Unraveling Decades of experience with Steve Trover

welcome back to the short-term rental riches podcast there's so many experts out in the field I'm excited to have another one join us today someone with over 26 years of experience in the short-term rental industry yes folks that was far before Airbnb and and those types of sites so today we have Steve on from better Talent well that's his most recent company but he's got a whole bunch of experience Steve welcome to to the show hey thanks Tim thanks for having me really appreciate it yeah

excited to have you on today and and pick your brain a little bit we we try to provide quick actionable tips on this podcast for anyone in the short-term industry or looking to get their first short-term rental or building their short-term rental portfolio and looking for a team which I know you have a ton of experience when it comes to the team side of things but before we get into kind of that piece you want to just give us a quick background yeah certainly so started

um in the strr industry in '97 uh here in the Orlando area where I'm based um started a little property management company a couple properties and grew that over the course of two decades um into 400 properties across four different destinations so we were here in Orlando Captiva Island Florida was one of our locations San Diego California so the La Hoya area and then uh Sun Valley Idaho and uh really enjoyed running that business business all those years grew it from you know just myself to

over 100 employees um so scaled it not not rapidly though very um very slowly but surely over that the course of those two decades um on top of that developed a proprietary PMS platform back in the day believe it or not there wasn't a lot of options on the software side today it seems like there's almost too many um so we designed and and built one with a developer and then I ultimately became the chief strategy officer of a company called livez as a part-time job

while I was running my businesses and that software us like I buy a lot of vacation rental shortal managers today um and then I'm the former vice president and president over a fiveyear period of the vacation rental Managers Association um took it into Europe during my tenure uh spent a lot of time with industry trade associations and then also had a real estate company um so we only kind of exclusively sold Str strs um we had a interior design company so we would furnish pretty much

everything that came into our inventory um whether that was new construction or an existing property uh and then ultimately developed a company called purpose built vacation homes where we designed spec and build vacation home properties really high producers um specifically started out here in the Orlando area it started to scale out over time so a lot of different aspects of the industry um absolutely love this industry I will probably never leave it um today I have a company called better talent that focuses on helping companies

in the space build their teams everything from a general manager to housekeepers and maintenance tax Frontline that type of thing and we work with over 200 um shortterm metal companies across the country yeah gosh awesome and so many so many ways to go um let's see where should we start I I think the purpose built short-term rentals is a really in interesting subset of the short-term Rental World and something that we're actually seeing quite a bit more of now is people are kind of living in

short ter rentals a lot of times H what what got you into what led you down that route absolutely um really it was um working with Builders here in the Orlando area and here it's it's a pretty unique St Market Orlando in the sense that a lot of the big box Builders so like your py lar big scaled um home home builders would build short teral communities here close to Disney um the problem with that is is they would only listen so much to us uh

professionals on what to build meaning they they take floor plans and maybe add some bedrooms but not add enough living space they have big walk-in closets they'd have things you didn't need and not things you did need and so um we would try to influence them over the years but frankly it just was challenging because they had a certain box they would work within and so my dream was like hey I want to really build the what the guests really want what will perform the best

for investors and I think doing that we need to really to have an R&D process and there wasn't one in the industry if you think about every product in fact every product were in front of our desk right now there's an R&D process to it and there wasn't an an Str Str and so we started doing focus groups looking at data and really um we actually trademarked the term guest influence design because we really want wanted the guest to decide what should be built and so

we really studied what that was what performed the best financially what operated the best um what was easy to maintain and clean and really design that into the product um the other thing that influenced me was the hotel industry and if you look at the evolution of hotels it kind of started out like Str Str in the sense that there was just all these like individually designed hotels really wasn't a lot of structure or R&D around that until kimens Wilson came around and started holiday in

and in the 50s and really designed a structured Hotel product and now today all Hotel products other than like boutiques are very structured and so I saw that Evolution probably going to happen in the industry and that's when we trademark purpose buil vacation homes and kind of launched that concept this was really we we built the first one believe it or not at the end of ' 08 right when everything fell apart um and the and nobody was building anything um I always seem to start

at the very bottom of something and that was a good time to do that so um even though it didn't seem like it at time seemed kind of scary quite frankly so um but it it worked out really well the first one we ever built was the top performing at that time uh rental in the Orlando market It produced half a million dollars in advanced bookings in the first 12 months existence so it was uh really amazing it was a nine-bedroom home and we built a

