Optimizing Hospitality Operations Through KPI Tracking | Ep. 28

Hi, I'm Rachel Alde and this is the hospitality break room recorded weekly in our actual break room at the of both Luxury Rentals offices in Park City, Utah. This season on the podcast, the founder and CEO of Inhaven, Ashley Chang, and her teammate Megan Myers will be joining me for the 10 full episodes. Our theme this season is "Certainty Served Weekly Within Inhaven". This is your inside look at how local property managers are setting new standards and vacation rentals. Each week we unpack the real challenges behind the bed, bath, kitchen and beyond, offering practical solutions, myth-busting truths and tips from the field. Whether you're a seasoned property manager, vendor, owner or just curious about getting into the vacation rental space, this series shares the real life tools and stories that bring more consistency to every stay. Powered by a boat luxury rentals in Inhaven, built for those who want to do things better. Hi, I'm Rachel Alde and welcome back to the hospitality break room. We are still in our season of "Certainty Served Weekly Within Inhaven". I have today Megan Myers and Ashley Chang from Inhaven. We're going to be talking about KPIs. Since I am not that great at KPIs, I am not a person who is not a rule follower. I'm really not great at process. Luckily I have a great team and really good consultants who have helped us do better on all those fronts. But Megan is going to really be leading this episode because she is a guru on all things process, workflow and that's why I am obsessed with her podcast, workflows and espressos and why I've always just looked up to her. So Megan, where do you want to start this off? I'm so excited. I'm just glad that we got Ashley called me last week and she was like, "What should we talk about next week?" And I said, "I've got just the thing." And I knew you'd love it, Rachel. But there are- I need this. I'm very excited because I want to hear some stories from you. So it is today's episode is a little bit of a departure where we're not going to be talking about setting standards or the bedbath in kitchen. We're kind of talking about what happens after those things are done and how can we measure success and how do we know when decisions that we've made or implemented are working? Yeah. And what better way to know than with KPIs or key performance indicators? Rachel, you use OKRs at a bone. So I'm excited to get into that. So how I feel is you can set all the standards in the world, but it doesn't really matter if you're not measuring your success. So let's get into it. Ashley, my first question is to you. So what role do you think that KPIs play at the company level in terms of strategy? And I think it would be a great kind of introduction for what we're doing over it in Haven right now on how we're introducing new KPIs into our business model. Yeah. So KPIs are super important at the company level as a startup. Now we're entering I think year three. The beginning, it was just a couple of us and we all were working on the phone together at all times, discussing priorities and whatnot. So as you start to expand as a company, I think it's really important to have those KPIs to make sure that all of your team are working on the right things at the right time and they're able to prioritize their work. So we're working very closely with Megan to implement KPIs at the department level and having sort of weekly readouts of where we stand with our KPIs, just to add more rigor and focus to our relatively young organization. It's always fun introducing KPIs to a team who is actually very close to working on. I do want to talk about that in general and they just hate it at first. Yeah, it is hard at first, right? Especially when you have a company, particularly a young company that's just like moving quickly and pivoting and more so pivoting on like feeling and overwhelm rather than on data and it's been, I remember at the key data level when we started to implement KPIs from the very beginning and even at 360 blue, like our first strategy meetings where we were required to go through KPIs and how it was like a pretty big adjustment in the beginning. And Rachel, what do you think has happened? Like you've kind of become a company that started without KPIs and now you're starting to implement what you refer to as OKRs. Like how has that adjustment been to your team and have you noticed a positive change along with I'm sure push back as well? Yeah, I mean, we would literally, I think we were in business for 10 or maybe it's 12 years, but I think it's, I think it's 10 years before we started working with Lini and Hart. Those are the consultants that we work with tandemly. And until, and we didn't start our OKRs with them like within the first year, I think it was the second year. And I was like, because they wanted, they told us that we should look at it and I was like, no, because my background was in corporate marketing before we started a board. And I was so averse to anything that was like KPI, OKR, anything like with a term like that, I was like, no way. And so I didn't want to do it. But then as we started to grow the team, you know, they clearly needed more guidelines and they were asking for guidelines. And so that was when we pulled the trigger to do this with Lini and Hart. And so I thought, I was saying yes at first, just because I thought it was obviously like the right thing I was supposed to be doing in quotes. And so I said yes, just to not be like to be perceived as stupid business owner. But we definitely were always your reactive as a company because even after 10 years, we were still a small business, you know, family run. And we just that it was, we were kind of like happy to be working that way. But it did get to a point when our revenue got to a certain point that we knew we really had to be planning better. And you know, we thought we were planning because you think you, but it's not until you see the example of what it looks like when you use KPIs or OKR, or when you do forecasting in a different way. And then you realize like how much better things could be going. So from our standpoint, you know, I rob and I were very adverse. Our team was asking for more guidelines and parameters, but we weren't putting together that that meant we needed OKRs or KPIs. And so then the process of building it, what we did with our team, which is how we kind of do everything was like very democratic. We built this all together. You know, we kind of built out a whole thing where we had all these sessions, we built up our company values, which we never had before that, our mission and vision and all that. And then we started building the OKRs slash KPIs however you want to word it after we had those values and missions and vision stuff. And so, but we did that as a team. And so that's what we still do to this day. We do, I think it's twice a year. We look at OKRs and we're looking at do we keep the same ones in place? Do we change them? Or, you know, and we use, is it bamboo where are no, I think it's 15 five where we're, I think we use the software called 15 five, you think I should know this. A lot of apps, I've been my mug. So OK, my world. And so, yeah, I think it's, I think we use 15 five to like monitor the OKRs and stuff, but it really does help. And I literally was on the phone with part, you know, one of our consultants and talking about the OKRs and making sure everyone's on track with like keeping them updated and tracking where we're meeting them and not. And it's been crazy, crazy helpful. But I totally see that like a lot of companies when you're smaller, you're just grinding so hard that you don't ever think to stop and look at stuff like this. You don't still think you have time to do it. You think it's like like a, that's like a luxury that big fancy companies have, but you don't because you're too small. And then the truth is, the earlier that you implement this kind of stuff, I think the more success you can have because like you said, I'm like, you can track things. And that's really valuable to like the progress of your company without tracking it. Sure, you're not taking any time away from the grind, but you're also probably putting your energy in the wrong direction a lot of the time and you just don't realize that. I think it's like tracking, but then how do you measure it? I think we're small companies or you know, measuring becomes overwhelming because you just don't have the data right like coming from the home depot, Tiffany and company. We had just so much data at our fingertips. And then having to start up where, you know, the data is just, it's, you don't have a tablo or, or, you know, master source and you kind of have to, it takes a lot of time to gather it. Yeah. And just talking it. So I think that can be overwhelming too. Yeah, Ashley, it's your background. Well, both of you have corporate backgrounds. Ashley, Tiffany and the home depot, like what was KPI tracking like there? Was it just very like you got your numbers and a dashboard very easily? And it was just very much a part of your every single day workload. Yeah. How did team of data analysts, you could ask questions too, like how did it work? Yeah, we had a whole team of data analysts and we would have in some cases hourly reports, you know, if we were tracking sales and then daily reports on margin and you know, other key performance indicators. So it was just really out of figure tips. And then if we wanted to pull anything, you know, custom, we would be in tablo just creating our