HIP E4 Mike and Nate - Operational Excellence

How can you go and take new experiences? How can we focus on taking a guess that comes and stays with us and providing them with an experience that they haven't had before? In the mundaneness of their life, of all the things that they have to do, how can we go and focus on providing an experience that's going to be mind blowing? That they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is not my everyday life. This experience is, this is creating awe and wow and oh my goodness, it's putting color into my life that I've been missing." Welcome to the Hotel Investor Playbook, your guide to building wealth and freedom through boutique hotel ownership hosted by Mike and Nate. Get in the game. Welcome to another episode of the Hotel Investor Playbook. I got Nate Dog here with me and today we're going to be talking about how to avoid common pitfalls and operations and build a financially thriving and personally fulfilling hospitality business. What's up, Nate Dog? Yo, what's up? What's up? I'm pumped about this. I just, I want to start by just, can we just shoot this straight for a minute? Let's shoot a straight man. All right. We talk about this all the time behind the scenes. Obviously, there's some momentum here in this opportunity that exists with people who are starting to see the opportunity of holy crap. The hotel, the hospitality, asset, space, whether it's experiential lodging, whether it's boutique hotels, hostels, whatever it is, that there's momentum building here. People are starting to see this is a way that I can really lever financial freedom and create long-term wealth. There's a movement that's starting. We're in these conversations consistently. We're in masterminds, we're at conferences, but behind the scenes, we're always like, okay, this is great that we're connected with all these people that are teaching, but nobody ever talks about operations. Like, no, all of the focus, it's constantly on the, it's like, it's focusing on, oh, this is what you need to do to acquire. Here's what you need to do to partner. Here's what you need to do to go and and raise capital and here's what you need to do to, there's all of the what you need to do, but then I don't get it. Like, well, what the hell is someone supposed to do once they actually execute this and now they own it. There's very, I don't hear that conversation occurring very often. Yeah, it's all the drama, right? It's like the drama of, wow, you're going to get started in this, you're going to buy a hotel. This is so exciting. Here's how you find it. Here's how you raise money. And then here's how you sell it for all this money and walk off into the sunset and live happily ever after, but there's this big gap. I'm like, wait a second. What happens between the time when I actually own this bad boy and sell this bad boy? Like, how does that work? Yeah. Well, and I mean, the reality is you can go and have a plan and have a thesis of, you know, what you're presenting to investors or what have you, but at the end of the day, what is it that actually makes the leverage or the lever pulling the lever? What actually makes it profitable? And what that is, this is the passionate asset class. This is hospitality. And so executing hospitality is this critical component, but it's like the least talked about part in teaching new people, you know, what this process really is. So although it's not, and I think part of it is, it's just the reality. It's not it's not the sexiest topic to talk about. I also feel like it's not an area where a lot of there's not a lot of people have created significant success in the actual hospitality part of people that are moving over into this space. They're at the beginning too. So because they're a little bit more in the beginning, yeah, we can acquire these, but they're learning as they go as well, you know, similar to what we have. But I do feel like, especially with you, I feel like we have something to offer listeners. And when I really look at strengths in development and processes and creation, you really have been just incredibly pivotal to obviously our success. I want to fast forward from, you know, how you get there to, you know, where we are. We're getting ready to scale, right? We own multiple hospitality asset properties, and now we're getting ready to really grow. You have the team right now focused on taking all of these operational processes and integrating a notion, which I'm not going to wouldn't do justice in explaining, but ultimately all of our systems and processes for operations will be easily accessible for every teammate across every hospitality asset that we own. So all of the systems and processes you've built in operations are going to be, boom, they're just there. They're accessible. But to go from where we started, and I think that this is, you know, a critical component that, look, in two and a half years, we were awarded the best small hostel in North America. We did that if you've rewind to our start, zero hostel experience. We didn't, none. We didn't know we were, we were scared. We didn't know. We felt like, okay, we knew that we were on to something. We did this during COVID, right? We're going to go and move forward with this vision because we saw an opportunity to provide a hospitality experience to go and elevate and execute at a high level. But man, we really knew absolutely nothing about it. And in that process of going from knowing absolutely zero to being awarded as the best small hostel in North America, there was a massive amount of inflammation, implementation that occurred. And I want to dig into that because I think that it's going to be really, really helpful and insightful for and critical for listeners to understand how that process occurred. So I want to just dig in a little bit if that's okay and start at the beginning of a little bit of your vision for how we went from knowing absolutely nothing and just having the courage to go and make the move and go all in. How did we, how did you start to shape in your mind how we were going to go and operate? