want to learn from one of our incredible Hosting Business Mastermind members and your incredible property management company. So talk to us about, where were you before you started managing furnished rentals?

[00:04:10] Colleen: Yeah. So I actually had a long-term management company. I still do. That’s how I started out. I started managing our personal rentals that my husband and I owned. We used to be very like jump in, figure-things-out-later people. That’s changed as we’ve gotten older and had a family. But we had purchased a house in Durham, North Carolina, right after we got married, three months after we got married.

[00:04:39] That was a 2,800 square foot, 1920s foursquare that nobody else wanted for good reason. And so we knew it was the house for us, and we just jumped in. And once we were in it, realized, it’s going to cost us a lot more to fix up than we thought. Didn’t have central heat or air, all the things.

[00:05:05] We had these old gas heaters in front of each fireplace where the heat went straight up to the 12-foot ceilings and not anything down where we actually were residing. And so like any normal person would do to come up with more money, we decided to buy another property that was in foreclosure and basically do a BRRRR with it.

[00:05:28] I don’t think we knew it was called a BRRRR back then, but we purchased this little 50,000-dollar house in our city, and we worked on it every single weekend, a lot of nights after work. We didn’t have any kids yet. And we renovated the whole thing, and we refinanced it, pulled the money out, double what we had bought it for. And then we rented it.

[00:05:53] And so we used that money to fix up the big 1920s foursquare. And that was my first foray into renting. We found tenants for this little property. Everything went great. We eventually actually sold that house to the tenants who were living there. And things moved forward in our life, and we ended up moving back to Charleston, South Carolina, which is where we live now.

[00:06:19] And we were shocked when we looked at what we could rent the foursquare for. And so instead of selling it, we held onto it. We were right next to Duke’s East campus, and we rented to graduate students. And that property cash flowed $1,000 a month for us, which is insane. And we had no clue what we were doing.

[00:06:40] I was enjoying managing, but we really had no clue. And if there was an issue that could be had at a rental, that property had it. So when I look back, it’s amazing to me all the things that we went through on that house, and I was still like, yes, I want to get my property management license.

[00:07:05] This is what I want to do with my life. Because it was insane. Three weeks after our first tenants moved in, we had a piece of PEX piping, and the attic burst, and half the house flooded. I was 39 weeks pregnant.

[00:07:20] Annette: Your pipes are getting ready to burst.

[00:07:24] Colleen: We just rolled with it. And of course, none of our tenants had renter’s insurance because we didn’t know that that was a thing they should do. We replaced their mattresses for them. They made other arrangements. Insurance stepped in. It was a big repair job.

[00:07:39] And so when I look back and I think about being in the delivery room and giving my sister-in-law this list of, these are the numbers of the who people who might call you, and you need to answer, and this is what you need to tell them, that feels a little insane to me now, but I guess it was the right career path.

[00:07:59] We have four kids now. That was our first child that I was pregnant with then. And after our fourth was born, I went and got my property management license in South Carolina, my property manager in charge license, so that I could start managing for other people.

[00:08:13] Annette: Is that required in South Carolina?

[00:08:16] Colleen: It is. Uh-huh. It is, if you’re going to manage property that you are not the owner.

[00:08:21] Sarah: What were you doing before you got that license, before you became a professional property manager and while you were managing your own? Were you staying at home, or did you have another career that you were in?

[00:08:32] Colleen: Yeah. So my degree is in marine biology. And I did work in marine biology for a few years after I graduated. I loved it. We lived in the Cayman Islands for a year. I had a job there, worked at a couple of aquariums, but when my husband’s job brought us to the Raleigh Durham area, I had to look for something else, and I took a temp job at a commercial construction company.

[00:09:00] And that was my first exposure to that world. And when we moved to Charleston, I ended up getting a job with actually one of our old coworkers from an aquarium that my husband and I both worked at who had started construction company here, and I was working there as a project manager. So I did do that until after our first child, and then I was staying home.