own reports. So it was a big shock coming, you know, starting with miss and, and you know, just not having all of that data at your fingertips. Do you feel like you had a pivotal moment at in Haven when you were like, hey, we need to start tracking like some of this information or we need to be better about tracking or introducing your key guys? Yeah. Yeah, it's just, you know, as you really stare down the PNL, you know, on a monthly basis, it's just making sure that you have the right recording in place so you can sort of stay on top of, you know, certain line items and whatnot. And I just don't want to like, we're after the end of the year. I want to be on top of it throughout the year, just to stay ahead of any challenges that we're facing. Rachel, do you feel like your business decision making has changed since you guys started implementing KPIs? Yeah, I mean, for sure, because the truth is our business always had so much growth every I think our growth for until literally I think this is our first year that we've ever had I think we had like 4% decline this year from last year. This is the first time so we've we've had 8 to 20% growth like every year always and so to be honest that's part of the reason why we weren't looking at KPIs is because we were just growing and growing right and we were we were like if working it's so great it keeps like it was just you know ballooning and then at some point talking to consultants we really brought in KPIs because we were wanting to make sure our team had clear understanding of their roles and their goals and also and that was more about keeping them happy. Honestly, when we started all this it wasn't about hitting our numbers because we were we were like shocking ourselves every year with how much revenue we were doing. So it wasn't like how can we do more it was more like how can we keep everyone happy so that we can all keep working because this is so crazy how much work we have and how much our team is growing. Now right now this this more recently in the past few months with us not having a year with growth so essentially we're like basically flat we're a few percentage points down and that feels frightening to be real as a company owner because we've never had that happen. So we're like what? And so this is the the OKRs or KPIs for us is what is helping us to be like OK we know we want to you know make some moves and increase revenue and look at I'm adding more properties in a way that we haven't really cared about before and you know doing some other strategic things and so how can we make sure that our efforts are going to be put like I said earlier like put the work where it needs to go because you know in the past it was always just a scramble to keep up with the demand and so now it's like OK we need to increase our portfolio we need to find a way to increase you know demand we need to and so then we want to look at pushing the work in the right place and I think that's where this stuff really can help us so that we're more efficient. Do you guys measure it coming from the retail background we would always measure same store sales so basically you know what's the what's the growth that we're seeing out of our existing surveys and then of course you add on the new that that position or new stores how do you guys measure that navigation mental industry is it do you look at here's the here's my existing homes and this is how they're performing like in Megan like we'll have more to say but I know like for us we will look at like year over year per house you know as this house but you know we also have all these factors that come into play that's different than in a store because say a house that did a certain amount of revenue last year might do less this year but that could have a lot to do with just like homeowner usage. Yeah. It have a lot to do with like it's a ski and ski outhouse and the snow was later this year and so that how you know what it could be like all these kind of not necessarily about like oh what's going wrong at that house because sometimes it's these outside factors and really like homeowner usage can play a huge part and so that has so then we're that you know so we can't look at just year over year per house it really has to be the whole thing but then also by neighborhood and I don't know Megan probably knows a bunch of other ways to look at that too but yeah I'd always look at it per house and then add in new growth so if you have like projections per house ideally every single home should have its individual projection similar to like a store projection and then you have like your number right so say it all adds up to $10 million then you have to subtract your expected attrition which in beach markets could be between like 15 and 20% in the Florida panhandle where there's so much competition and it's so saturated you might be losing 15% of your inventory every single year but your net gain is still positive because there are so many new builds and so many there are 20,000 vacation rentals that are joining programs and changing all the time and so then we would add in our growth and finding those percentages was really hard and when I moved over to Outpost I remember being super surprised because I was looking at attrition numbers and Rachel I don't know if this is your case or anyone listening that's in a mountain destination like the attrition was so much less way less like I don't know if it's increased loyalty with homeowners in mountain destinations like their relationships are just stronger I think fly to markets are different honestly yeah because a lot of homeowners are like in Europe and they never come back and they don't look at their house very much like I think if you drive to your beach house a lot it's on your mind and you're like you're getting that FOMO you know what I mean and you're talking to your neighbors because you're seeing them and people that have beach house or vacation houses that are fly to especially like something remote like ski town I think they don't they're not thinking about should they switch and there's a left FOMO because it's like these are you know really expensive investments and they're also like in these places that things are really hard to take care of and so I think it's like okay we got it solid it's taking care of and you're maybe less likely to be like out head in the clouds thinking about you know what you could be missing out on which I think is what that those kind of changes often come from it's so interesting to as as the occasional companies start to think of expansion from either mountain to beach or beach to mountain how that attrition like is can be really impactful like you know at outpost if we had expanded and gone to 30 a and I knew nothing about it it would have been a huge shock to us when we were losing 20% of our homes every single year because we were used to maybe losing two three properties a year out of two hundred and twenty where at three sixty we might lose like 50 homes in a single year and that's just standard for that area but you're just your turn is high but you're adding so many new properties whereas in the mountains your inventory is lower you don't have as many to add on the competition is less and so I always think it's these types of KPIs I think of almost like company level KPIs so what is information that you are sharing at the company level with your team that's like the heartbeat of your organization so net gain and vacation on companies I consider to be one of those like core KPIs your whole team should know on a weekly basis like what is our net gain so far for the year and of course like I said like that changes very much depending on what location you're in and revenue year over year total revenue so I've seen this looked at multiple different ways and Rachel I'm curious about how you look at it from do you look at revenue minus owner payments or are you looking at like top line bookings I mean both so we're always every month we're looking at both but like for me that top line revenue number per year is always just really interesting I think just because of having grown from nothing like I thought that always shocks me honestly but then yeah then we're always analyzing obviously the net number as well to be looking at yeah you know like you said like you know how are we doing with you know are like sometimes we'll be looking at our splits and making sure everyone you know because we started at a little bit of a lower split in the very beginning and so there's a certain amount of houses that are still on like whatever it was 17 years ago like 25% in Park City and so then we've moved people up to 30 and then 35 and so sometimes we'll be looking at that kind of stuff and comparing you know that homeowner payment piece coming out a bit and whatever I think business development KPIs are really important at the company level too so you can understand and that's something we've been working on at the in Haven level so Ashley like what has been your key business development like growth indicator of in Haven's success I should say you know obviously top line it's just the companies that we're working with you know just how many we're working with and how many we're working with at a level where we have a strong relationship with them where they're getting on our standards from a bad back in kitchen perspective versus you know just the one-offs that are by you know 12 paper every week or whatnot and so that's been really important is just obviously the number of companies we're working with and the depth of the partnership