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I'm a little bit of a goof. I'm kind of silly and stuff. But this is a serious subject right here. This part is so important. And to your point, it's commonly overlooked. It's not really talked about because operations is not sexy. Operations is just the blocking and tackling of owning a business. And it's really important though that you nail this. And this, look, whether you plan on self-managing your hotel or hospitality asset or you're going to outsource this to a management team, you got to understand how the heck do you, like how do you run a business effectively? How do you run a hospitality business effectively to be specific? And so this is my love language. I love this. For me, I relate this almost like, you know, I was when I walk through a big city and I look at these buildings, you know, or even if I walk through a neighborhood and I see a beautiful home, I really like how, you know, people have built something that's tangible, right? When you look at a beautifully designed, whether it's a historic building or even a modern one, you look and you go, wow, you're an awe of the design of that building and you can see it, you can physically feel it. It is a tangible product of someone's effort, intentional effort to build something amazing. And I bring this up because, you know, in previous work I did where it was just, you know, through the computer and whatnot, there's, or even in sales, it's hard to have something conceptual that you can feel, you can see, it's tangible. But when building this business, the operations have an absolute impact that, you know, both from a financial perspective, but also from a personal fulfillment because when you're building operations, what this is really geared towards as operations is, is providing an incredible experience for your guest. It's not just, hey, let's, you know, figure out how to do laundry. It's like, hey, you know, we need laundry to be run effectively because, you know, people are depending on this. These are the critical things that people need. I mean, laundry is probably a terrible example. But my point is, whatever in operations we're going to go through today, it's, to me, I'm passionate driven by the experience. And so when we started looking at like, oh my gosh, okay, so we don't have any experience with running a hospitality business. Where do we start? What do we do? It didn't just like, one day we just knew how to do everything. We had to learn by doing, we went through this. And so I feel like this episode, what we're going to provide is we're going to short or cut some of the obstacles that people are gonna have to learn. Like again, whether that's through self-managing or outsourcing this, so that you can really drill down on like, what are the key pillars of the business from an operational perspective that lead to guest satisfaction, which is ultimately gonna drive revenue? And then like I said, something you can be proud of, that personal fulfillment of your brand. So although it's not a city skyscraper that you're walking by, when you walk into your location and you see that it is thriving, that people are enjoying it, when you get positive reviews, that is something that touches your heart a bit. And so for me, it's emotionally driven. And I wanna actually use that word emotion here, and I wanna send it back to you Nathan, because one thing that we recognize very early on is to deliver excellence. We need to understand what is driving people. People are human, people are emotional beings. And very early on, you identified what's gonna be successful is understanding what those human emotional needs are. So I'll pass it back to you. - Yeah, okay, so here's my takeaway from what you kind of just went through. That at the end of the day, that what we're trying to accomplish in hospitality is creating a feeling, right? Like that's the essence of all of this stuff that we're gonna go through. The end result is we were very clear, or you have to be very clear, on what end feeling are you trying to create? What is it that you want somebody to feel like after they've experienced your product, in our case, this hospitality experience? And so from an operational standpoint, you've really become an expert into, all right, we need to dive into every one of the facets that's gonna impact at the end of the day, a very simple thing, which may even be subconscious for people, this feeling that they walk away with and then turn back and go, wow, that was something. And I think when we came into this, look, you can go on our website, and we actually break this down, but to create the highest level of feeling within someone, human beings were all wired the same way. Now, we may have different dominant things that motivate us, or that really touch us in a certain way, but every human being, their maps are made up of having fulfillment of six human emotional needs. And so I'll just run through them really quickly, and we really started, this was our starting point. We knew people, we knew that people, if you fulfill these needs, number one, certainty, variety, connection, significance, contribution, and growth. Everything fits into one of those, everything that motivates us, fits into one of those six human emotional needs. And here's the magic part, because they're human emotional needs, if that need is fulfilled, if it's executed, and somebody connects with, and that's delivered to them, they experience fulfillment. Fulfillment creates the feeling of happiness, joy, peace. So what you're delivering and making these a focus, but if we just give a couple examples, certainty, we recognize in the beginning, we didn't know how to run a hostile, right? But what we recognized is, people, if we wanted to fulfill certainty, we better make sure that we create a safe, secure environment, that at every process through the guest journey that we're focusing on, does this guest feel like they can depend on us and our hospitality company? Can they depend on us? Do they feel safe with us? How can we go and implement all of these things and all of these processes to elicit the feeling of, yes, man, I felt safe and secure and clean, everything was taken care of, I can depend and I trust this company. You can look at the opposite side of that and say that people need variety fulfilled. So we went and said, wow, okay, variety, how can you get the highest level of, how can you go and take new experiences? How can we focus on taking a guest that comes and stays with us and providing them with an experience that they haven't had before in the mundaneness of their life of all the things that they have to do? How can we go and focus on providing an experience that's gonna be mind blowing, that they're like, oh my gosh, this is not my everyday life. This experience is, this is creating awe and wow, and oh my goodness, it's putting color into my life that I've been missing, right? And so how can we go and put processes in place and ultimately I won't go through each one of these, but we really dug into those human emotional needs and I think that there was a timing, like in this