[00:09:27] Sarah: Talk to us about what your business looks like today. Let’s fast forward really quick. What does your portfolio look like?

[00:09:34] Colleen: Yeah. So I’m managing 38 long-term rentals and 21 furnished rentals, mix of midterm and short-term, and they’re all in the greater Charleston area. We sold that 1920s foursquare about five years ago.

[00:09:55] And we were going to owe a lot of capital gains tax on it, so we ended up doing a 1031 exchange and purchased two properties here in Charleston specifically to furnish them and dip our feet into the water of short-term rentals. I wanted to manage for ourselves first before branching off into managing furnish for other people just to learn the ropes. And so that was how that transition started.

[00:10:30] Sarah: Your interest in branching into furnished rental, short-term and midterm, was it because you wanted to diversify? Did you see a need? Was it simply because you wanted to invest in one yourself and then you figured, well, if I’m doing it for myself, I might as well do it for others? What was that catalyst?

[00:10:45] Colleen: Yeah. I don’t know that I really saw a need at that point. At this stage now, I could definitely see a need in our market for the midterm rentals. I have more inquiries than I have properties to be able to offer for the midterm stays, but at that time it was just that I had an interest in it.

[00:11:03] I work very closely with a cleaning company– now my cleaners for all my short-term rentals. And we share an office space that we purchased together. Looking back now, at the time, I could not have foreseen the path that friendship would take.

[00:11:20] But we were at a CrossFit gym together, and they owned a cleaning company, and we became friends, and they cleaned a lot of furnished rentals. And I actually went to work for them part-time before we purchased our short-term rentals, because I had an interest in moving into that space.

[00:11:38] And I felt like that would be a good intro. I didn’t do it with the foresight of I would at some point be managing this many furnished rentals or any of that. It was just I had an interest and started cleaning for them part-time and learned how to clean furnished rentals.

[00:11:55] And so when we bought our own, I was cleaning them myself initially, as most people do, to the point where you’re like, this is nuts. I need to hire somebody. And so they started cleaning them. And then as I picked up more clients, they’re the only cleaning company I use now. They do all of my furnished cleans. Our lives are very intertwined. We share an office. We have centralized consumables for all the furnished rentals. It makes it really easy.

[00:12:23] Annette: But you’re not business partners though, correct? They have the cleaning business. You have the property management business.

[00:12:31] Colleen: Yes.

[00:12:31] Annette: Okay. So even though it’s blurred, you share the office, share maybe some expenses, you do not share–

[00:12:38] Colleen: We’re business partners in the office.

[00:12:40] Annette: Okay, got that.

[00:12:41] Colleen: But our businesses are separate. Uh-huh.

[00:12:43] Annette: Okay. Can we unpack that?

[00:12:45] Colleen: I like that. Yeah.

[00:12:46] Sarah: Well, let’s talk about that because I think it’s a question that a lot of people have in their mind. There’s two things, right, Colleen? How do you partner with someone like that? What happens if it comes to this terrible, dramatic end? So what conversations have you had with your cleaning team? Have you had those really tough conversations? Do you have an exit strategy should things move apart?

[00:13:10] Annette: A backup plan.

[00:13:11] Sarah: Yeah, a backup plan. What does that look like for you guys?

[00:13:14] Colleen: Yeah. I guess I’d have to find new cleaners. But we did have those conversations when we moved into the partnership to purchase our office space. We had a list of conversations. We had our list of questions we had to answer in the conversation with our lawyer before the partnership agreement.

[00:13:32] And we hashed through that. It was not a new relationship for us. At the point that we transitioned into that, we had been friends for over five years. We’ve known each other now for eight years, nine years, so it wasn’t a new relationship. So we felt pretty solid in that aspect of it.

[00:13:57] Sarah: Well, you think about people when they get married. You know what I mean? I guess you get a prenup, but do you really talk about the end when you get married? Probably not as much as we should, but I love that. And so how does the relationship work with your cleans? What if there’s an unsatisfactory clean? Is there ever one? Are there any of those awkward moments?