that's what you know makes it sustainable business active Rachel do you have a business development department alone yeah so we have miles on our team who does homeowner acquisition and so it was always Rob and I and for many years it was mostly me and then in Jackson there's a guy named West that was helping with our Jackson homeowner acquisition and Brandon who was our original employee in San Valley he's helping but miles now miles was on our operations team in the beginning I think he's known with us for five years and then he moved into the homeowner relations team so he was like interacting with the homeowners on a day-to-day basis because we have you know group people that are just their whole job is to be the communication with the homeowners and and then he started you know expressing an interest in homeowner acquisition and his office is like right near Rob and I and he would hear me on the phone all the time talking to you know new potential homeowners so I think he was like I can do that and so I then I started having him help out with some of that process and that was like over a year and not even doing the meetings which is like listening and also like looking at the way we had our pipeline and stuff which was on a spreadsheet not going to lie and so now we just started working with San Square and they're handling homeowner acquisition on handling they are helping us with homeowner acquisition like dashboards and like the whole process with the pipeline and the mailer and all that kind of stuff and so he's the one like leading that with homeowner acquisition from our team so he's he really is the one driving homeowner acquisition process like watching over the pipeline handling most of the communication and then once someone signs with us then he passes it back to the homeowner release and steam because then there's the whole onboarding process. Pipeline growth is a huge like company level key performance indicator that I think is important both on the vacation on the side and on the supplier side and understanding what your perspective revenue is at each stage of the pipeline and then having very clearly defined stages of the pipeline which I think can be really difficult and I mean honestly on both sides like as a supplier and a vacation rental manager because developing that like and tree exit criteria for each stage of the pipeline can be super subjective. - Yeah, we were on a call with SenseGuard this morning talking about homeowner acquisition and using SenseGuard, and I was literally explaining to the team in miles about like the difference of the pipeline and how we use the pipeline versus tasks. 'Cause we were talking about tasks and said, I was like, all right, remember, like pipelines are for sales and that we were, I was explaining this more and more 'cause this is like newer to them 'cause we never, we didn't have much software especially for homeowner acquisition or honestly for CRM in general. So pipeline concepts, not like, it's not like any of my team doesn't know what this is but like just laying it out, like you said, it could be hard to get it. It's like, yeah, there's these tasks but like a pipeline is all about taking someone who's not yet our client and moving them through the pipeline for them to become our client and then all these other tasks that have to happen after they become a client or sometimes during that pipeline process. Those are tasks, there's a task management process and then there's this pipeline process, you know, and it's like, oh, it's so helpful. Like it's so helpful, but you know, it's all, there's just so many working parts to all of this. And for you two as business leaders to understanding like, okay, we've got $3 million of potential revenue in the pipeline. What's the percentage that this is actually gonna turn into $3 million because I need it to forecast my budget which is gonna let me know what my expenses need to be and a business that already has really thin margins. This is scary. - This is scary. - This is scary. - You know, you can't scare it. - That makes sense. That's the way you said that makes me like, do I do this wrong? Like I never look at the value of what of the homeowners in the pipeline. Like I never consider that, I see again because we were always growing so much. So I never even, it was always just like, okay, now we have this house in the portfolio. Like we think it might do this much. We'll see after the first year. Literally that, like it was never about like, I wonder if we were to sign, you know, half of these houses in the next three months. Because sometimes our process with homeowners can be really long. You know, again, like this is the same reason why they don't switch very easily, like in this out. Because it's like, it's just, sometimes they're like, oh my god, we really need to switch. We love you. We hate the company that we're with. But sometimes it takes two years. - Halfway and I are like, how we get that. - Yeah. - Wow. - Yeah, I think in sales was more, it was newer to me because I'm a client from a merchandising background. And so it was really interesting. And someone once said, you need to know sort of how many people you have at each stage of your pipeline and how many of you need to have at each stage because, you know, to keep a really healthy pipeline. If you look at a, you know, typical sales process of 90 days, you have enough at each stage. You keep it going into you, even enough new acquisition coming in. So yeah, we're trying to get that down at Inhaven. I mean, we haven't gotten there yet, but just really understanding how many, you know, leads or so you have to have at each stage of the pipeline. - Not either. - I feel like learning so much right now. I feel like I should be taking notes right now. - I agree. This is being recorded. So that's the point. - It is, it's funny. The way we do things at Inhaven is the exact same way that we did things when I was a property manager. Where essentially everything in your pipeline is a deal, or a potential deal or a lead or however you want to define it. And it is assigned a value where when you're a vacation rental company, that value is the projection of the home, what you think it's going to do. So whether or not the owner asked for a projection, like we assigned one internally. And that allowed us to make decisions like, okay, is this home worth waving startup costs for? Because it's projected to do X amount. Is this home worth lowering our commission percentage for? Or how many of these homes do we need to bring on in order to hit our sales goals? So assigning that was really helpful. And we had like business development sales goals that were in place for the homeowner acquisition team that was largely paid commission and based on what the projection of these homes were and how long they stayed on the program when they came on board. And it was like this full science where we would sit down at a table and say like, okay, what deals do we have that are going to likely close this month? And how close are we to hitting our goal? And it allowed us to know like, okay, it is May right now. We're probably not going to hit the May goal, but we will make up for it in June. Because we have these 10 other homes in the pipeline that are just waiting to get through Memorial Day and then they're making a switch. And it was really interesting just in terms of like revenue projections, how that changed things. And it also created this sense of urgency for the homeowner acquisition team because they knew like, okay, we've got to go into this meeting once a week and speak to the deals that we are working. And we can talk about any barriers to like, hey, the reason I haven't signed this deal is because they really need the CEO to get on the phone with them and just give them like a little wink and a nudge and make them feel important. And then they'll sign. And let's you know is someone who's leading the business and the same is true at in Haven, right? Where like our leads are assigned values and we can go into the pipeline and understand like, okay, how many leads do we have in this like final decision stage and does Ashley need to call them or do we need to make a trip out to visit them? So I think values for leads are super important. - It's like, this is magic. And I hope everyone listening is taking notes because I literally am like, I'm going to after this recording, go talk to Miles and Miles is going to be like, don't ever talk to that Megan Lady again. - Oh, really? - This podcast is like a free consulting hour for people listening. Like, do you guys understand? I know there's millions and millions of you listening and for there's so many and it's hard for like, talk is so many people at one time. But just kidding, I think it's probably like our parents. But actually, no, not to sidetrack everything like I always do. But did you already tell you that Sarah Bradford listens to our podcast like all of it? She does. - Yeah, no one else is listening to this entire season religiously. Tom Goodwin. - Oh my God, I was going to say Tom. - You guys, so many people that I've been talking to in the industry recently, I'm not trying to tune our own horn too much, but like a little. And I hope for all of our millions and millions or maybe like tens of listeners that this doesn't sound too crazy. But I find it like, I literally fan girl when someone like Sarah or Tom or people like that, Tom were like, oh yeah, I've been listening. I'm like, you've been listening. Like you have, for real, like what you listen to like 10 minutes, or do