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

[00:00:08] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:00:10] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:00:11] Sarah: Let’s start this episode like we do every week, and that is sharing one of you. You’re going to our website, strshare.com, sharing all the information about your short-term rental so that we can spread the love here on our podcast, to our email list, and of course, on Instagram every single Sunday. Annette, who are we sharing this week?

[00:00:28] Annette: This week we are sharing @thewooderhouse, and that’s W-O-O-D-E-R House, @thewooderhouse, and I want to point out, everyone, please do this today if it’s not somewhere on your feed. They have a reel that actually shows a person working at the desk in their property.

[00:00:53] First of all, it has an amazing view, but I feel like so often we show the desks, but they show it with the chair open and the laptop there, and then when you start the roll, you actually see the person working at the desk and then they take that work from home person into a hammock.

[00:01:13] So I just think we miss out on like, we say, oh, we have a work remote friendly, but to actually see it, I’m like, oh my gosh, that would be awesome to go there and work there. And I see that there is a proper setup. So I actually needed that visualization to put myself at that desk working. That would be pretty awesome. Work a little bit. Go outside to the hammock.

[00:01:36] So share those actual moments that maybe don’t get shared as much like the desk and someone actually sitting there, using their computer, looking at the awesome view, and they see that you have that specific setup for them. So there’s tons of other things on this feed for sure, but I really just wanted to highlight how sometimes we have amenities that we look over that might be the exact reason why someone is choosing to stay with you. So well done. Yes.

[00:02:06] Sarah: All right. This episode is for all those– actually, you could tune in this episode as one of two people. Maybe you’re someone who is thinking about hiring either a co-host or a property manager and you’re like, how do I know if they’re good or not? How do I know they’re going to love my property as much as I do and really want for it success as much as I want for it?

[00:02:31] Or you might be a budding co-host yourself or a property manager yourself and you’re growing or you want to see how someone else is doing it and killing the game. Today we have Stephanie Wise, who is the COO of HostWise, managing over 100 units in Pittsburgh. She began her journey as a cleaner with a 50-dollar bid on turnout and has transformed that humble start into a business with over 4 million in sales.

[00:02:58] And here’s how you know we love it here on Thanks for Visiting, an overall rating, five-star rating of 4.95, which is really hard to do when you have so many properties and it’s been several years in business. Annette and I led a panel at IMN this summer, which is the short-term rental conference for IMN, and we hopped on a Zoom to talk to our panel before we head out to the conference, and Stephanie stuck out like a sore thumb. We were like, she is our girl.

[00:03:29] Annette: The smartest thumb.

[00:03:30] Sarah: Oh my God. The way she was just talking, first of all, her confidence is infectious. And she doesn’t apologize for being an incredible host and for having an incredible company and for being really good at what she’s really good at, which is, and she says it here on her intake form, that cleaning. She goes, I am the market leader here.

[00:03:50] Annette: She put that in all caps just to her confidence– she feels like it. She knows she is the market leader. And this is also for someone that if you’re just starting out and you have to hire a cleaner, there’s some really good information in here. And we hear it all the time from some of you’re, like, “I want to start my own cleaning company.” Because they think they’ve got it down. This is an interesting thing too, if you’re trying to find maybe an alternate niche inside the short-term rental world.

[00:04:15] Sarah: We asked Stephanie, how do we get the best cleaners to work with us? How does that happen? And I cannot wait for you to hear her answer. Stephanie, welcome to the show.

[00:04:28] Stephanie: Thank you.

[00:04:29] Sarah: We’re so excited to have you. And we’ve got an agenda here.

[00:04:33] Annette: We do. And we want to start at the beginning with your 50-dollar bid as a cleaner that led you. I always love these hosting stories because it’s always accidental. But how did this 50-dollar bid for a cleaning get you started in this industry? Take us back.

[00:04:56] Stephanie: So like you said, completely accidental. I did not mean to be in this industry or have a company at all. I came out of a 10-year career in the show production and touring worlds. I just couldn’t travel anymore. I couldn’t be on the road. I was like, I got to do something else.

[00:05:17] I moved back to my hometown, needed a side hustle instantly. Started bartending. I was serving, and for me, it was the worst job in the entire universe. So I went home one night, and don’t judge me for this part of my story, but I Googled “jobs for people who hate people.” That was where I was at that point in my life. Now all day I talk to people. You know what I mean?

[00:05:47] Sarah: I totally get it.

[00:05:50] Annette: Let’s tell the listeners, though, that event planning– Sarah and I know this, but can you just tell them the type of event planning you were doing? Because it was pretty intense with hundreds of thousands of people around you, I feel like. So people understand where this comes from too, being submerged in so many people.

[00:06:09] Stephanie: Did the same thing, how I started in this industry. I was an audio engineer. I did something called front of house, which is basically live sound for live shows. Started at club level, slowly started working my way up, got bigger tours. Noticed, I think I could run this a little bit better. Started assisting with tour managing, and then got on bigger tours. Started doing more corporate stuff, and was on the road for six years straight.

[00:06:44] I did a lot of festivals. I did a one large arena tour, but my bread and butter was club level stuff. So it was all live music. I would take stuff here and there where I would do corporate events or just different conferences and things like that. But basically live music was my life.