process, as often when we created our mission and vision, these six human emotional needs were in them, but as a constant learner, you're constantly reading books and then sometimes you'll share them. And I think that one of the things that impacted our journey along the way that had just a massive impact was number one, you reading the book of delivering happiness. - Yeah, that book. - Dude, you read that book and then you're like, Nate Dogbrook, you've got to read this book and I'm gonna make it mandatory. We were just opening, we just had our core staff hired, we were just getting into it, we're just starting the learning process and you're like every one of our leaders, they all need to, staff needs to read this book. And so I wanna turn it over, 'cause that really helped simplify ultimately how you go and fulfill these human emotional needs, but can you just maybe walk us through how you were impacted by delivering happiness and then how that created helped you create operational excellence? - Yeah, absolutely. So you're right, when we were starting out, we were walking through these human emotional needs and that coincided with me reading this book, delivering happiness, which is the story of Zappos from the Founders perspective, Tony Shea. And there are so many takeaways that, I could spend a whole podcast episode on it. It's must, it is required reading for any person in management for any of our locations. And like I said, there's so many takeaways, but one of the main ones I think that just drove from an operational perspective, like when we're making decisions on how we're gonna perform things operationally, whether that's communication or our staff training. In the book, he talks about creating wow moments when people are surprised. So there's a level of expectation that if you pay for a good or service, you expect a certain standard, but a wow moment is created when you're not expecting that, when it's above and beyond. So I'll give you a quick example, and then I'll roll through all the different functions, but communication. So one of the things that we rolled out early on was we call them a low-hawk calls. And when we have guests arriving, three days before the arrival, our staff gives them a friendly call just to say, hey, we're here for you. We have 24 hour reception. And when you arrive, someone will be here to greet you. And there's a few other things that we just go through, but the point is we provide them this a low-hawk, this welcome call, and they're not expecting that. Sometimes people are a little concerned. Like if they miss our call and it goes to voicemail, they might be concerned like, well, it's something wrong because that just doesn't happen, especially in a hostile, right? People associate hostels with being kind of low service, but from our mindset, whether whatever type of hospitality asset you're gonna run, whether it's a hostile hotel, any other kind of experiential lodging, these wow moments. It could be just providing a little gift basket inside your room with their name on it that recognizes them as being special and a little bit of gratitude. But the book is all about what created Zappo's success was they took a business that was fundamentally not that unique or special. People are buying shoes, right? But it was their customer service that they poured into and the culture that they created, that ultimately created this brand where people were thrilled to do business with. And so that's what drives us from an operational perspective. How can we constantly create wow moments? So I'm gonna roll through what we call. - Yeah, can I circle back on one thing there quickly before we can roll through this? Okay, you created almost, there was almost this mantra. And now I hear it used like, I'll just overhear it when in our team meetings and it's just constant. There's yes, it's the wow moments. But I also believe that the other thing that came out of that was we are going to obsess over the guest journey. Just we're gonna be obsessed over it. So how can we go obsess over the guest journey? And really think through every part of the process, right? And so that obsession, because what that obsession did is I believe what I watched, I'm gonna, you're like, the master integrator of processes. But really where it started for me and watching you start to create these processes was listening to our guests. And it really started with your obsession over guest reviews. And when I say obsession, most people are obsessed about going out and getting five star reviews because obviously that impacts you and all of that. But that was not your obsession. Your obsession was to truly just first listen. Like what is the guest experience? What are they telling us about their experience? And you were looking at, I mean, every single platform and where some of us would be like, "Oh, that's just don't want off." You'd be like, "Well, no, time out." Let's really hear what this person is saying. Let's go see how we can impact this. And it started impacting you driving really creating process after process after process. And these processes, bro, were fricking over two and a half years. We're just like, holy crap, there's a fricking process for it. Like to go and execute at the highest level, you have to have process or an agreed upon way to do something to execute at the highest level. They were just like, it was almost overwhelming from a process standpoint of wow, to deliver this. These are all the things that you need to do to make sure that that nothing falls through the cracks. But I want to fast forward right now. Because right now, dude, you're having the team integrate everything into fricking notion to just help us be really easy to scale. Prior to this, though, prior to notion, through our business coach, thank you shout out to Rick English, he really helped take all of these processes that were created by you and really help us really make them succinct. And we rolled out EOS. So EOS is a system of organizing your business called the entrepreneurial operating system. It's based on a book by Gina Wakeman called Traction. So we read that book and we took a lot from it. But then from there, we went higher to business coach that could help us implement the lessons from the book. Correct. So now we're sitting there and we have operations, our hospitality operations. Now we have them recognized like every component, every function of what it takes to go and operate. Like that going through that process was painful and time consuming to go through this process of all right, well, let's think through everything that we do within our