you listen to a whole episode? There are like many episodes and I'm like, starts making sweat a little. - Yeah, but isn't this exciting? So anyway, obviously like some people that listen, maybe you have tons of experience and maybe this doesn't feel like consulting for you. But I have to imagine that people that, you know, are having been doing this forever. And I think a lot of vacation rental companies are not this complicated or experience or sometimes like professional in all these ways. And I don't think that's saying a bad thing because we were in business for 10 years. Before we ever even tried to have KPIs or OKRs. And so I think that this kind of stuff is just so helpful and whether you're looking at it for KPIs and OKRs for homeowner acquisition, like we've just been talking about or other parts of the business that we'll talk about in a second. Like this is gold. Like why did I not know this earlier? And some of the stuff I really did learn from Sarah and Tim's podcast, you know, "Ski to Sea with Serentine." Over the years, I learned so much from them. But I feel like Megan, the way you explain this, sometimes it's just like really, really valuable. So thanks. Let's do more. Keep going. Let's do more. Let's get into it. OK. So we talked a little bit about company level KPIs. I really want to talk through housekeeping because I think it is just so pertinent to what we've been talking about over the last. I think this is our eighth episode. Is this true? I think so. Helen's not in here with me. And she always can remember numbers and I can't. But I do think it seems like eight is correct. I see. Yeah. Yeah. And I worked just on the phone with our graphic designer and she was asking me and I was like, that's a good question. I think it's eight. I don't know. Exactly. Oh my god, that means it's like almost over. Does it have to be? I know. I am kind of proud about it. It's real. That it's halfway through May. God. Say it. OK. So here's the thing with tracking KPIs at any level. And getting into housekeeping specifically, I think it's-- we can get a little trigger happy with KPIs and start to want to pull everything. And when thinking through, like, what should I actually be tracking, ensuring that you can make actionable decisions off of it, I think, is the very first step. And if the answer is no, then that might be fun to look at. And that is definitely a use case sometimes. Maybe you go in once a month and you look at a dashboard and you just kind of have more insights into things. But unless you are making like quick decisions based off of this data, it's probably not worth looking at weekly. So every KPI or OKR, understanding what it is, why it matters, and how to track it are the three questions that you really want to answer whenever you're thinking through, like, is something worth pulling. And it takes time to go in and set up dashboards, no matter what CRM you're using or whether it's through your PMS. Someone is likely manually pulling this information, putting it into a spreadsheet or putting it into a dashboard. And so thinking through, like, OK, is this worth taking someone's time to pull this information and then can we use this to make further decisions? So there are four housekeeping KPI's that I absolutely love. This is so timely. We're just keeping in house, like, right now. Oh, OK. And like, trying to get all this help from people on the industry to help get it set up. So you literally are just like so on the nose. It's not even funny. OK. Well, I want you to tell me, OK, so you're not tracking housekeeping KPI's yet, right? Because you haven't brought it in house. But you will be just starting. Yeah. OK. So these are my four favorites. And I want you both to tell me if you feel-- Ashley, I'm interested in your perspective, not to put pressure on you as someone who is outside of, like, the operation side of being an actual property manager, what you think, and if you feel like these sound good from an outside perspective or anything's missing. So I find if you start to track more than, like, three to five per department, it becomes very overwhelming. So the first thing is the average time to complete a clean. And this should be relatively easy to track with the industry now 10 years ago. This was not a thing. But now you have the ability where you can go in and a housekeeper can press a button to start a clean and then press a button to stop a clean. And it tells you how long they were at a property for a specific amount of time. And I think that this is important for you to understand as a business leader, like how long is it actually taking people to complete these cleans? And from just like paying perspective, with paying your housekeepers, talking to your homeowners, understanding how much time a home takes to manage. And you can say, like, okay, if we're going to bring on a 10 bedroom home, it's going to take us 11 hours to clean it. We might need to adjust our check-in and check-out dates if there is a turn on a specific date versus a two bedroom condo, right? And just kind of getting these baseline understanding so you know what your cost to clean typically looks like for these sized properties. And you also can set a baseline to where if a crew is taking a really, really long time or if they're finishing very, very quickly, you can understand if maybe they're not hitting their efficiency metrics as set by you and the team. So that's number one. Two is cleaning cost per property, which I think I've talked to both of you about. Tell us, Boo, and the face on previous episodes. So I won't really talk about that. That thing we have to right now. The topic is like so current for me. I talked to two clients today. Poor, oh my gosh, Ashley on the first one, we talked to this morning. She was like, Megan, do you want to get into pricing? And then I think I talked for 30 straight minutes without taking a single pause. And she probably was like, okay, well, thank you for the tips and advice. And I'll be talking to you guys in a couple of months. It is very overwhelming, but I think knowing what your cleaning cost is per property is arguably the most important KPI on the housekeeping side. So you can ensure that you're not losing your money and what is such can be such a profitable part of your company. Your inspection pass, salary. So what I would love to know, and Ashley, I mean, you've probably talked to three times as many property managers throughout your career, then I have like how many property managers are doing inspections in addition to claims. Do you find that pretty often? They do inspections more on a quarterly or biannual level. I think it's really unique where we talk to some property managers that do the pre-arrival inspections. And there's even more the higher end, you know, more service oriented property managers. I do lower like property to people ratio. I do think when these inspections and maybe thinking through like what does that look like when you're only performing inspections on a quarterly basis, but this like inspection pass fail rate, particularly when you're doing them for each check-in, like how often. And that gives you a gauge on your housekeeping performance in general when you have an inspector that comes in. And if you have a certain crew that is failing every single inspection or three quarters of their inspections for you to make those staffing adjustments. And then your top three recurring guest complaints. And I think this is huge honestly as it relates to inhaven and how we are helping clients like if you are getting complaints about your pillows consistently, then like it's probably time to buy new pillows. Or if your top complaint is the discomfort of your sheets, like that tells you something. But first like tracking these KPIs and or these complaints that you're getting and assigning a value to them if you have to issue a refund or credit a guest in some way toward a future stay. I think allows you to make future decisions toward those departments in your company. What do you think Rachel? Do you feel like this is feasible for you? Or are you like there's no way? No, no, it's totally feasible. It's just like it is overwhelming because you know realistically it's like coming from a place where you're just grinding all the time and not necessarily focused on the tracking of things, which is just really not efficient and not helpful. But like can be reality and then moving into a place where you start to do it, it's super overwhelming. But I also have seen it be super helpful. So Ashley, when working with clients on the inhaven side, are you seeing that a majority of customers are tracking some type of efficiency on the housekeeping side or not usually? They are. I think they are. I think it's more just making sure I mean you have such a great recommendation all across. You should consider when looking at housekeeping and the fees that you should be charging. I think what we're what we're really doing with our property managers is working with them to turn house supplies into or home supplies into revenue generators. And so really looking at okay, what is the cost to turn a home? What are those housekeeping fees? What's the cost of the products, all that kind of stuff and just making sure that they're charging enough to make a margin off of each of turn. And Rachel's our case study right here. Yeah, I mean because we're like we are just looking at all this now. I don't even know Ashley if Julie from my team has brought this up to you yet, but like because we had some options posed to us by like another consultant