[00:07:05] Annette: And that’s a lot of people in, a lot of people in.

[00:07:09] Stephanie: All the time. And it set me up really well for this industry though because you start before everybody. You end after everybody. You never really clock out. You’re always on call for just whatever the universe decides to throw at you that day. But it really set me up in a sense of, I was taking 20 to 30 people to 50 cities, but now I do 50 turnovers in one day. I flip flopped it a little bit, but it also set me up to understand what life is like from a professional traveler perspective.

[00:07:48] Annette: Okay. So you Googled “jobs for people that don’t like people”.

[00:07:51] Stephanie: Yeah. Because I did not anyone.

[00:07:54] Annette: You were in your non-people era then.

[00:07:56] Stephanie: Anyone who worked in the service industry, in a restaurant, can completely sympathize with that statement. But cleaning came up and I started– I’d never cleaned professionally, but I enjoyed it, and I thought, this would be a really great way to kind of just take a break, but still be physical. I like to be on the move. I like the instant gratification of cleaning.

[00:08:21] So I started just on Craigslist and weird stuff, just everything you do when you’re getting into something and you don’t have all the information. Did some stuff, and somebody contacted me and said, “Hey, I have an Airbnb. Would you like to clean it?” And I did it and I went, “This is my vibe.” I’m in here when nobody’s in here. I like the decor and making things look aesthetically pleasing, but just dip my toes in, started researching it a little bit more, found TurnoverBnB, which is now Turno, and loaded up a profile on there and got bids instantly.

[00:09:04] So I started putting bids on houses and cleaning Airbnbs, and it picked up very fast. And I realized very quickly that if you were reliable and great to communicate with, this was going to be easy. I could do all of them. And I was coming in after people, and I was really surprised at the quality of cleaning and just the units.

[00:09:29] And when I was talking to the host and telling them, “This is broken. You’re understocked here. You’ve got the wrong bed size sheets. Is this what these people have been doing with you?” At first it was funny because people would be like, “You okay in there? It’s been three hours. My other cleaner is 40 minutes.” And I went, “Girl, I got to do an overhaul in here. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

[00:09:55] And it didn’t matter if I was getting paid for a deep clean or not. It was just, this is what needs done, was my mentality. So I got used to that side of it, but it snowballed really quickly where a lot of my current clients went out and they grew and they got more units because now they had someone that they knew could handle it.

[00:10:19] And pretty soon they just started handing everything over to me. They went, “Do you want to be loaded into our systems? Why don’t you just look at our calendar? Do you want to co-host? Can you go over here? I have the guest that’s locked out.” They would call me at 9.00 PM, and I went. I’m the go to for a lot of hosts and management companies at this point. I should really get my systems together, my pricing together and all of that.

[00:10:47] The third client I ever got is now my business partner at HostWise. So we grew up together, and it was really funny because when I got into his unit, I went, “This guy doesn’t care at all.” It was like, I just went [Inaudible] this furniture is broken here. And all that it was is it wasn’t being communicated to him. But as soon as I told him that, he was on it. He had me new stuff.

[00:11:20] He liked that I was letting him know ahead of time, we’re about to be low on these products. And he talked to me and said, well, why don’t we make a calendar? And started building systems with me, and we just consistently checked in with one another. He was from out of state at the time, and he would come back three months later and I’d be like, oh, I’m cleaning 40 properties kind of thing.

[00:11:46] And he was like, this was fast. And he started to grow. And he said, “Do you know anybody who would want to set up a unit?” And in my brain, I went, that sounds like the most fun job in the entire universe for me. Little did I know that not everyone loves putting together furniture, painting, and doing wallpaper, but I was so pumped. I was so excited.

[00:12:12] So I started weaving my way into the staging side of things as well. But we sat down one day and he went, “You’re really good at this. I’m really good at this. We should partner up and start something.” And at that point I had been cleaning for about two years and I had 80 units, and I was doing it with the team of 11. And we were killing it.

[00:12:40] I didn’t have a cleaning score below 4.8, and some of these houses had a lot of problems. So that was positive feedback for me. I knew I was doing something right. But a lot of these other hosts had asked me to start something with them too. But Chad, who is my partner, his units were very different.

[00:13:03] The type of guests that he got, they followed rules. He spent more money on quality items. You could just tell he cared a little bit, and he was going in the direction of, I want to do this better than anyone. And our goals really aligned when we talked about it. So we just jumped in together, and that’s how HostWise started. And we did a million dollars in sales our first year. So that little 50-dollar bid on a one-bedroom apartment in three years turned into a million dollars of sales our first year open.

[00:13:39] Annette: I love it. We want to talk about hosting, but I have to go back to this cleaning company. 11 team members, 80 units. This will help hosts that are listening or people that are thinking how can I layer on– maybe I am going to start my own cleaning company in the city. Those 11 team members, were they full-time? Were they contractors? And were you still physically cleaning when you had the 11 team members also?

[00:14:09] Stephanie: I was always cleaning. I couldn’t get myself out of it. At that point, you know how they say you want to work on your business not work for your business? I was doing great, but it was bananas for a second. I couldn’t get caught up, and I couldn’t get people trained. And everybody runs into that when they grow.