[00:14:17] Colleen: Yeah, occasionally there is. And thankfully, I can talk very easily with them. One of the girls who owns our company and I are both empaths, and we’re both like very, you don’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings. But also, they take a huge amount of pride in their clean.

[00:14:40] And so if something like that happens, they want to make it right right away. There’s never any like, if I have to bring something to their attention, there’s never anything that they push back on that it wasn’t their fault, anything like that.

[00:14:54] Sarah: No egos.

[00:14:55] Colleen: Right. There’s no egos. And that goes both ways. There’s certainly a lot of things as well that I have to be reminded of too, things that they have asked me to pick up that I need to drop off at a property. We are both very busy. We’re running very busy small businesses and doing a lot of the stuff ourselves. And so I think there’s a mutual grace there. Thankfully, they’re amazing at what they do, and we have very great, mostly all five stars.

[00:15:25] Annette: I’m completely overwhelmed right now. I’m just doing some math. You’ve got your long-term rentals. You’ve got your midterm rentals. You’ve got your short-term rentals. I know our listeners want to know, what does your team look like? And what are you using? How do you know how long this person’s staying, paying your owners? Right now I have this vision of you juggling, juggling, juggling, and I want to know how you are doing it all.

[00:15:50] Colleen: Yeah. That’s my whole life. I don’t have the team that I want to have in place yet, but I’m on track to do that. I would say that, when I look back, because I did a lot of reflecting before we recorded this episode, the two most important things that I did for my business, and one was intentional for my business and one was just life related, my husband and I joined a CrossFit gym, and I joined a BNI group, which is a business referral group you pay to be a part of.

[00:16:25] And only one person, from each industry can hold a seat in the group, so there’s no other property manager in the group. And the relationships that I have formed from those two things, and I think it doesn’t matter– you don’t have to join a gym, but just something in your community and not being alone in what you’re doing, just generally in life.

[00:16:48] I have short-term rental clients. I found my realtor. That’s what brought my cleaners and I together, had midterm rental guests. I’ve had long-term rental management referrals that clients that I manage, for so many, that came from the gym side. And then on the BNI group, same thing, my HVAC guy, my water remediation guy. I have a couple of short-term rental clients, a couple of long-term rental clients.

[00:17:20] Those have been the two biggest sources of partnerships in my life, manifested into business relationships and people who are on my team without being direct hires on my team. I currently have myself, and then I have somebody starting as a direct hire this summer, and I’m working on hiring another permanent part-time position as well.

[00:17:45] Sarah: So you are, for all those rentals, the one communicating with the guests?

[00:17:52] Colleen: I am.

[00:17:53] Sarah: You are the one monitoring the day-to-day operations in all the software. And you are the one managing the books and making sure your owners get paid.

[00:18:05] Colleen: Yes, but I do have a really great bookkeeping team.

[00:18:09] Sarah: Colleen, you are busy.

[00:18:12] Colleen: I am busy. That was the first and the biggest thing that I passed off, was the bookkeeping. I’m on my second bookkeeper now, and I think you don’t know what you don’t know when you go into something, and as the business grows, things that you don’t get right the first time become more costly to fix.

[00:18:35] But then as long as you’re not making the same, I’m not going to call it a mistake because you’re just learning, but the second go around, as long as you’re not doing the same thing again, and you’re making changes, and you’re moving forward and correct that, then it’s a game changer.

[00:18:54] Sarah: What has been the reason you haven’t yet hired at this stage? Is it you feel like there’s not enough funds to support that, or is it you just haven’t had time to sit down and be thoughtful about it?

[00:19:06] Colleen: It was both. And so now I’m at the point where I have the funds to hire, but I probably should have stopped taking new clients for a little while, and I didn’t. I kept growing, and so now it’s at the point where it’s crucial that I get somebody on board. And that is one of the things that I look back and wish that I had done differently.

[00:19:27] I think it was a combination of feeling like I was worried that somebody else wouldn’t do it the same way. And I’m letting go of that. Definitely letting go of that mentality as I’ve grown. It’s also exposed my weaknesses. I didn’t go to school for business.