that we work with in terms of like getting house keeping supplies. I don't even know that I realized in Haven, does in Haven do the chemicals and stuff for housekeepers? Oh my god. Yeah, okay. So like we have started looking at pricing options. And when you just said that it could be a way to create some profit, I was like thinking literally I was thinking what I can. I'm not even not joking. I'm just going to be like I'm going to be the most like make one of my self person ever on a podcast. So many people have said to me like you shouldn't say all that stuff like you shouldn't admit you know and I'm like this is who I am. And I think our clients like us because we're honest and we're authentic and like we're transparent. But the truth is we've never been able to do anything but lose a little bit of money on housekeeping and the linens and stuff. And like Megan has been so inspiring and what in Haven has helped us get to like try to work to a place where we could either break even a reprofitable. And then I hadn't even thought I mean I'm not going to lie. I had not thought that we would be able to potentially make a profit off of the supplies. I literally my husband and I had been talking about bringing housekeeping inside and we thought we were looking at how much it will cost to bring housekeeping in house. And we were thinking one of the big costs would be supplies. And we didn't think that we would ever have I didn't know we could recruit that. Like welcome to the reality. So I mean the other Smith is so helpful because it's like oh you can do that like cool can someone tell me how and it's like yeah people are out there and they can tell you how and that's so great because it didn't used to be like this and I just love in Haven so much and I'm sorry that I'm like this but it's like really you can do that and you can tell me how like that's so freaking valuable both like time wise and like comfort as owning a business but also like actual money and profit wise. It's easy. And Megan you've done a great job at your your previous companies and sort of making a profit off of housekeeping. Can you talk about how you broke down that to get to that that cost and then the margin? Yeah of course so it all starts at the property level which is unfortunate from what your spreadsheet is going to look like but very fortunate because it allows you to have these like very specific one-off conversations about how you're performing at each property level. So the first step is understanding what revenue you're bringing in per property and how many turns that specific home has which this is easy to pull right like you pull it from your PMS and include the number of bedrooms bathrooms and your total occupancy. So what you really want to see here is and this is typically directly correlated right your larger homes a lot of the times have less turns because there are longer stays versus like a two bedroom condo but there's so much more to clean because the square footage is that much higher and if you're paying cleaners on a square footage rate which you often see with like contracted housekeepers I don't know if that's how you were doing it previously Rachel. Well then it seems right for a while. It's great. Then it's easy to kind of multiply the square footage times what you're paying the housekeepers but I think these conversations navigating them with homeowners when you can speak to like hey the reason your housekeeping fee is $800 a turn is because you have a 10 bedroom home with four bunk beds and it takes our team this is why it's important to track the time it takes to clean a house eight hours every single time they're going to clean and we're having to pay two housekeepers $27 each in order to clean this so here's our cost. So first figuring out what your actual cost to clean is and this is completely determined on what you are paying your housekeepers and how long it is taking you to clean the house if that if you're paying them hourly or what the piece rate is so just figuring out what your cost to clean is is like first and foremost and then the second thing is your amenity cost and this can be typically broken down per turn so let's say you're providing body agro fee shampoo conditioner body wash massage bars all the like amenity setup plus a small kitchen setup and if you can get a general cost of okay that's $7.50 on every single turn this home turns approximately 26 times this is how much it costs to put amenities in this property every single year and then you have your housekeeping supplies and your laundry costs so this this is determined on a couple of things right like are you renting your laundry do you have your own laundry facility if you have your own laundry facility I was talking to to client stay in the way that I told her to do it was to get her electric and water bills monthly and divide by the number of turns that she's had. I mean, here's the thing. Like, you're not going to get the most accurate. Like, it exactly costs me X amount when you have your own laundry facility and you don't really understand versus like when you are paying somebody or a laundry facility where they're charging you per piece or poundage. It can be a little harder to track, but you can get close enough for you have something where it's easy to tie into this spreadsheet overall and you can have a baseline understanding of like, okay, it's $100 a turn or whatever that may be cost-wise. And then that same thing goes for the cost of your cleaning supplies as well. So you could take like your monthly cleaning supplies bills and just divide that by number of properties and number of turns. And then you should have your total cost to clean this property on an annual basis. Like, this is what I'm paying the housekeepers. This is what I'm paying for cleaning supplies for laundry and for amenities. And it will probably surprise you. But that is how housekeeping fees should be developed. And I think right now, because it is so overwhelming to think about creating this spreadsheet and pulling all of this data, which can be kind of hard to get a hold of. And I will admit that like there isn't a five reports that you can just go and pull in five minutes or else everybody would be doing this, right? There's a reason why a lot of property managers don't. It's time consuming. You start to see that your cost is probably a lot higher than you're expecting it to be. And that allows you to kind of build in this margin and then go and set your house keeping fees. And then if you get any pushback, either from guests who are like, "Whoa, your housekeeping fees really high," or from owners, you can say, "Well, the cost to clean this property is pretty high in and of itself because we're covering this that and the other." And we're cleaning everything on every single turn to ensure that it is fresh and clean for your arrival. Which, like we always say that. I always tell homeowners that they're complaining about it, that we're losing money on this. But the truth is, it's hard for me to show them that. And see, if we did all this work, we would be able to actually show them. I can be transparent, but here's how much we pull in annually for the cost of cleanings for homeowners. And here's how much we make. Sorry, here's how much we make and here's how much we pay out using what you're talking about. Megan, that kind of a whole spreadsheet with all the components. And we could really show, like here, I'm not lying. Because I think a lot of the time our guests and homeowners do complain because we do have high cleaning costs in our mountain towns where we are. And people always think we're making so much money off of it. And the truth is, we're losing money off of it. And it's like, I promise, I'm sure, it's already an nonprofit center for it. Like it's already like we should like some sort of charitable operation. So yeah, and like, and I think, so there's so many reasons to gather all this information and whether you're looking at it for KPIs and or for, you know, making sure that you're running a profitable, profitable business or just also to have the information to share with your guests and homeowners when these kind of things come up, depending on what level of sharing you want to do. It's worth it, you know, it is hard. Like you said, it's really hard to put the time towards it. Because when you're grinding away and you don't have a big team and if you're like, our team and we're not, we don't have extra people who are, you know, we do have Brad on our team who's amazing, numbers and revenue management and stuff like that. But we don't have extra people that are doing tons of work with spreadsheets and stuff. And so when you don't have that, it's even more daunting. Because it's like what me and Rob are we gonna do this? And like that's, you know, crazy with all the rest of the stuff we have to do. And so honestly, again, just like hearing other people from other companies like you, Megan, and just having a resource like in Haven, and I know I say it a million times, but I don't care. It's true. It's like true a million times over. Like that's the gift. Because some of this stuff you just can't possibly know how to do it on your own. And or you can't create, you know, the math, math, next time a spreadsheet on your own and or, you know, you maybe even if you kind of could, you would get it wrong and it would be a waste of time. And having resources where it could be like, really explain here's exactly what you need to include in your calculations. It's like, oh, I mean, and it sounds silly that like I never knew