[00:14:32] So I think it’s good that people hear that story and they go, “Oh, she had it all figured out.” No, I was killing myself sometimes in doing four or five units in a day. But a lot of it was I really cared about my team, and I didn’t want to overload them. So I would take the tough stuff myself.

[00:14:51] And it did work out for me in the end because I still have cleaners from that first year that I started that clean for me now. And we’re five years in. So I really cared about how much money they made. Everyone started off as 1099s, and as we grew, you have to move to a W-2 model. I know some people do a piece rate as well.

[00:15:20] For me, 1099 seemed to be the cleaners’ favorites. We all sat down at one point and I said, “What works better for you guys. What do you want to do?” And towards the end, what was really helpful for me, I had a lot of part time people. Because you guys know this. Your Sundays and Mondays are totally loaded. And then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, you might not have too much going on.

[00:15:48] So I really leaned into that part time gig economy work. Not everybody wants to drive Uber or do DoorDash or get a retail job. When you’re looking at cleaning and you’re doing it 1099, the team that I have now can make 35 to $50 an hour, depending on their strength of hustle.

[00:16:12] So it’s one of those things where I said, this can really help people out. It was great for moms. That 11:00 to 4:00, in the middle of the day, worked well for people. It was this unique way to make money quickly.

[00:16:30] Sarah: Yeah. Now you’re involved in HostWise and you are COO. So you’re chief operations. So operations is your jam. Are you the direct report for the cleaning team?

[00:16:45] Stephanie: Yeah. I will always have a hand in it. We’ve grown, and we’ve added people to the team, but I’ve had people that have been here and know the way that we do things that they do jump in and help, like a team lead.

[00:17:03] But one of my learning points from having the cleaning company and having so many different clients is they would put me in touch with VAs all the time. And when I would get information from the VAs or whoever was handling communications and then I was getting in houses, I was basically like, none of this– the information was getting lost in translation everywhere.

[00:17:32] Or when I eventually started to be able to see communications with the guest, what the VA had told me or some feedback that we had received, wasn’t the same things that the guests were reporting. So I knew when I started a company, I wanted to eliminate that side of it. So all of our cleaners, we have a Slack channel based on territory.

[00:17:53] And they have a direct line to me, to Chad, the CEO, to each territory manager. They’re junior ops managers that handle each part of our city. But I take a direct line from all of them. So if anybody has a question, sometimes I answer it. Sometimes a cleaner that’s been with me for two weeks answers it, or sometimes a cleaner that’s been with me for five years will answer it. We’re really a team sport. Everybody’s got a place, and there’s a lot of communication day to day.

[00:18:25] Annette: Can we pause on the VA and cleaner communication?

[00:18:28] Stephanie: Yes.

[00:18:29] Annette: As listeners are hearing this and they are managing both a virtual assistant and the cleaner, what did you see most was being lost in communication? The owners, do they need to go to the property and see what’s going on? What were those communication– because I can see how that just becomes a snowball over time. It just gets worse and worse and worse. What was that miscommunication that you saw the most? And how can we stop that from happening?

[00:19:01] Stephanie: Well, the biggest thing that surprised me when I started to gain momentum cleaning and getting into several units was how much the hosts didn’t know about their property. There was a lot of times where I showed up and they couldn’t get me inside. Now, you have to remember too, this was five years ago.

[00:19:20] So this was in the old days of Airbnb and short-term rental. There weren’t a lot of systems. There wasn’t a lot of software for things like this. So people were just figuring it out as they went, but I still run into it as we bring on new units now.

[00:19:37] Annette: I was going to say, I think you say it was a long time ago, but I think you’ll find that very often still.

[00:19:45] Stephanie: You’re spot on. But they just don’t know their houses. And I think that’s crazy. But the VAs, they would say things to me like, we got a report from a guest that, we’ll just say, the drain and the sink is clogged. And I would go in there and I’d be like, “Okay, there’s no problem.” And then I would look on it on whatever property management system they were using, Guesty, Hostaway, or whatever. And I’d see what the guest would say. And it was like, okay, they’ve confused this with another unit completely.

[00:20:24] Or just saying things like, my personal feedback would be maybe changing the quilts to a duvet cover or whatever it was. It was never communicated to me as the guest said it. Or if there was a maintenance issue, it was coming to me, and like, I’m not the maintenance guy, which I think that just goes sideways with cleaners all the time now.

[00:20:53] I’m in a lot of cleaning groups, and the feedback that I hear is host expectations of what I’m supposed to do day to day. And I went, you have to be very clear what you’re there to do and what you’re there not to do.

[00:21:07] Sarah: That hits me at my core. We would hear these hosts, Stephanie, and Annette and my travels are getting to know other hosts and just the expectation they have for their cleaner. They really wanted the cleaner to run their company.

[00:21:22] Stephanie: Yeah. It’s unfair.

[00:21:24] Sarah: For peanuts. And it’s like, well, no wonder your reviews aren’t great and your place isn’t as clean as you’d like, because you don’t have any brand standards. Your communication is lackluster. You’re asking way too much of them. They need other clients because what you pay them isn’t enough to live off of.