business to deliver that feeling, to deliver that and execute that award-winning hospitality feeling. How did you do it? And then going through and going all right, we got to break down what all happens. But this systematic approach, I'm going to ask you if you can just roll through. Okay, well, when we broke this down and rolled this out into functions, can you just first of all, before you go into anything, can you just roll through what the functions of operations are or the categories, what it takes to operate a hospitality business? Yeah, absolutely. So look, I think that you hit the nail on the head that there was a lot of work that it took to identify all of these different functions and then execute them effectively. But I want to also mention that if you have a guiding principle, it makes your decision making a lot easier. And for us, it was to your point, the guest journey. So everything that we were doing was based on providing the best guest journey possible. So prior to them arriving. So from the time that they are thinking about making a reservation, after they book, stay with us, and then ultimately after they depart operations is encompasses all of that. And so every single one, every single touch point within their journey, the guiding principle is how can we obsess over the guest experience and provide the guest, the best guest journey as possible. And once you have that guiding principle, I think it just, it makes the decision making process a lot easier. That's number one. Number two, what I'm about to roll through if you might seem like a lot. And we'll go ahead and we'll share this in the show notes. We can give you a link to see our actual accountability structure with all the different functions and you know, itemize detailed exactly what each and every function does based on roll. But for now, I just very high level, top level, just give you an understanding of what those functions are. I'm going to roll through these. But I also want to say, the pretty universal, it doesn't really matter what your hospitality asset is. I mean, all of these functions are going to be very universal. And so once you learn this and identify it and if you know, we share it with you, you can really quite easily just plug in what the different roles are for each function specific for your particular location or your operation. So, you know, and secondly, yeah, I want to go back to something you said earlier as well. You said, look, even if you're not going to operate, right, if you're going to hire an operator, if you're if you don't have the experience, you need a road map and you need some guidelines to be like, well, I better be checking in on all of these. How do I audit and how do I know what my ultimately, what my operator, how do I go and audit them? So, I think either direction, even if someone's like, well, I'm not going to operate this myself, well, you better have a road map and I think this provides a road map for either way, either what you need to go and execute at a high level or what you need to hold your operator accountable to in the hospitality business. So either direction. Absolutely. No, great point. I think that word audit is so essential. You talked about how I was obsessing over the reviews, but you know, I was auditing them really looking at, I wasn't judging whether or not, I mean, of course, I wanted a five star review, who doesn't, right? But really, what I was judging is, well, what is the guest, what are they sharing with us, what information can we learn from them that will give us a guiding direction how we can improve. So, beyond just the reviews, we implemented a communication log within our staff. So, you know, for each shift, someone working, the reception, you know, front desk or manager on duty, you know, the reception, they have their own little communication log where they're going to take note of things that came up like, hey, we, you know, a guest stub their toe on this bed, like this particular bed, maybe, you know, could be, could be dangerous. Maybe we need to replace it, right? Or we ran out of toilet paper, was it, like, you scratch your head, go, well, how could you run out of toilet paper, right? But it's in the com log, it's in the communication log. And so we addressed it. So we implemented things like, okay, well, are we servicing the bathrooms enough to make sure that they have toilet paper. So, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole for all of these little things, but what you're going to find is each one of these functions, there will be something that that that resolves every potential issue that a guest could have. And auditing this is the important point I'm trying to make here is whether you're doing it yourself or you hire a third party management, you need to know what to audit. So at this point, I'll walk through what these different functions are. And then, you know, if you want, we can drill down more specifically. But yeah, I love it. Okay, cool. So I'm going to go through very quickly, just roll these out. Here are the functions, marketing, and then lump together, we've got our website, our property management system, and our OTA online travel agency management. We've got staffing, manager on duty, housekeeping, review management, general admin, property maintenance, finance, lash accounting, guest experience, community outreach, human resources, and lastly, revenue management. So it's one of those functions, there's a whole bunch of different roles that fall underneath. Okay, so fair. So obviously the listeners aren't seeing this. But if you look at each one of those functions that you just labeled, then underneath each one of them, there's function components, correct? Right. Will you just pick one of those functions and then run down the things, the function components that will need to have processes around to ultimately fulfill the guest journey? Well, I don't know. Where do you want me to start? Is there anything that pops out of you that you think is more important? Or where should I start? Pick one. All right. How about guest experience? Okay. Yeah, let's go there. Okay, so different functions could be the reception/guest check-ins. What's that experience like? Tours and activities. So anything on-site that you may provide, whether in our case, it might be an activity, it could be, we have a welcome Margarita night where basically guests get together and socialize, but we sponsor that, we put that on to encourage guest interaction. Well, someone's got to manage all that, right? Guest experience, we audit the cameras to make sure that nothing is wacky. We