that before, but you know, I didn't, and I think a lot of people don't know that yet. So yeah, I think it's it's common because it's, I mean, just explaining it takes 20 minutes, you know, and so you're like, okay, this is going to take a resource that has to go and pull all this information. And one thing I think that it becomes common when implementing these KPI specifically at a housekeeping level. And Ashley and I like, I've heard this on demo calls, right, is a customer will say, God, I don't want to ask housekeeping to do another thing or the idea of like adding something else to their plate or tracking something and they feel like they're being watched. Like were there is this fragility around housekeeping that exists in every single market because housekeepers are really hard to find. And when you have good housekeepers, like they are extremely valuable. So the idea of them feeling anything other than complete job satisfaction for a job that already is so hard is really difficult. And Ashley, like, I'm sure you've gotten that a lot over time. Like, do you have advice used to combat that or how have you approached it previously? Yeah, I think so much of it goes into training with the housekeeping team and just checking in with them and hearing their concerns and show that you're trying to help them by making your processes more efficient or giving them the tools that they need. So I think that's just that two-way relationship. It's always, it's one thing to say, go pull this number for me and they just, but if they understood why they're pulling the numbers that you're trying to look into, how do we make their department or their area more profitable, giving them transparency into why? I think you can get them on board. Yeah, Rachel, have you faced this as well? Well, I mean, housekeeper fragility is like that really strikes a chord with me because yeah, it's like, you know, for us, we've gotten to a point. And like I said, we're looking at bringing housekeeping in house over in the process right now. But, you know, the way we've done it up until now, it's like we have great teams and then we don't have any, we barely have any complaints about housekeeping, right? So we get all these great reviews. We have amazing cleans. And so that's never been really our problem. You know, there's other things like I said, like profitability or even just being able to lose money on it is, you know, probably our biggest issue, which is why we're looking for getting in house. But the concept of like, you know, oh, we've gotten to a point where everyone's trained and we have really good cleaning results, then you just don't want to mess with it, right? Because it's like it is a very fragile ecosystem of these people that oftentimes have been there's language barriers and there's, you know, issues with keeping the same people year after year and hitting the right, you know, payroll amount so that you could possibly have any profitability and getting all of that to work. And then, you know, your number one thing, right, is that your guest and your homeowners are happy. So when you have that, you're kind of like, no one breathed like it's like it's like a stack of like a, what does that call when you make cards into like a, why can't you? What is a health of cards? When you just, like, don't want to breathe on it. Like no one moved. Like no one jostled the floor of this building because if you do, in this falls, we work so hard to build the house cards. So it's like you have it and then you're just like, and then if someone says like, you know what? Because like for us right now, our housekeepers put the soap and shampoo and the properties and actually what was it? Because it was in Haven was talking about this with us. We were saying like we were going to have the housekeepers. Oh, we were going to have the housekeeper do linens and they were going to get them like with pick sheet, which we're going to be doing now that it's in house. But like before we could brought it in house, it was like, well, can we do pick sheets so that they could get the, it was like, no, just leave it the way it is. Don't change it because they're all freak out. And then, you know, and so I that resonates with me and I think honestly having KPIs and having like processes in place with your team could probably allow the team to do better with housekeeping or any other area of the company so that there isn't so much fear about things being so fragile. But like, you know, realistically, it's there that fear and that concern, especially once you've gotten Joe Point where you have really good execution and you have really good results. And then you just don't want to do anything and then you have to always continually be like like doing things even though you're scared because you're like, well, we have to make this more profitable, right? Like we, I mean, Rob and I have been keeping housekeeping the way we've had it for all these years, mostly out of fear because we have good housekeeping and we didn't want to mess with it. Yeah. So, I mean, this is like these are all steps in the path. So like stop acting from fear, start acting out of like data and efficiency. And that's just really hard. It sounds really good to talk about it, but it's really hard. But also having process that explain to people and having tools like this and all this, that's what makes it go from something you refuse to do because you're too scared to something you're like, okay, we can actually do it. Let's do this. To Ashley's point to like explaining the context for the decisions that you're making, I think is really important. And then one thing in housekeeping that I realized, I don't know a couple of years ago is that I was punishing for bad behavior, but I wasn't rewarding for good behavior, which I'm embarrassed to admit. But I think it's honestly common like going to a crew and saying like what the hell you've had these five complaints over the last month, rather than going to a crew, which of course needs to be done, that hasn't had any complaints in six months and giving them a bonus for that, right? And like oftentimes these housekeeping crews, especially in really small towns, like they're all friends and they talk, right? And so I would rather a crew say, hey, we just got this thousand dollar bonus or whatever this bonus because we haven't had any complaints and like allowing that to be a positive example. And I'm like, I felt so silly that it took so long where I'm like, no wonder we're not having great success with our housekeeping teams because it's like ruling with this iron hammer, which is super shitty. And I also think like this pushback on transparency in terms of financials is such an interesting conversation. So I have firmly laid on one side of this and I'm really curious what y'all's thoughts are. But I went to work for a company that did not have any transparency with financials. And I really struggled with that. Like I had access to them, but nobody else did. And I was like, how are we supposed to explain the data that we're tracking and how it's going to make us more profitable as a company if nobody understands like what our financials look like at all. And the response that I got was like, well, we just don't want the team like knowing how much money the company makes. And we don't feel like it's necessary. And this, that and the other, when I'm thinking in my head, well, they obviously know we are making money because the leadership team is going on three week trips to Europe and like someone's driving a Porsche, right? Like and I think with lack of information comes speculation, right? People start to assume maybe that you're making a lot more money than you actually are. Or alternatively, maybe people can be concerned that the company isn't making money. And so I think actually 360 did a really great job of this where the company was open booked. But it was never like, here are the financials and then move on to the next slide. It would be like, hey, here's what our revenue goal is for the year. Here's how much after we pay employees, after we pay our bills, after we do this, that and the other, here's like what the actual margin of the company is. And then we use this money to reinvest back into the company. And you know, we're proud of the salaries and income that our team does make. But in reality, like we make a lot less, like you might see our revenue goal as millions and millions of dollars in your eyes get really big and you think the company's making all this money. But there are so many expenses that come with running a business. And I have felt like when introducing KPIs and making big business decisions and this like fragility of teams in general, it can be easier when you're like providing this fund, these financials with a lot of context so people can understand why you're making the decisions that you are. And ultimately like, hey, it can lead to more money for the whole team later on down the road, the more successful we are. But I want to hear both of your thoughts as business owners. And to see like, I've obviously never owned a business. So maybe I'm crazy. What do you guys think? - Would you say what you think for a fashion? 