[00:19:47] I don’t know how to run a company. I’m learning as I go. And so I’m seeing the holes where I want to find people who are talented in the areas that I am not to come in and fill those gaps. But also, I think if you don’t hire soon enough and you get too busy, you start to feel like, how am I going to have the time to create my SOPs to train somebody?

[00:20:14] Because you’re going a million miles an hour, and you can’t see the space to be able to do that. And I wish I had had that foresight because now I’m desperate. It all starts on June 1st. I’m counting down the days.

[00:20:29] Annette: Colleen, we want to give you a huge compliment. I want to rewind. You just said you don’t know how to run a company. I’m going to absolutely say you 1000% do run a company.

[00:20:39] Colleen: I do.

[00:20:40] Annette: Just don’t ever say that again. You are crushing it. And I want to share with the listeners you are in our mastermind membership. You’re VIP. You’ve been in for years, and you take action. You have been with us. You show up to calls every time. You ask a question. We follow up, and you have done the thing. So can you share with us– you talked about BNI, which BNI is an investment. I know that you have to pay to be a part of that.

[00:21:08] Sarah: I think that’s a really quick hot tip for everyone listening. If you desire to grow either your own property management company, your own hosting company, or you want to manage for others, BNI is a great resource. And I would say it’s almost in every state, most cities.

[00:21:26] Annette: Not to turn this into the BNI show, but Columbus has multiple. So depending on the population density, a lot of times it’s invite only because Colleen said they do keep it, one person per–

[00:21:38] Sarah: Industry.

[00:21:39] Annette: Per industry.

[00:21:40] Colleen: Industry. Yeah.

[00:21:40] Annette: But I love that you’re investing in your health with the CrossFit gym. You’re investing in your business with BNI, and then you invested in yourself in joining our mastermind. So can you share the decision? I want to share with listeners you decided to join us.

[00:21:56] Obviously, you have a ton of properties. You are super busy, but you make time. You carve time out to come and meet with us multiple times a month. And then you’ve been to our live events. Can you just share with us why you decided to do that and make that investment and an online community also, Colleen?

[00:22:13] Colleen: So my business didn’t really grow very much for several years, and part of that was intentional because I started it when my kids were really young. And so I was not actively trying to grow my business. I was only taking referrals. And when you have one to three clients and doing no outside prospecting, you don’t have any referral lead gen.

[00:22:37] And so I would say for the first, honestly, five years of my business, it was very slow growth. And then once my youngest started school, that was when I had made a decision to actively work on growing my business. Backfired a little bit on me because she started kindergarten at the height of COVID.

[00:23:02] And so instead of all my kids going to school, they were all doing school from home, so it was what it was, but I just didn’t want to feel stuck anymore. I wanted to learn all the things that I didn’t know. The further I got into my business, the more obvious it was how many things I just didn’t know, and I started to feel like this is ridiculous for me to only be listening to podcasts and trying to research online and stuff.

[00:23:31] If there’s other people who have done it and already have a blueprint that I can fast track that and learn from, then that’s what I wanted to do. It’s like if you’re renovating a property and you do everything yourself and you realize at the end of it that if you had just figured out and gotten it rented sooner, sold sooner, you would’ve made more money than you did.

[00:23:53] And that’s how I was starting to feel in my business. When we were just starting our short-term rentals, my husband was also diagnosed with cancer and had several surgeries. The first one left him on life support. It was just really traumatic for our family, and it just changed things for me, not in the immediate, like you go out and absolutely change your life.

[00:24:25] Life was still going on. Our kids still had all the things happening. But slowly, over those couple of years after that first surgery and his diagnosis, things started to shift in me where my goals got bigger. What I wanted for my business got bigger. What I wanted to be able to provide for our family and to give him the option.

[00:24:48] Once you have something happen, then now it’s like a reality for you that things aren’t always going to stay the same. They’re not always going to be how they’ve been, and so you can’t take things for granted. You can’t take health for granted. You can’t take anything for granted.