lot of seven eight nine 10 11 12 14 bedroom properties here in Orlando so yeah that's awesome well a couple really important points there I think one of the things you said is that while you're doing your R&D you really figured out who is going to be staying there and so that's really important for all of us out there we need to know who Our Guest Avatar is um and make sure that our property fits for them so real real important piece of the puzzle there

unequivocally and we would come up with the different types of avatars if you will guest profiles soccer mom baby boomer grandma with a bunch of kids and grandkids that type of thing and we actually did focus groups with kids we brought them in because they were such a big part of obviously the Orlando market and so knowing what it is whether that's a girlfriend getaway or golfers or whatever it is understanding the need the unique needs of those groups and designing that into the product and

the service that you provide so yeah yeah good good stuff Steve and I think a lot of this is so much easier to do now than it was back then too right we didn't have air DNA and a lot of these other tools yeah we were constantly um just looking for some type of data that we could make decisions around a lot of our data was internal we did work with destination marketing organizations on kind of who was coming to the market that type of thing

U but you didn't have occupancy and ADR data to your point there was no revar information and really didn't understand demand other than what we saw within our own systems um and so that today um you can make a lot better data driven decisions um on what to build where to build how to build it all those things with the technology that exists but I will say I find a lot of people don't use that for that purpose and I think there's a gap there and

an opportunity for a lot of people um yeah no it yeah super important and it and it's so detailed now I mean like you mentioned you guys were building properties massive properties 10 11 12 bedrooms uh we can go on tools like airdna now or a lot of the pricing tools and see what the demand is for these different size properties and so really important to take a look at that if if anyone's planning on uh building from scratch which I think is exciting what's interesting

about that though is is it's really good to look at that data but also look at what maybe the data doesn't tell you and what I mean by that is for instance we did a survey of our own customer base we got 2,000 responses and if we asked them what's the bedroom count you'd need for your you know overarching your extended family to stay in a vacation home at the time and um 20% of our customer base said that they needed a nine-bedroom or larger we

didn't even have any in fact the market didn't even have any and so that told us wait there's a gap we can build bigger homes and that worked really really well and those were the top performers for a long time so so you know looking at the data is is really important but also what it may not be telling you um is important as well so great Point great Point well I A A lot of exciting stuff there a lot of different experience I think at

the end of the day though nothing in the short-term rental industry no short-term rental really functions well unless we have a good Hospitality component right that's sort of the name of the game and so to have or to offer a really good hospit really good experience and really good Hospitality we have to have good team and you guys know a whole bunch about building teams we're going to get into better Talent where you're you're sort of focused on now but before we do that do you

have just some some tips on you know for people out there that are maybe looking to hire a housekeeper or looking to hire a maintenance person how they might go about evaluating their options absolutely um you know when you're thinking about Frontline housekeeping maintenance Tex inspectors that type of thing um it's really important to get a lot of applicant flow and what I mean by that is a lot of times people will just throw up an out on indeed or just do one thing right and

and then they're like oh okay I've got sobody to choose from um it really it requires you to have a strong amount of applicant flow that you have enough to choose from so you can find those really kind of diamond in the rough people that were are ideal for that particular job the other thing I recommend and and something that we definitely do with every type of person that we help with hiring on is personality testing um housekeepers specifically a lot of times we'll hire somebody

that interviews well as a housekeeper because they're good at talking well when you're doing housekeeping you're not talking right so it's really more of a a reserve type person that's more ideal that doesn't need social interaction so if you hire somebody that needs that that's good in an interview they're probably going to churn same thing goes with um their behavioral trait as it pertains to being able to do repetitive tasks um this is you know housekeeping as we know you clean up once you got to

go back and do it again and and certain people are designed for that and certain people are not and so even you know lot of people think that personality testing is something you might do with like an executive or that type of thing I I completely disagree in fact think the front line is every bit as important to do that with than than other than all other aspects of the of the business and and housekeeping is the hardest part of this business um I don't think