'Cause you know what I mean? - Well, I think, you know, there's various ways. I think the ultimate goal is to get people invested in the strategy and talk people invested in your vision and understand their context and how they're playing towards it. So I think there's like very sensitive information that you wouldn't want to get out there that you really just trusted your leadership team versus the entire company. I mean, we share a lot of numbers because we were a public company at Home Depot or a ticketing company that I had access to. But it's making sure that people understand, here are goals. Here's the really important part that you're playing in achieving these goals. And here are some of the, you know, if you're talking about margins or whatever, here are some of the cost drivers that are pulling our margins down. Or this is, you know, this is what we're making at the end of the day. But just being sensitive to what information can be publicly shared versus, you know, what's private and using different lovers to get people engaged on the strategy. - Mm-hmm. - Yeah, so I'll say like in the very beginning, I definitely like to me, it just all this relates back to tribal leadership. One of my favorite books so much. - So fun. - And when I read it, like the part that resonated with me the most at that point, which was like seven or eight years ago, was like the stage two thing of like where you feel like, like everyone's a, like all of your competitors are like, like you're like you can't, like I'm great, but everyone else is in kind of a thing, you know? And like so you're like the fear that you have or like the, this way that you want to be like constantly, sort of like angrily competing with everyone around you, but and you're not like as open. And so like that to me, it feels related to the way that I used to feel about the transparency of our business, which was there was so much more fear when we started. So I was afraid to let anyone know how good or bad we were doing. And what's funny is we were always doing so well, and we never even like realized it till later. We just thought we were, I don't know, we didn't know. And so I remember thinking that like we maybe weren't doing well enough and I didn't want, you know, our employees to know that or our competitors and I sometimes felt like if our employees knew like they're gonna tell, I don't know, like I had this fear. I did have a lot of fear I've been in it. And and then I remember the same feeling that you just mentioned, Megan, I had that in the beginning too, which I do think that something that you can maybe if you're going to therapy or if you like are always working on some of this self-development, like you can work through it, but there was a fear of like if the employees know how much money we make, then somehow like they are gonna, you know what I really thought, I think I always thought they're gonna go start their own business. I'm like they're gonna go just do what we're doing, right? I mean, you have many, I probably thought that for 10 years. Like I was always afraid that people were gonna just go and make their vacation rental company. And when I learned over the time, I was like, no, most people do not want to go dive into all this crap that we did, right? Just found it fun and easy. So I was like, well aren't they all just gonna go start their own company? And when I learned, just like no one that's ever worked here has really done, okay, wait, one person had, but it didn't go well. And honestly, they're like, we don't want to. But that be a lesson to everyone. That guy's in jail now for real. And that's a story for another podcast. But like no one else has ever done it, okay? It doesn't happen. It's a real feel like that was not real. But I did have that fear for many years. So I didn't have transparency and I didn't want to, because I had all these fears around, all these different irrational and rational things. And then now more recently, we become very transparent with our team. We started doing budgets. Yes, I know. Once we in the face, we didn't do budgets until like a few years ago. What? I know, but okay. And so but doing budgets, then that's like, that was creating all this transparency within the team of like how much we make and how much everything costs and how much everyone gets. And we're careful to not like let everyone see how much each other makes because I know that that can be a thing. Although I actually don't have a company role against people talking about it because personally, I think people are going to talk about it anyway. So just why I think it's illegal, right? I don't know, but I, like you're, you can put something in the contract to say, like they're not supposed to tell, talk about that with each other. But I'm always like, who cares? Some of you can talk about it. They're going to talk about it. I'm not stopping them. Like whatever it's like it is what it is. But anyway, so my opinion is like more transparency that we've had more therapy than Robin, I've had we've been able to be much more comfortable. So I feel like everything, my team can know everything and they pretty much do. And like yes, my husband and I make a lot of money owning this company. Like yeah, I mean, but we used to not. But like it took 17 for years and now, yeah, we make money. And like I don't think that anyone on our team, well, I hope that they don't have like resentment about that because I feel like they make a lot of money too. And our team has like amazing insane benefits. And Robin, I have been busting our asses in every possible way for all these years. So like I think it's okay that we make some money now. But I do understand the transparency piece. And I really do think that the KBI and the OKR stuff, that feeding in and like being done alongside transparency is frigging everything. And like I said, I was on a call with one of our consultants this morning, we were talking about our upcoming company retreat and what we're gonna be talking about. We were literally talking about our OKRs. And we were literally saying talking about transparency with what our payroll numbers are and some other numbers within the company as part of the discussion about OKRs because we want everyone to understand how this all works for our business and how it all ties together. And we want them to know the real numbers. And like I feel like it's, especially when you're paying people well and when you have like generous compensation, you know that it's like someone has for a raise and they're grateful for it for like a second. But then we all just get used to wanting more and wanting more. And everybody is a lot of people are like that. And that's OK. But having the bigger picture on it and you know what you want and what payroll looks like at this company as compared to revenue and how we can all, if we want to increase payroll even higher, I'm not against it. But then how is that going to have to be impacted by revenue and tying that to the OKRs and the KPIs? Like this is the whole thing. Right? It makes it all make sense. Otherwise, if you just take part of that, like if you just take transparency or you, you know, whatever, you just take generous compensation or you just take KPIs or OKRs and you don't do the whole thing, it doesn't really. It's not as powerful by any means as having all those parts in that little process. It's the boat metaphor that I like to use in the rowing. We're all like basically everybody, your team's in a boat in good to grade. They use the bus metaphor, which I've all had. But everybody has an or in the boat and like they don't know what direction you're rowing in unless you tell them what direction to go in and like why you're rowing this direction. But how can you expect an entire boat of people to be like, hey, I want everybody to be rowing this way. And to say, OK, great. That sounds amazing. No, that requires trust and buy-in and transparency and a good culture and tracking of performance and decision making based on data, which these KPIs I think are so important because you have this like very concrete information to where when you make a business decision or pivot in some way or if you don't hit your goals and you can't pay out X amount compensation, you can say, well, this is because this KPI was directly tied to our business income, which is directly tied to our EBITDA and all the things. Yeah. So I give it a-- Yes. OK, so we got through two departments, right? The company level and housekeeping. So-- And I believe it's mainly largely due to my fault. So a couple of wrap up questions for you guys. I actually, like from-- your perspective, how do you feel that standardization and this like measurable KPI tracking? How do they all fit in together? So when we are talking to a company about a linen program, like how does it all fit into the bigger picture of company profitability? Yeah, so I think you look at KPI's per key stakeholder. So you know, that's the property manager. So the KPI is you should be looking at it from a standardization perspective are, you know, what percentage of your homes are on the standards to create just about our guest experience and less operational headaches for your team. And then also with that, by getting your homes on standards, there will be cost savings, time savings, so looking at the the labor and cost savings that you're achieving as a percentage as a key performance indicator. And then from the owner perspective, obviously it's looking at your owner buy-in, what percentage of your owners you have, what types of marketing materials are getting that informs what types of marketing materials you'll need. But this should be a really key sell for your owners and just in terms of the professionalization that you have for your company and the industry. And then from a guest perspective, looking at guest reviews and whatnot, because you should see those increase the more you standardize and create just about our