[00:21:39] So therefore they’re trying to get as much done in a day so they can feed their family. It’s this snowball. So I want to go into the fact that, and you said this too in your onboarding form for this show of how you really feel like you are the market leader when it comes to cleaning in general.

[00:21:55] So my question to you is, I think everyone out there wants to know, what is your secret to finding a great cleaner? Where are they? How do we talk to them? And what do they want these days?

[00:22:08] Stephanie: I think what most people don’t understand when they’re getting a cleaner is you have to ask yourself, why should they want to work for me? You hear this all the time, and we get it from guests. They’re like, well, I guess if you don’t want my money– they don’t. If it stinks to go clean your place, they don’t want to go there. Time is money. Understanding what their day to day is like, and we really cater to our cleaners.

[00:22:36] I think that it’s the most important role in short-term rentals. They’re directly responsible for my guest experience. They’re the last person in there before somebody has their first time in one of my units. That’s a big responsibility. And for anyone who hasn’t had to do it, I think there’s this idea that you walk in and you wipe off surfaces and you leave.

[00:23:04] It’s like, these girls and guys, they’re carrying just the amount that your body takes on– in our city, it’s nothing but stairs. So they’re carrying laundry upstairs. We did a data analysis because I love this stuff, and it was our cleaners on average do 36 flights of stairs on a day of work, and they walk 5.2 miles.

[00:23:27] So people need to get that stuff in their head about what their day to day is like. But when I’m talking to a new cleaner, I always know the points that I’m looking for. I’m looking for somebody who is interested in this industry. I almost never take somebody from residential cleaning.

[00:23:48] Residential cleaners do not like this stuff. Sometimes people will hop over into our industry, and they’ll enjoy it, but they don’t understand the pricing is totally different. Our units turn over on average every three and a half days. I have a clean. It’s not the same kind of clean that you do once a month or a bi-weekly clean for a residential. So they’re trying to price things the same way and trying to re-educate someone on how to run their business. Doesn’t always work. But sometimes that’s what it takes.

[00:24:24] I’ve gotten people who are interested and I’ll sit down with them, and I’ll go, I want you to look at the big picture here. This is what you’re making with residential clean. These are your hours. This is your run rate. And then on this side, this is what Airbnb does. They’re two totally different worlds. They can’t be compared at all.

[00:24:45] But people who are in the short-term rental cleaning, as soon as they find me, they do not leave. And it’s because of a couple things. First of all, like I said, I cater to cleaners. They have between 11:00 and 4:00 to make money, and it’s important to me that nothing affects their money-making time. My operations and my systems have really been based on making it easier and quicker for them to get through their cleans. We do 1099s at this point.

[00:25:22] So they’re paid per house, and that was the choice of my cleaners. We sat down, had a conversation. I said, “What do you guys like more?” Not enough people ask them what they want. But with territories, what I ended up doing is we keep cleaners in these separate territories.

[00:25:43] So I don’t want them having a drive time over five minutes. And we’ve put there are a couple exceptions on busy days, but we stay pretty true to that. I also put in hubs in all of my many territories. So if they run out of something or if there’s an emergency, within five minutes, they are at a hub, which is a mini warehouse. They can grab an oven pan. If I don’t want them scrubbing an oven pan– it’s not worth their time– they can just replace.

[00:26:11] They’ve got sheets, mattress covers. I’ve got lamps. I’ve got doorknobs, whatever you need. We can just switch that out quickly. Just eliminating that time that they’re sitting there working on something when I want them making money. Also, very clear, and we touched on this a little bit before, I don’t want them doing anything but cleaning.

[00:26:36] So we do rely on them heavily to report things to us, lost items, bad guests, because we want to flag those guests. We don’t want them back. Any maintenance issues. They help us out with all of that. And then I’ll send my team out to handle those based on priority.

[00:26:57] They clean, and that’s it. We offer laundry service, but I do it a little bit different than everybody else does at this point in that we do towels in the house and linens through laundry service, and that was something my team and I decided on together when I sat down with the cleaners. Obviously, laundry, everybody hates it.

[00:27:22] It’s such a time suck. I can’t wait until time travel is real. It’s just the dryer waiting situation is insane. But we decided to do towels and units because, a, when I wasn’t doing towels or linens and it was all full laundry service, I was getting bare minimum cleans at all time. It was, how quick can I get in and how quick can I get out? And we were missing some major points?

[00:27:52] And the truth is most of our houses take one load to do towels. And by the time they dry, you’re looking at an hour and a half to an hour and 45. Anything under that, it’s all going to laundry service anyway. But I also didn’t want them to have to carry that much weight on them. So we talked about it, and they agreed that it was a good idea.

[00:28:16] It saves us a little bit of money. It helps me keep extra towels stocked for guests and housekeeping closets. When everything was going to laundry service, it was hard keeping those backups inside. So it just eliminated everything and gave my cleaners a little bit of money, a little bit extra to do towels in the units. So that’s one thing that I think we only do at this point, but it worked for us. It might not work for everybody.