respond to guest communication. So how to categorize guest communication, emails, etc. So this is important where this spins off into another function. So I'm going to pivot over to we talked about-- - I want to dig in, can I dig in though before you pivot? - Okay, well, listen, I was gonna talk about how that results to our technology, which would fall under kind of our PMS and whatnot. - Okay. - So, okay, responding to communication. So we have technology in place that provides, it makes it as easy as possible for people to communicate with us and for us to respond to them. So starting with our website, we've embedded, you know, AI function for chat. And so if people have a question that the AI chat bought on our website, on our homepage, is preloaded with tons of helpful information because we have so many emails, prior emails of people sending us the same questions. We took those emails and we uploaded it into the AI. And now the AI read through, however, let's say 10,000 emails. And based on that, now it knows the answer is to most of the questions. So it's just like that was an easy hack. And so instead of someone ever to try to call us, our staff being worn down by having to respond to, you know, messages, you know, having AI implemented in that regard benefits, not only the guests, but the staff as well. So that's just one example. - I love that. Okay. So technology is a tool in ultimately saying, how can we make sure that this guest journey is the highest and best, if we can get answers absolutely immediately, do it effectively efficiently, which frees up our team that's on 24/17, that's on staff. Now they're focused on guest experience versus answering a question that they've answered 20,000 times before. So implementing technology is a way in which we can enhance that function component. I wanna go and dig in a little bit because I know that there's like, you talk about a function component under guest experience, I wanna talk about activities. - Okay. - Okay. So like this is the level of detail when you have, when you have EOS, and you have these components, and you figure out processes and integrating processes into hospitality, I wanna dig into activities and ask you if there's processes that are applied to an activity. - Okay. Well, can you give me like a specific activity so that I know what you mean? - Yeah. I'm thinking about like, (laughs) okay. Yes. Road to Hana. - Ooh. Okay. Well, start we need to make sure the van is safe, right? So-- - There we go, baby. Come on. - Yeah. So, you know, we've got this van, and our staff takes the guest on an incredible tour to go visit a part of the island that's lush and tropical and beautiful, it's waterfalls, there's incredible beaches. It is an amazing experience that oftentimes people pay $100 for to hire a private guide, and we just offer it free. So that tour is an important part of our business, but day one, we didn't really know all the ins and outs of like, okay, what is the process? So we had to learn this, but for example, like these are just common things like, hey, let's check to make sure that the tires have air in it. Let's make sure the window wipers work because you're going to a rainforest. And the last thing you want is, you know, to not be able to have the winter wipers functioning. So they do a quick, they check the brake lights and all the stuff, but all common, you know, like how do you know they do that? How do you know that? - Yeah, exactly. So the auditing part is now they have a checklist of things that before the tour, they have to go and fill out the checklist, then they bring it to reception. And then reception will enter it into our communications log, which goes to our management staff, which ultimately determines how many guests are on the tour, what was the condition of the van, anything that they've noticed that needs to be replaced or repaired if there's an engine warning sign or whatever the AC is not cooling. Like they just log it all and they go, it goes into our com log and then the managers review at each and every day and those managers, then provide an end of day report, which goes to us, which we can then view. And they can ask for feedback or, you know, if they have any questions about, you know, approvals if they need to replace something. So there's this whole system that works like that. Does that answer what you're looking for? - Well, that's part of it, but how does the guests know that there's an activity on that day? - Right. Okay, in terms of operations, how does the guests know? Well, of course, everything is posted on our website. So there's a schedule, but there's also an activity board, daily, which provides the list of the activities that they can sign up for. And now we used to have a piece of paper that they could write their name on, but now it's all done through an electronic system. They scan our QR code and they can add their name to a list and, you know, it's first come first serve. - But here's my point. When I look at this and I look at obsessing over the guest journey, the little things, the details. You didn't like the placement. You didn't like where it was in the beginning. Didn't like what it looked like. When out and found, kept your eyes open as we experience different things along the way and you're like, wow, that looks, look at that compared to what we do. And then, boom, you know, take that. And you continue to find ways in which, all right, well, where can we put this to make it more convenient, to have it show better? And then from there, it's like, where's the next part? How can you, the evolution of focusing on every single detail from when the guest comes and sees that visually, what does it look like? How does it make them feel? How do we include them? How do we make it simple for them and take away pain points for them? Like, I can go and break down too. So now all of a sudden they're like, all right, they're signed up, they're good. There's, there's wait list, there's communication. There's if they weren't on it. There's internal communication that they can have with other people in the hostel that says, hey, we're gonna go to, but we're gonna drive on or own, does anyway. So you have all of these systems that have made it better and better and better. And then to the fact where if the van gets checked out, then from the van, it goes to the, it has to be notated in the communication log, from the communication log. Any manager can, is obligated to, they have to send out a report that shows their initials next to everything on the com log so that it can be audited by the next level up to say, all right, eyes have