guest experience. So I think, you know, it's one thing to implement standards. You also need to be measuring against them to make sure that the data is telling you the right things and that will award if you need to fix something and just to alleviate a lot of the operational stress on your team. Rachel, what is your perspective on overall like owner communication and tweaks to the operational side of your business with this KPI tracking? Like after this conversation, do you feel like you can go in and now like implement these KPI's with your housekeeping team and move forward effectively? I mean, you know, it's crazy because I was just, I'm not gonna lie, I'm never gonna lie, you guys, I'm always gonna tell you the truth. This podcast should be called Not Gonna Lie. Yeah, Not Gonna Lie. Rachel just tells everything she's not supposed to be telling everyone. But no, so as we were sitting here, I was like, they're gonna ask me about one of my KPI's. I don't remember any of them, my own. And Helen's texting me right now. I'm watching them come through. But I would, I'm not kidding. It's like deepening our connection to homeowners through property care and enhancements, deepening our connection to one another through living our values like some of this stuff. These are like company wide ones. But to me, the part about like the OKRs and how that this is gonna like help your operational excellence or whatever, it's like this, there's no denying that okay, this relates to me to like this conversation I've had a lot at conferences about values because I've been like going on panels and telling people like, you know, when we finally developed our company values with these consultants from Tandemly, that like it really changed the way that everyone in our company worked because they're sort of self-policing and you know, things go differently. And then I think that that really relates to the OKRs and KPI's too because it's like again, if you're developing that with your team or with like collaboration from your team, there's another one she just sent me. It's so good. Map and manifest authentic mountain town hospitality. There's one of our OKRs. Hello, is this so Rachel that I think I wrote that one. But so like working on these like with our team. And then obviously I don't look at them enough because I couldn't remember any, but that's probably a function of Mike's was cheese brain. But like having all these things written out and then having the team with the department like the raw department directors going back and looking at the OKRs or KPIs that you create every quarter or every six months or year or whatever. Like to me, that is how you get the excellence because it is one thing to say like we want excellence in housekeeping with really good reviews and no one complaining or like we want excellence with our guest days and that we want really good reviews from the guest saying that they had a great time and that they book again and that we can you know have rates that are you know, really good strong rates because we have all this good reputation. But it's like how how like it's it's possible to get to that point without OKRs or KPIs like you could start without any of this you could bust your ass you could grind super hard you could get magic and have an amazing team of people that care a lot and you could make it happen. Like how do you keep that happening for a long time and that's how you could really make money right because in the beginning, you know, it's not going to be as profitable as you just like throw all this to get it through all. But then if you want to keep it going, this is where you have to have OKRs and KPIs and you have to have people like Megan and Ashley and people that have that sort of operational process mind where they're like helping to give you frameworks to operate within so that you can continue to be like now we know either we know where we want to go because we're striving to get to a point we haven't been before or we know where we want to go because we've been there we got there. But now how do we stay here right and it's like OKRs it's not going to happen by accident every year forever. It's like we're going to have to figure out how how we do this right and how do we keep doing it and that to me is like all these parts of your KPIs are OKRs where you can either work backwards like we do or if you're starting new and you're coming into the industry now and there's all this software and all these cool people to help you maybe you're starting from nothing and you want to get to it whichever way you're going you need these like steps right to track against so that your team knows what they're supposed to be doing and are they going like you said Megan in the right direction and if they're not getting there like what are the reasons that you're not getting there and you know these are the tools that you can use to do that and it's taken me 17 years to figure this out but it's like for sure this is not an opinion this is true and and yeah is that what you asked I'm not sure yeah I love it. Rachel answer you probably asked me like what's two plus two and I was all hold on let me just go on. Not going to lie not going to lie. OK so my challenge for the listeners over this next month really well I guess we have like another three weeks left two weeks left after this. Oh wow. OK over the next two weeks is to pick two KPIs and start tracking them and we went through seven today so they don't have to be the seven they could be something else there are maybe we could talk about this at some point but there are like emotional KPIs that I think are really interesting too. Oh like sentiment and like owner sentiment or guest sentiment that I think those are harder to track like quantitatively but I do believe that there are like emotional KPIs that can play a part in specific circumstances so pick two KPIs start tracking them we're definitely doing it on the end haven't side and I can't wait to hear about it. I don't know what we're doing for the next episode so someone's going to have to tease it and then Rachel you're going to have to sign us off. Yeah I mean here's the thing I don't think we know we're talking about next time but like we didn't know what we were going to talk about this time when we signed off last time and look what it led to like if people listen to this conversation and if they aren't excited about what they can do with their KPIs and OKRs I don't even understand who you are like if you're listening and you're just like I didn't get anything from this like I don't I think honestly you should go on like what is it psychology today and like I think you should get some therapy or if you're not doing that like you should go talk to your friend and let them listen to this episode and then let them tell you is there really nothing here because I feel like there's so much here and look this came out of us not knowing what we were going to talk about so what that tells me is that our next episode next week could be this amazing or even more because we are going to be coming up with it in the next few days just like what happened last week and magic out of that pure magic. Ashley's probably going to take back the mic after she's like these two. I can't walk you. What could you do a whole episode of that? math and manifest. Yeah. I literally I had a moment where I was like could we change the name of the company to math and manifest. I had a moment like because I want to hear all of that. Yeah and then I was like I need to I just came up like those aren't even yeah so this is how I live my life. So between now and then the next few days who knows we're going to come up with something amazing to all my know you're listening and Sarah I know you're listening and so if you guys want to send us text messages with thematic suggestions let us know anyone who's listening the millions of you or the tens of you or maybe the the hundreds or that maybe we count by two's I don't know however many. I wonder if I then feel free to go on LinkedIn. We have there's a hospitality break room like LinkedIn page and then obviously all three of us have our own pages. I feel like no one's really like I could pretend and I feel like we get people commenting on our LinkedIn like sending us private messages all the time but we don't so like if you want to be the first if you're one of those people do it but someone could you could give us an idea. I'm not saying we're going to use it because we might come up with a really good idea that we can't deny but anyway feel free to be part of the process if you'd like otherwise please don't forget to come and to back in next week on Monday for the next episode even though this episode actually is going to come out on a Tuesday or Wednesday but don't let that deter you this is just the world is not perfect everything is not black and white. You can run your toes in your past yeah and otherwise thanks for listening and we hope you got a ton out of this I think there's no way that you couldn't have but I'm crossing my fingers if you can't see me I hope you did and otherwise thanks for listening to to the hospitality break room and to wait what's my you guys why do I always do this wait it's served served weekly. Thank you. Certainly served weekly see I knew it was a seaword but I just I couldn't remember which one but that's I don't think that has anything to say about anything here and are there that's just that's how the Rachel bring work so everyone have a great week until we talk to you next time and thanks for listening bye bye.