[00:25:02] And so if we get hit with another shocking scenario like that, I want to have options as a family and I want him to not have to be the sole provider for our household. And so that was probably the biggest turning point for me in my thought process, honestly.

[00:25:20] And that shift happened from me saying things like, I don’t want to manage anybody. I just want to keep my business small enough where it’s just me. I don’t want to have to worry about employees and all of that too. What kind of team can I grow? What my corporate structure needs to look like. These are the spots I need to fill. And it’s crazy to look back and realize how things can change as you grow.

[00:25:46] Sarah: What are your goals, Colleen? So I know baby steps with like hiring, but three years out, five years out, what does Colleen dream? What does your business look like?

[00:25:57] Colleen: Yeah, so I recently took the step to separate the furnished rental and long-term rental side of my business into two separate LLCs with the goal in mind of eventually being able to sell the long-term rental side of my business. Not that’s anything that’s happening in the immediate future, but I needed that to start being separate so that I had the option.

[00:26:20] Because I can feel it in my soul. I am burning out on the long-term rental side. I just really, really love the hospitality aspect of the short-term rental and the furnished rental side. And so I know the direction that I want to actively work on growing my business. Never say never, but I’m not looking to be crazy huge.

[00:26:42] I want to try to keep it 50 units or less on the furnished side and would just like to have my operations really, really dialed in. And that’s what I’ve been working on for the past year, is just really putting the right systems in place so that I can grow in a sustainable way. Because I was starting to feel like what was happening, and still is a little bit, was unsustainable.

[00:27:04] Annette: Just to let the listeners know, her talking about hospitality, Colleen, had flew into our– not technically flew in, but she had to fly into her desk quickly because she had to make it to the bakery to get pastries to make sure her guest checking in later today had fresh pastries because they sell out.

[00:27:20] So just to give you a little insight into what she does for her guest, all while being a mother of four, which still blows our mind. But Colleen, the 50 units or less, we talk with you a lot, but your tech stack, you’re using Relay. You’re using PriceLabs. You’re just implementing Breezeway.

[00:27:38] Again, like we said, you are an action taker. When you’re taking action, for instance, on a new piece, we see a lot of hosts that get stuck. They try to implement something, and there’s too much tech out there. They bring it all on, and then they don’t really implement it. Can you share with us bringing on PriceLabs and now bringing on Breezeway?

[00:27:54] We talk about all of these things in our podcast a lot, and they’re our partners, but how have you started to bring them on and add to your tech stack being, currently, a one woman show, and bringing that in, and making sure you’re squeezing all of the juice out of the tech so it’s helping you, and almost being a team member before you hire a team member? That’s what we see the tech as.

[00:28:15] Colleen: Yes. So just so things aren’t misconstrued, I signed on with Breezeway over a year ago.

[00:28:21] Annette: Okay. Ooh, no, this is good.

[00:28:23] Colleen: So I signed on with Breezeway over a year ago, and I have been paying for Breezeway every month, and it’s still not fully implemented. And I think even the list of properties that I have loaded in Breezeway isn’t even accurate anymore. That was the one piece of tech that I felt like needed a much fuller amount of my attention that I didn’t have, and time that I didn’t have.

[00:28:50] And so I did not throw in the towel on it. That is one of the number one things that my employee is going to be helping with this summer. We’re going to get that up and fully running because now I am at a number of properties where the maintenance component is starting to feel unsustainable.

[00:29:12] I need a better tracking system, and I know that Breezeway is going to do what I need it to do for my business. But yeah, that completely resonates with me. I know you said I’m an action taker, but I’m a slow action taker. It takes me a long time sometimes to get things up and running. I also started using Hospitable.

[00:29:30] I was not using any kind of PMS system prior to this, and so all these things, I reached a point in my business where I felt like I needed all these things at once and then realized I can’t implement all these things at once. And so things had to get prioritized, and other things take a backseat.