been on this. Somebody has already audited this, we're good. If there's a solution that needs to happen, somebody needs to present. I just, I wanted to dig into that because something as simple as when people hear, oh my gosh, your guess had such, you know, there's an Instagram post and it's like mind blowing where you're like, holy crap, that's what they're experiencing. But that experience to execute it at that level and provide that moment of fulfillment, the amount of effort and energy and process and then having it so that it can, it can be audited so that nothing slips through the cracks. I think that it's important for people to understand that that's the essence of hospitality is creating that feeling, but what goes into it, I think people miss a lot. And I just, that's one little teeny function component on that sheet that has had massive amount of evolution and thought, but ultimately impacts the experience and makes us successful. What I think describing is the programming, right? So what I envision when I'm thinking about a guest experience, like I close my eyes and I'm envisioning, well, what is the guest feeling in that moment? And I think this is applicable for more than just our business, but for anyone's, right? And you mentioned that I wasn't satisfied with the way that the description of the guided tours that we offer were displayed on the wall. And I'm not naturally like an artistic person, but what I am good at is recognizing what others are doing well and just simply copying them. And of course I didn't rip off what others are doing, but I'm constantly taking photos of places that I think have done things well. So if I go to the Maryop, for example, and they have nice furniture, I'm taking photos of that furniture. I just did this the other weekend here for my own home. I'm like, oh, cool. Like, look at the little fire pit that they have and that little chair and the way it's lined up. And so what you're describing is we went to a competitor and they had a display wall that ultimately, I thought, wow, we should implement something like that because that is a good function. And thinking about how the guest is going to receive that experience in that moment, it's as simple as just kind of like going back to the journey sequentially when they walk in, when they open the door, how do they feel, what do they see? I mean, we can drill down to the sound, like the music that's playing. There's a certain type of audible music at a decibel level that we want because we don't want it too loud. Kind of like the story of the three bears and that was the porridge, right? It's like too cold, too hot, just right. We want it just right. And so going and visiting other locations, it doesn't matter whether it's in your same genre of hospitality, pick the things where, like in our case, looking at furniture at the Maryop, you might apply a certain type of chair, where we may take Starbucks, for example, and go, wow, when you walk into Starbucks, the music is always a certain type and it kind of makes you feel good. and it kind of puts you in the mood. Well, what I did is I went to a resort and I like, "Hmm, I like the way this music is making me feel." And I don't need my staff to copy that playlist, but ultimately the feeling that a guest is having, I wanted them to implement that. So I'm constantly on like a, it's like I'm recording. I'm video recording in my mind, the experiences that I want my guests to have throughout the journey from start to finish. I love that. And as you were talking about the music and all that, like there's levels of execution. Remember when we were at the unique stage summit? And you know, we were going through best practices of design. And one of the things that came out was the sound. And was it hinder? That-- - Oh, I don't know. I don't know. - Well, she sends out, I think so. She sends out a curated playlist. Like as the person is there, they're like, "Hey, it's approaching five o'clock. The sun will be setting in 30 minutes and 15 minutes. Go ahead and hit the sound system and play this mix." And it sets up like the most perfect mood. So in hospitality, when we look at operations, how do we go and impact? You can really dig in and be very intentional about how you want to make a guest feel. And I think that, you know, that's the point here. But I want to go to another one of the components because I think that this one's critical. And I want to go to the-- 'Cause there's several different processes that you implemented. I feel like you utilized technology. You utilized the human element of team and accountability. And this component has maybe moved us forward, you know, faster, better than any is can you go through the component of reviews? Sure. Like how we track reviews and how we audit them and then what we do. I'd say first of all, just the name of that function is what's the name of it? Review management. Review management. OK, and then can you-- what are the lower components of review management? OK, I'm getting there right now. All right, so it's auditing review scores responding to reviews, address/solve issues, driving quantity and quality of reviews, and team recognition for positive reviews. OK, great. So can you give us just, you know, maybe a little detail on those because I think that this is critical for-- like if you start here, if somebody that wants to go out and create a profitable hospitality company, they have to deliver a profitable experience. There has to be a win/win, right? The guest needs to feel like they won for you to win yourself. And that shows in review. So I think this is a great one to just do a little bit of a little deep dive into on these different components. Yeah, absolutely. OK, so I believe that review management utilizes technology. There's a relationship there to start. Well, let me describe, you know, when I'm talking about review management, there's a variety of sources of reviews, right? So you've got Google reviews, you've got OTA reviews, whether that's, you know, Expedia.com and any of those derivatives. So you need technology, really, to have something where you can document all those. But before someone gets to the stage where they're leaving the resort or they've left and then they get prompted to leave a review, I want to reference that we have technology on site. When someone signs into our Wi-Fi, we prompt them to enter their email for access. Just like every other location, you know, whether it's a coffee shop or a hotel, they typically require you to provide an email. Well, of course, there's an advantage of having their email for future marketing. But for