[00:28:46] But also, I spend a lot of time teaching my cleaners. Another part of my success. And I love these two stories. I love sharing these. But when I had my cleaning company, I had a girl come to me. She was 21 years old. She was working in retail. She was interested in learning about cleaning. Her mom was a cleaner, and I went, “I’ll show you everything you need to know.” And she honestly almost got fired. She was not good.

[00:29:20] But we worked on it and worked on it because her willingness to learn was there. It’s all about the intention. So the intention for her was to be great, and she was making really awful mistakes, but it was just the lack of education, not a lack of willingness. So we worked together, taught her some things.

[00:29:40] She kept missing microwaves for whatever reason, and I was like, when you get to the unit, I want you to put your car keys in the microwave, because you can’t leave until it’s done. And I use that in a lot of places now, when I have somebody consistently missing something. I’ll see them check into a house, and I’ll go “Put your car keys in the refrigerator. You keep missing that refrigerator. Otherwise you get a perfect score on your inspection.”

[00:30:11] But anyway, she got into this. She got it to the point where she was making 25, 35 an hour, got interested in real estate, was with me for about two and a half, three years, got her real estate license, still cleaning for me on the side. And she ended up selling me my first house ever that I bought with the money from my cleaning business and our hosting business.

[00:30:37] So it was this full circle idea of you give back to your team. And anytime I’ve had cleaners who are really good at this and I see leadership potential in them, I sit them down and I go, “You have the potential to have a company.” And I’ve got my business plan, and I share that with the girls if they ask for it, and I just mentor them on starting their own company, and that’s how we were able to grow with great cleaning scores, because I’ve got a couple people who worked for me as independent cleaners and now have started their own business.

[00:31:17] One of my girls is killing it. She’s not even a full year in, and she’s got, I think, 14 people on her team at this point, and she’s handling about 60% of my turnovers at this point. So it’s feeding back into your team and other people see that. And every once in a while, I will grab them and I’ll go, “You need your own business.” You are great at this. You’re weird in your head. You should be in this industry.

[00:31:50] You guys know what I’m talking about. Every once in a while you see somebody and you go, “You have that little something that’s that sparkle that will work here. So you should get into this. You should think about it.” And you just put it in their head. I have people who show up and want to clean and leave too. Totally okay.

[00:32:07] I’m all right with you wanting to make your money and go. But if they want opportunity there, totally. And we do stuff for our day-to-day cleaners too. Not everybody wants to own a business. But with our inspection scores, we do different competitions.

[00:32:26] I score my cleaners two separate ways. We do overall cleaning scores, and then we give them a score for likeliness of a guest complaint. Just to teach them where their efforts should go. When you’re tight on time, a rapper under the bed doesn’t hit as hard as not cleaning a toilet.

[00:32:49] Not every mistake is on the same scale. So we did a little competition. We did two Dyson’s this last month that our two top cleaners, whoever got the best scores, they got new Dyson’s. And I do like to get them stuff that helps them with their business, making their money faster. And that’s one of those things that helps. But we do free flights.

[00:33:16] We do nights in the units. That’s really helpful for them to see from a guest perspective what it’s like. I remember being a cleaner, and I went to go meet a client, and I sat down on the couch and I went, “I’ve been cleaning this for a year, and I’ve never sat here. This is strange.” It’s a different perspective when you’re in it and you’re living it or staying there for the night than it is when you’re running around trying to clean, swearing inside of your head while you’re sweating.

[00:33:49] Annette: That’s an interesting point that you just made, perspective, of actually having that. Reward them with a stay. I know they’re cleaning it, so they might not want to, but hey, I’m going to buy you dinner. We’ll have it delivered to the house. But frame it as like, I really want you to see it from the guest’s perspective and why all the things that you do are so important, and how it impacts their stay.

[00:34:12] That’s an interesting– do you let them stay in the units that they clean? Like, do they actually really like that though? As I’m saying it, I’m like, they’re in there all the time during the cleaning. Do they actually want to stay there?

[00:34:23] Stephanie: Yeah. Well, we’ve got 100 just in Pittsburgh, so they’re not in everything all the time, but we’ve got a couple of these showstoppers. You know what I mean? They’ve got the hot tubs, or the rooftop deck, and the fire pits. So if they have a birthday coming up or something, we’ll be like, “Okay, take two friends. Go stay in the unit.” We do discounts for our team too, and they’ll book the houses. We get them a pretty hefty discount.

[00:34:55] They’ll book the houses and say, “Okay, I’m going to do my baby shower here.” Or we have somebody looking at one of our houses to do her engagement party kind of thing. It’s a big family, and we want to give back to what we can. And it’s helpful because Chad and I have our own units, so we can do– but with a client property, definitely have to get permission for something like that before.

[00:35:20] Annette: So let’s go to the clients. Because obviously you’ve done well finding all the cleaners. And you guys, like you said, have 100-plus units in Pittsburgh. What are those non-negotiables though when you’re setting up and working with those clients?

[00:35:35] Because obviously, they need to support you with your cleaning team and your high standards. So what are non-negotiables there? Because I feel like that’s happening right now. We have a lot of people in our membership. They’re co-hosts. They have so many clients coming to them, and it’s like, how do I set boundaries? What are those non-negotiables? Maybe you’re just getting started and you don’t know yet what one of your non negotiables would be. So how can you assist there?