[00:29:48] And so for me, Hospitable was the first thing that got implemented. PriceLabs, a little bit more recently. And I still feel like I have a long way to go on learning PriceLabs. There’s so much in all this tech to be able to use it to its fullest potential. And so I am juggling a lot of balls, and I just try not to drop the same ones too many days in a row or too many weeks in a row.

[00:30:15] When it comes to work life and family life, our kids are at the ages now where they are incredibly busy, and they all play sports, and their sports schedules are nuts, and you want to be at all the things.

[00:30:30] And trying to manage all of them, there’s definitely things that take a backseat for a while, and then it’s like, okay, it’s your turn. Breezeway is almost up. It’s almost Breezeway’s turn. And I’m so excited to have that fully implemented, but I get that it’s easy to be distracted by all the shiny objects, and you see a presentation, and this piece of tech seems amazing, and you’re like, I need that in my business.

[00:30:55] And then the reality is it also is coming with a monthly cost, and is what the tech is giving you worth the cost that you’re paying for it? That’s another thing to consider.

[00:31:06] Annette: No, I love that you just were that transparent. And there’s so much tech that we have in our personal lives, in our business lives, that we’re like, if you can squeeze one thing out of it that makes your life easier, it’s worth it until you can continue on. But we see that. We see the tech overwhelm with so many hosts, and we want to help with that, bring it on at the right time, and how it can work for you.

[00:31:29] Sarah: So Colleen, you’re slow to implement compared to what? Everyone thinks everyone else is adding on all this tech all at once, and you’re all automatically pros at it, and everyone else is much faster, much more organized than you are, and I can tell you, Annette and I, just looking at our own business, we see a lot of businesses inside of our mastermind, and you just have to remember that. It’s like compared to what? Are your owners happy? Are the homes safe? Are your guests happy? That is uno business advice or business KPI.

[00:32:00] Annette: Colleen, you’re a great guest to talk about this. I’m going to get really fired up. We’re over everybody like, this is passive business. This is easy. We want to work. We like to work. Maybe that’s our new slogan. We like to work. There’s nothing wrong with working.

[00:32:16] Working is fun. I don’t know. Maybe that’s our new motto is like, it’s going to take time. You can’t just flip the switch on tech, and everything’s taken care of. And so what you’re doing is what Sarah said, is giving everyone grace of what is the time limit if you’re utilizing some of it? And you know what? It’s okay if maybe something is on your tech stack and getting paid for, and it’s just this little reminder.

[00:32:40] Sarah: We’ve all been there.

[00:32:42] Annette: Yeah. I had a meeting last night with a team member like, hey, May, we should probably look at everything we’re paying for. Are we using it? And it’s like, how’s been five months of the year? And I bet you when we have that meeting next week, there’s going to be some stuff we haven’t used that we’re like, let’s not get rid of it because we need it. It’s that reminder.

[00:32:58] Colleen: Yeah. Because you know it’s coming. You know that you need to do it. That’s been a big paradigm shift for me as I started getting more into the short-term rental space. Long-term rentals, I was just doing my thing. There was nobody else that I was looking at. There was nothing else I was comparing to.

[00:33:16] The only piece of tech I have in that business is I have a property management system. I use Buildium. Of course, there’s no systems that overlap between the long-term and the short-term. And that was one of the other reasons why I did separate out both parts of my business.

[00:33:29] Everything was already so separate. The way that everything operated was so different, and it just felt like it made sense to do that. But when I moved into the short-term rental space, I remember the first time that I realized there were short-term rental podcasts, and I was like, what?

[00:33:46] It’s eye-opening to me. I had no clue. And I binged all of these short-term rental podcasts, and I was just like a sponge, taking in all this information. And to a certain degree, it was probably information overload. And then you start following all these people on Instagram, and then you start only seeing the highlight reels, and you’re thinking like, well, that’s not what my business looks like. And that’s not what my life looks like.

[00:34:17] I’ve had to really do a lot of mindset work and shift that paradigm that other people are doing so much better, that other people are able to implement things faster, that they’re making so much more money, that their business is always cash flowing, and all of that, because it is hard to separate that out.