review purposes, what happens is two days into their stay, they get an automatic email that asks them for feedback. And if they provide feedback that is excellent or good, so a four or a five star, then we automatically prompt them, it redirects them to our Google places page where they can then leave a five star review on Google. But if they've got a challenge or they're not fond of whatever, then, you know, if they give us a three star or below, then it automatically diverts that person to leave a comment internally. And so it kind of insulates us. It kind of allows them to vent their challenge. So number one, allows them to get it off their chest, what's wrong? And hopefully, you know, get a solution if they're still on property and, you know, they can, they want a solution, we'll address it immediately. So this software, this technology, notifies our staff when we've gotten review, good or bad. And so when it goes internally, we can immediately address it and then hopefully, you know, improve their experience. - So basically, technology helped you create the process that says, we want to hear every single thing that we can from our guest, but we also, so we want to elicit that. Like, let's get as much feedback as we possibly can. But let's make sure that the positive ones go out to the public and the negative ones stay in house. So you researched and found technology to help us with that as much as possible. - Absolutely, yep. And it works. We get less poor reviews as a result, but we also get valuable feedback from an auditing perspective so we can make improvements to improve the guest experience overall. And we also put on site near the reception, we have a QR code that, you know, prompts people, it says something along the lines of like, hey, are you having a fantastic time? Like, you know, do we earn a five star review? Please leave us a five star review on Google. And so they can just use their little QR code with their phone and go review us. But seeing that at the front desk, you know, when, especially since our staff is so outgoing and so, you know, so good at providing great customer service, they'll often just do it because we have the call to action right there in front of them. If you don't have the sign, that's one simple thing. I like, blows me away that people don't have a sign. They go, "Oh, I'm not getting enough good reviews. How do I get more reviews?" Well, do you have a sign up on your front desk or somewhere that's visible, maybe in the room, that says, "Please leave us a review and prompt them to do so?" No? Well, it's probably why you're not getting a lot of reviews. So that's one simple step. But moving on, auditing reviews is incredibly important, not just for our business, but for the guest. And so we have a system in place where we use a, quite simple Google sheet and one of our managers will each week do a scrub of all of our different sources of reviews and put them into a spreadsheet. And it's just categorized where, you know, we have to have a minimum threshold, but it lists all the different reviews and it shows positive feedback and negative feedback. And then, of course, I'll scan the negative feedback. And if I see something there that we can improve upon, it's either in our control or out of our control. And if it's out of our control, we talk about it and we try to be solution oriented, but we move on and we focus on things that we can control, right? Whether the place is clean, if it's not clean enough, hey, what's going on? We need to implement a new process or otherwise address this because cleanliness is the utmost priority to us. So this review audit happens weekly and it's one of the things that within EOS, we do a success score card or scoreboard where we're auditing the average review score. And if our average review score dips, then us as operators, the business will look into this and be like, well, why did we dip? And then we can go into the weeds and look at the specific, you know, negative reviews and come up with solutions. But that auditing is important because it's direct feedback. You're getting direct feedback from your guests. If you don't look at those reviews and you don't audit those and you don't constantly monitor them, you're probably not going to improve. So it's been super important from us. That's really, it's driven, I believe, our success is really driven by reviews. We obsess over the guest experience, but we really are obsessing over their reviews and so we can provide that amazing experience. - Well, first of all, bro, I love the way you just broke this down and I think that this is very, very actionable 'cause I feel like there's missing steps in there for like reviews. Everybody knows reviews. It's a simple thing, right? Well, what reviews are you getting? How many reviews are you getting? Well, what are they? And I think that teams will go and they'll be like, look, we got this bad review. But I feel like what you've done really well is you've established a culture around those reviews where whenever the review is, that then there's action that comes with that review, right? So if the reviews are positive, you have on your list lift up teammates if their name gets mentioned. So you're creating this positive environment around, let's celebrate those that get positive reviews. Then secondly, it's all right, in control or not in control. It doesn't end there. There has to be a solution, right? Like, look, how can we control this? What do we have control? What part of us, what we do? How can we go get better? And then they have to create that. solution, right? There's a solution that has to occur. And then it goes from there to follow up on in the team meeting that it's one of the KPIs and it has to be addressed, solved, moved forward. And so there's accountability that comes with it. So there's positive culture. And then there's also agreed upon standards. And then there's the execution. And if we don't live up to that execution, what's going to be done and it all can be audited. And I feel like that's where the miss is for a lot of, and this isn't just in hospitality. This is, I think, a key learning into building process. And I want to, can I talk about one more thing though? I just, I think it's so important. It's so overlooked, but this is something that it blows my mind when I witness this. It's the response to the reviews. So someone leaves a negative review. How our team responds to that review is more important than the problem that the person reported. It's how they respond. I tell my wife this all the time, it's not the problem. It's, it's our solution. And