[00:36:01] Stephanie: Well, there’s a beginning game, and there’s an end game. In the beginning, I had to do a lot of stuff I didn’t want to do. When you’re walking into your first client management, you have to take on properties that are a lot of work. You’re generally dealing with current hosts or clients that are in the thick of it.

[00:36:22] People don’t call us because things are going great, but sometimes we’re dealing with brand new properties and then you have to step into, I’m going to educate you on this. So in the beginning, I had to be available all the time. I had to assume five different hats all the time.

[00:36:43] I was doing a lot of things that I wasn’t charging for, but I had to prove myself because I wasn’t big enough and I didn’t have that track record yet. Now I’m about three, maybe four years into HostWise, and it’s a little bit more in my favor.

[00:37:00] My non negotiables are pretty strict. And if people don’t like my rules, then we’re not going to work with you. We talked about it when we were at IMN a little bit, where I said, when a client comes to me, I can go, we have a 4.93 overall, which is really hard to do when you’re at our size.

[00:37:26] I don’t know that a lot of people have it. Because we’re focused on such quality. So my reviews are there. My occupancy is up, and my price per night– I’m peak season. I’m priced 40% over market price at this point. So I have all those bargaining chips in my favor. People see us. They know we’re busy.

[00:37:50] They know our reviews are great. We also have a really great reputation in our community and with our neighbors. A lot of this stuff comes word from mouth. So I go into it, listening to what people want to say, but I turn down 90% of my leads right now. I’m still growing, but I want to do restrained growth.

[00:38:13] I want to make sure I’m growing well and that my team can catch up. But when I’m walking into a client meeting, I am totally transparent. There are some times where they give me a house and I go, I have no idea if this would be good. I honestly don’t know. I’ve never been in anything like it. We try it, but I can’t promise you anything.

[00:38:33] Here’s what AirDNA says. But I just don’t know. That doesn’t happen too often, but if I feel that way, I’m really upfront about it, non-negotiables with clients. I just did a new client meeting. Probably that first half hour is me just educating them on our systems and our standards, and this is what you can expect if you sign up for us.

[00:38:58] And my second part of my meeting is I go, “if you talk to other people, I want you to ask these five questions.” If I want to land a listing, that is what gets it for me every time, because there are things that I have covered in our business they know other people haven’t. So I go, make sure you ask them A, B, and C. And that always works for me because I know nobody has those answers.

[00:39:24] But non-negotiables with clients, they have to understand my hierarchy. Really upfront about this. My neighborhood and community come first. If there are any issues with that, that’s what I address first. Then it’s my team. Then it’s my guest. Then it’s my client. If they’re sending me a message about they have an owner’s day coming up and they want to add a day six months from now, I’m not going to respond to you right away, especially if it’s a Sunday and I’m doing 70 checkouts. You know what I mean?

[00:39:56] But I’m very clear with them. You have your 24/7 hotline to our entire team. It goes to whoever’s on for the day. They have an owner’s dashboard. They can see their financials. They can create owner stays. They can do a lot of stuff themselves, but for some reason, everybody wants my time or my partner’s time.

[00:40:18] So I’m really upfront in telling them, “You’re going to deal with me now, but I want you to be prepared that you’re going to be walking to somebody else.” Biggest thing, and I feel like everybody walks into this, people want to launch yesterday. And I go, “We have protocols we have to go through. I have to do my maintenance check. We’ve got to do staging, new photos.”

[00:40:42] And they go, “So can we be up in a week?” And I have to set expectations for how long that’s going to take based on where they are. And also people that don’t want to be to our quality. I talk a lot about amenities and how important it is. I don’t want my places just to be somewhere to sleep.

[00:41:03] If I’m getting into conversations where they’re like, well, my great grandmother’s bed is in my garage and I’m going to bring it here, they’re probably not for me because they’re not super worried about their guest experience. And then going over safety, having them understand these are our safety protocols. These are the devices that we have to have in the house, and these are the monthly subscriptions that you’ll be charged for, just all those kinds of conversations.

[00:41:36] Sarah: Well, I want to talk about two things because I’ve got a couple of budding co-hosts in the back of my head that I’ve been trying to drive this home with them, and I feel like maybe you’ll be the ticket. Let’s talk about staging and getting and onboarding a property that is to your brand standards. Do you do in-house staging? And if you do, if the client wants to use a different designer or stager, talk to me about that. Or is there a one way to do it if they want to be on boarded to HostWise?

[00:42:06] Stephanie: So if somebody wants to do their own, we’ve run into that, we will guide them through it. And I do have an owner’s guide for doing that because we do have a couple of remote clients as well, where it’s not possible for me to set up their houses. But we prefer to do it. We do all of our in-house staging.

[00:42:28] I design the houses. Sometimes we do remodels. But competition is tough out there. And to your credit too, one of those things that really hit me in the heart popped in my feed that you guys said, where Airbnb isn’t going anywhere, bad hosting is. That starts with setting up the house and the things that we put in there.