[00:34:39] And that’s been a slow shift for me to realize that things take time, and I’m not going to have all this cash flow as I’m actively building my business. And I don’t know what the end looks like in the three-year, five-year. I know what I think I want it to look like right now, but when I look back five years ago, things are so different in my business, in my life, and the way I think about things that I’ve stopped projecting out that far.

[00:35:12] Sarah: I like that. Colleen, you have grown so much. It has been such a pleasure getting to know you and your business, and Annette and I hope you don’t ever get too far from us because we love watching, and we’re rooting for you. If anyone wants to reach out to you, if they’re interested in having you manage their furnished rental, or if they have questions about growing their business, how can they reach out to you?

[00:35:35] Colleen: Yeah, so I am not huge on social media, but people are welcome to follow me. My business Instagram is @fullyfurnishedcharleston, @fullyfurnishedcharleston. And my website’s fullyfurnishedcharleston.com, and my personal Instagram, it’s @colleen_chrien, C-H-R-I-E-N. And I do share a lot of property management things on there, life things, kid things. But I love connecting with anybody in the short-term rental space, anyone in the property management space, and especially if you’re local to the Charleston area.

[00:36:15] Annette: And Fully Furnished Charleston. Let’s give it up for some search engine optimization on that. Let’s go. That is great. You worked on that one because I feel like you were Picket Fence–

[00:36:25] Colleen: I did.

[00:36:26] Annette: Right?

[00:36:26] Colleen: It is. Yeah. And that my long-term.

[00:36:28] Annette: Yeah.

[00:36:29] Colleen: So then my long-term rental company is Picket Fence Properties. I don’t have any social media for that because that side of my business grows enough as it is. It’s like I don’t want anyone to find me.

[00:36:40] Annette: What? No. Actually, Colleen, before we wrap up, I do want to share really quickly. It was one of those things like, do you share it? Don’t you share it? Because it’s like you don’t do any advertising. You’re part of BNI, but I also–

[00:36:51] Colleen: I’m not anymore.

[00:36:52] Annette: Oh, you’re not.

[00:36:52] Colleen: I’m not part of BNI anymore. I did that for two years. And then I really just felt like I had become too busy. The relationships that were formed there have stayed.

[00:37:06] Annette: Yeah. The parting message here is people reach out to us all the time. I want to grow my business. How do I grow my business? And what you have done is you’re just really, really good at what you do, and then you’ve been all referrals, zero paid ads. But I know you’re going to start aggressively trying to acquire new clients, but I just want to share that all of these homes have been 100% referral at this point in time from you just being an amazing business owner.

[00:37:31] Colleen: Correct. Everything has been referral-based, and I think that the key to that is cultivating relationships without an ulterior motive. So just being a part of things in your community and being supportive of other people, being supportive of other businesses in your personal life and in your business life, depending whatever groups you’re a part of.

[00:37:57] And that just can come back to you tenfold, and you have no idea what twists and turns life is going to take. And our community here showed up for us big time when Matt was first diagnosed and when he was in the ICU and all that. Across the gym was the ones providing the meal train. One girl at our gym remembered where I said I was going to board my dogs during that time, and she went and extended their stay. Just things that you wouldn’t think anybody would do.

[00:38:28] If you are investing time in other people, they’re going to invest that time back into you. And when life throws those curve balls at you, you’re so grateful that you cultivated those communities. And it’s been the same on the business side. That’s how I get referrals. That’s how I have contractors to work for me.

[00:38:52] I have an amazing HVAC electrician, handyman. All of that has just come from community contacts, not from me putting a post on Facebook that I’m looking for a handyman or anything like that. And so I just think that if you are cultivating those relationships without ulterior motives, it’s going to come back to you.

[00:39:15] Sarah: What a great reminder and message. Colleen, thank you so much for your time today. With that, I am Sarah Karakaian.

[00:39:23] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:39:25] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:39:26] Sarah: We’ll talk to you next time.