originally, you know, our staff was just responding. And sometimes we're being a little bit like defensive, like they would lead with defense and then towards the end kind of acknowledge, like, oh, yeah, maybe you might have been a little right. And I was like, no, no, no, listen. It doesn't matter what the problem is. Okay. In a sense, the customer is always right in a sense. Okay. So we got to lead number one when we're responding is acknowledge them, acknowledge their concern, acknowledge their complaint because people want to feel important. And if you just listen to them and they feel heard, they feel that they're, they're validated in whatever they have communicated, no matter how ridiculous it is. If at minimum, you just repeat that you understand that they are frustrated because of XYZ, it doesn't just go a long way for that customer. It's everyone else that is viewing the response, that is going to judge the merit of the issue. And so originally, you know, they had kind of a reverse order. And so I was very methodical and say, step one, acknowledge them, step two, you know, offer an apology, step three, communicate ways in which, you know, we either have improved or are going to improve. And you know, it could have been something as simple as like parking, which is kind of out of our control. But we hear them. And this is what we're going to do. And this is what we have done. So we didn't have a lot of parking. We went out and as I was, and what I mean parking is our property has no parking. Our property doesn't have on site on property parking. And unfortunately, they're doing construction where the parking lot is directly across the street. And that's out of our control. What can we do? Well, we communicated to them, we understand your frustration. This is a temporary situation. We're going to do our best to find a solution. Well, a few months later, we went and secured through a private property owner, a parking lot that we could lease so that we could provide parking for our guest, even though it wasn't on property, this provided them an area where they could park while the construction was going on. And then we went and communicated that in the response that we've done so, you know, so that if anyone is reviewing this, even if it's an older review, they see the number one that we care. That's the most important thing and that we will follow up and will execute to the best of our ability. And sometimes quite honestly, we can't solve everything. But as long as we show compassion and empathy and heart, whoever is reviewing this in the future, it diminishes the problem. It just almost eliminates it evaporates if they just feel like, well, the management care so often I see and reviews, people start to get defensive and say, well, actually, this is what really happened. Doesn't matter. Yeah. Dude, I love that. I think that that's gold, you know, absolutely. And, you know, what I'm feeling as we're going through this because I'm like, holy crap. I mean, we just went through a couple of little components on, on like, this is just one little, one little area of operations. And so it's like holy crap. We could, we could run a three day seminar on just the operation piece. Like, hey, let's go through each one of these components. Let's show how technology is used. Let's show like, how do you get there? But I do want to leave with an actionable piece because I think that what you've done an unbelievable job at is, you know, integrating through this whole, this, this whole piece, all of these operational components is you've created process. And so I just, I want to kind of end with this, this little piece because our listeners can go and get this. We're going to just, we'll be open. We'll just share you, share with you ours. Here's our components. Here's what you need to know in operations. And then if they have further questions, look, reach out to us. We're, this is our passion. So we're, we're glad to connect and help in, in any way that we can make the hospitality space better for, for sure. But an actionable step that everybody can take is going, okay, I can see that, that to become award winning, you have to have award winning process. What is process? Look, there's a lot of different ways to do things. What process really is, it's an agreed upon commitment of the organization. That's really what it is of doing something. So it's setting the standard and then coming up with an agreed upon, because you can do things in different ways and create the same experience. But as long as everybody's aligned, we've agreed upon, we've set the standard and then we agreed upon the way that we're going to go about doing it. Now we have a commitment and now there's a process in place. So go attack your, your business in that way, making sure that you have processes and all of these different areas and you'll come out more successful for it. So look, after going through this, I hope that this is, well, at least it has been for me, it's eye opening, how much has gone into creating the guest experience, how operations and having processes, how much they impact ultimately the success or the failure of the asset that you purchased, what you're doing for yourself, for your investors, how you do operationally is going to have a massive impact ultimately on that end result. And so as I'm running through it and I'm like, man, we could do no questions asked, three days seminar, we could fill the thing with each one of these processes and digging deep into it. But I think that's also important. I really want to provide you with value out of this. We want to post our actual accountability structure. And look, this took obviously, it took us two and a half years to create processes and then hire a business coach to really help us structure everything that we did to boil it all down to these functions. And then the components under those functions. And we'll provide it to you for free. Go ahead and just jump on the hotel investor playbook. Go dot com, jump on our website. We'll provide a link that you can go ahead and download. Secondly, you can always obviously reach out to us at the hotel investor playbook on Instagram. But look, if you're gaining value from this, that's our goal. What we ask, return, give us a five star review. That's what we're looking for. We want to continue this show. We want to be able to provide value to more people. So give us that five star review and then share this with someone that you feel like would benefit from hearing it. And we're going to sign off. But we hope you guys have a freaking killer week, killer day. And until next time, Aloha.