[00:42:52] Anytime I’ve had a client do it themselves, they’ve quit halfway through, and we’ve had to redo a lot of their work. And in turn, it’s cost them a lot more in both money and time. So we’re really upfront with the fact of the way we do things– we’ve set up 106 of these in under four years. We’ve got a method to the madness.

[00:43:16] I’ve got a warehouse, so I buy things bulk. So a lot of the times I can bring my branding items in at a discounted price for them, and they’re sitting on a shelf. Something no one is ever prepared for is the amount of cardboard and trash that happens when you’re setting up a unit.

[00:43:35] Things like that that people don’t understand, and I go, “Have a plan for trash.” And they go, “Yeah. Okay.” And I go, “No, really, have a plan for trash.” But yeah, I prefer to do it in-house just because we follow the same system in every house. And when I’m in control, I know where my team is. I can schedule it out for everybody.

[00:44:02] It just goes smoother. And we know all of our boxes are checked. Sometimes you got to live and work in a house for a little bit to learn all of your troubleshooting and quirks. So when somebody has a question and I go, okay, that doorknob in the basement does stick when it gets warm out, just lift it up slightly, things like that. It sounds stupid, but it’s super helpful.

[00:44:26] Sarah: Yes. Knowing the houses inside and out is definitely our superpower. I’ve got one more question for you, and it is, I feel like we get to talk to all these cool co-hosts and budding co-hosts on Instagram, DMs, or we’re at the conferences, and they’re so hospitable to a fault, where they want to work for free, essentially. You know what I mean? At the end of the day.

[00:44:47] And I heard you say something that triggered me where these are the subscriptions that we need to operate your home optimally, and these are the charges that you’re going to have above and beyond the commission that we earn.

[00:44:57] Can you dig into that? How did you find out that you can’t support all these subscriptions that it takes to really beat the competition? How do your clients handle that? I don’t know if you guys you’re trust accounting or invoicing, but what’s worked for you as you’ve figured out what works best for your healthy business that you can sustain so that you can continue to be this great employer and community advocate?

[00:45:21] Stephanie: Well, I get surprised that we don’t get a lot of pushback because we do charge for everything extra. But in the grand scheme of things, we’re really setting their property up for success. But I think when they see the amount– you have to have your data too. We talk about data a lot in this business, and that’s where my partner comes in, because he just kills it.

[00:45:45] He’s the Taylor Swift of data and pricing. I swear to God. But I’ll say to him, how much more does a king bed make me versus a queen? And we sit down and we make it, and the answer is $6,000 a year. I use that approach when I get into our technology, our maintenance, and the different aspects that we charge for.

[00:46:11] And most of the time, because we almost are “wholesaling everything,” like our lawn and landscaping, I can give them 100 units, so I get a better price than they would just doing it on their own. Same thing goes for our safety equipment and subscriptions.

[00:46:33] When you get to a certain size, you just get a deal. But what it comes down to is I’m just making my clients more money than anybody else. So somebody else might not charge for this, but at the end of the day, they’re making more money with me because our pricing strategies are spot on and our reviews are spot on.

[00:46:54] So in turn, we’re making them more money than they would with someone else. Sometimes I have to have those educating talks with my clients too when they go, “Oh, this person is only this percentage, and you’re this percentage.” And I went, “Yeah, but in the long run, this is all included.”

[00:47:12] So you’re going to make more money with us. And I don’t dive deep into that. If somebody doesn’t want to work with me, I don’t really go after them. You know what I mean? I’m like, “I understand.” And there’s been a couple of times where that’s happened. They went to somebody else because they had a lower commission, and a lot of those houses ended up being mine anyway, because things didn’t go well.

[00:47:37] Annette: Yeah. For sure.

[00:47:39] Stephanie: And the explanation of why we need some of this stuff, my minutes and my cameras, those are non-negotiables. Those minute devices have saved me thousands of dollars in damage, just being able to shut down bad guests quickly.

[00:47:54] Annette: Because you are further along, this is my final question. And there are so many co-hosts, again, they are so hungry, and you’re talking like, oh, I like– sorry, I said you had– you just had an error there. Oh, I turn down 90% of my clients. But in the beginning, was it the cleaning that really catapulted the leads?

[00:48:12] What do you think your secret sauce was in the beginning? So rewind it to getting all of those clients before you could start turning them down. What was that shift? Where were you finding your clients?

[00:48:23] Stephanie: In the beginning, the cleaning did put us a step ahead, and there are two specific reasons for that. We launched the week before COVID hit. It was a crazy time for everybody where they watched a bunch of cancellations and people thought like, this is over. But I had been cleaning these units for two years, so everybody was catching up at this point to try to get their cleaning scores up. And that’s hard to do.

[00:48:56] To try to get any score up on Airbnb or Vrbo, it’s difficult. But we were already there. I remember when the COVID cleaning protocol came out, I went, “Okay. We do everything on this list. We’re good to go.” I think the only thing we ended up adding in was disinfecting toilet brushes, and I felt pretty good about that.

[00:49:20] You have to break down and look what people are reviewing. Communication is kind of, give me stars at that point. There shouldn’t be issues with communication if you’re just starting. You should be on that all the time. That should be easy points. Check in too. Cleaning, you have to understand that– maintenance, there’s not a spot for them to rate that. So that comes across in your cleaning score a lot as well.

[00:49:54] Stephanie: So those two things need to be addressed. Value, I don’t care about. I don’t want somebody to check out and go, “I feel like I paid enough for this. This was a good deal.” I’m okay to lose a little bit of my stars on value and push the pricing per night a little bit. That’s okay with me.

[00:50:17] So in the beginning, how they found us, honestly, Facebook group. They found us that way, and it was just, does anybody do this? And we had four units of our own, and they could see that we were going okay, but it was tough. I think before you go and get clients, though, the most important thing to do is to definitely get your systems into place. I think everybody, even with growing, you always hear people talking about, oh, I set up this many units. Now I have this many and that many.

[00:50:57] Quantity means nothing if you’re doing it badly. It’s not impressive. I had a conversation with somebody at the last conference and they said, “Oh, I just put up 20 units in Pittsburgh two weeks ago.” I went, “You did 20 units in two weeks?” And they were like, “Yeah.” And I went, “There’s no way they’re any good.”

[00:51:15] That sounds snarky, but it makes me mad because I’m like, your guests are going to have a terrible experience. So get your systems into play before you go searching for anybody. And when you explain the systems that you have to potential clients, that’s the stuff that sells you, especially safety. A lot of people, they have personal attachments to their homes.

[00:51:40] They want to know everything’s going to be okay. And they also want to know that they’re not going to be held liable. So safety definitely is a selling point. Tell them how you’re going to make it better than everybody else. And don’t be afraid to charge for everything, as long as you do it well. But don’t do a lot of stuff for free. In the beginning, I did, and I regret it. Because I look back now and I think if I would have charged for it, nobody would have blinked an eye, honestly.

[00:52:14] Sarah: Yeah. And I think too, nothing can replace you being in those units for two years, seeing it being done poorly. I’m sure there were some hosts that had a few great things going on that you could learn from. But being in the trenches like that, in the units, before the guests, after the guests, there’s nothing that can replace that. Can I say last year, maybe it was 2022 was the year of the co-host, because it felt like people finally started to see how much work it takes to run a successful short-term rental.

[00:52:46] And so I saw this huge push for people to offload their property onto someone else to do it, and it takes a special human being to be able to be communicative, to be a people person, but to also be a data person. And if you’re not that person, you got your person. So there’s just so many things that you put in your recipe that were spot on that there’s no way you can’t be successful because you’ve made these choices for yourself.

[00:53:12] Stephanie: I also think people get into this and they think it’s real estate. And in some sense it is, but we’re in the hospitality business. That’s the reason why traditional property management companies aren’t great at this. No one likes their landlord. You know what I mean? It’s like, now we’re going to put these people in charge of guest communication? That’s terrible.

[00:53:36] I remember living in an apartment and waiting for them to turn my water on for eight days. You know what I mean? So I think sometimes we make it look easy, and people think that it is, but it’s not. You’re spot on when you say it takes a different kind of human. It’s all a special breed to be in this industry.

[00:54:00] Sarah: Which is great. It leaves all that work for us.

[00:54:02] Annette: Yeah. Stephanie, where can people come stay with you, find out more about you learn about HostWise and Stephanie West?

[00:54:13] Stephanie: Sure. So we have a couple of different things. We’ve got our units in Pittsburgh. We’re in Austin, Texas, Siesta Key, in Winter Park, Colorado. We have HostWise Stays. We can do direct bookings on there, obviously Airbnb, Vrbo. Whatever channel you can book a place on, you can find us on.

[00:54:35] We also have something called Steelstra, which is something my partner and I started. You can go to steelstra.org, and it’s basically us educating people on how to run property safely. Three years ago, in Pittsburgh, there was a deadly shooting at an Airbnb, and we had a feeling we don’t have a lot of regulation here. So we want to make sure this information is out there for people to learn on how you prevent things like that. And then hostwisestays.com. So all of that stuff, Instagram. We’re everywhere.

[00:55:14] Annette: Love it. This has been awesome. And listeners, if you take any of Stephanie’s advice, I want to know if you go on Turno and you get your first lead. What I hear through here is starting and then partnering with the right people. So you got to start and then partner. And it was you partnering with the right clients, the right cleaners, and then your business partner chat. So this has been great.

[00:55:36] Stephanie: Yeah. My favorite part about this business, is it gives you back what you put into it. It’s meant for entrepreneurs, but people who like to hustle and work hard. The more you put in– it I like being scored every day. I’m competitive. So it gives me a little extra drive. But this industry, if you put a lot into it, it’ll get it right back to you.

[00:56:01] Annette: That’s the mic drop.

[00:56:02] Sarah: Mic drop. All right.

[00:56:03] Annette: Exclamation point on the show.

[00:56:05] Sarah: Well, I’m Sarah Karakaian.

[00:56:06] Annette: I am Annette Grant. And together we are–

[00:56:08] Both Annette & Sarah: Thanks for Visiting.

[00:56:09] Sarah: Talk to you next time.