that's shocker to anybody listening but um doing that well um makes everything else easier when the guest shows up and the property is gleaned um even if it's got a maintenance issue here or there that can be overlooked with it smells clean looks clean and is clean so doing that well is really really critical um and then maintenance the same thing I mean if in finding somebody that is best designed for the role um is critical and a lot of times we just kind of hire

whoever comes in and fogs the mirror so to speak and we find out that doesn't work um I you know I've been hiring people for 33 years um I did it badly for a long time before I started to really refine how we do it and the reason why I landed on town and and what we're why we're addressing that today is I think it's the hardest part of this business and I've done stuff in Tech I've done stuff with development and all those things is

are all the whole thing is hard but the people's side is the hardest part to get right but you have to be intentional on how you go about it yeah definitely definitely well well tell us just a little bit more about better Talent Steve um I think I know a lot of people on this show are probably not at the point where they're hiring someone full-time and so they're maybe looking out maybe maybe they have one short-term rental right now and they're not quite at that

Journey where they're bringing someone on full-time so um any thoughts on that and then just yeah yeah one of the things it's an exercise I really like to encourage everybody to do that's early stage like that they're thinking about maybe I want to bring on somebody full-time or maybe I just need to hire housekeepers and maintenance tax it's really um thinking about the parts of the business that um you like to do and don't like to do the things that you're good at and you're not

good at um most of us just kind of like don't put a lot of strategy around that early on um creating an organizational chart believe it or not when you're only by yourself is key right now if you have a Str Str and you're pushing it on the channels and you're doing all the things and you're providing Hospitality to guests you're doing marketing you're doing reservations you're doing accounting you're doing uh Guest Services guest know communication you're doing cleaning maintenance um all of those things are

happening so creating an organizational chart and putting your name on every single one of those things and then saying okay which ones of these do I like to do the least or or which ones are am I the worst at that's who I want to go hire for right and so as you're scaling you go from one property to two to three and I started with one and ended up with 400 so it it it can happen probably will happen if you wanted to to get

passionate about this thing but the only way to do that is with people and the best way to hire that first one is to do is have them do the things that you're not designed to do and so that's my biggest piece of advice is instead of just you know thinking well this is what everybody does they hire an x no you need to hire the thing that you do not want to do sometimes that's finance a lot of times we have people that hold on

to accounting way too long get themselves in trouble because of it so um whatever that is that you know that you have a weak spot in that's what we need to focus on first that also can be a full-time employee or maybe it's not and they not ready and that's just different vendors contractors vas um at better Talent we don't just do full-time employees we do all of the above we help with any type of talent um and we want to do that in the most

efficient way possible because it's the most expensive cost when you look at a a property management company if you decide that that's what you want to do and you want to start one when you get to 20 30 40 50 properties and you look at your profit and loss statement and your financials I get guarantee you the biggest cost structure will be people it will be either full-time employees part-time independent contractors Consultants whatever that is Vaas but the collective of that is generally over 50 60

sometimes 70% of the cost structure and so you really got to pay attention to that that part of it as you're growing um the other thing I would say about that initial hire when you get to that whether it's a contractor or a full-time employee if I had a 100 employees and I make a bad hire that's 1% of my company if I have only me and I hire somebody and it's a bad hire that's 50% of my company that was a bad hire and what

I mean by a bad hire is just somebody that's not a good fit for your particular role it's super costly not just to hire them but the training and all the time that you put into it so it's really imperative to spend the time to get the right person for whatever that role is early stage um because it it will be very very costly if you make a bad one if you do it well it'll pay dividends and that's when you'll be able to start to

scale the business so yeah totally some excellent points there uh you know I the reality is that there's things that we don't like doing like you mentioned sometimes we hold off on those there's an excellent book called who not how uh by Dan solivan I think which I really recommend anyone out there if you haven't read it yet but one of the things I took from that and that I've realized with my own business is that the things I was procrastinating with were things um that

I need to hire for first uh and so that that might be a good way if there's part of your business or part of your short-term rental operation right now where you see yourself procrastinating a lot or you don't want to respond then maybe look to fill your uh organizational chart with that position first so uh great yeah good stuff um well shoot let's see I I guess Steve you guys have hired a ton of people and that's what better Talent does it helps uh people

for specifically for the short- terminal industry I'll let you get more into that but for someone out there that's looking to hire maybe on their own they're just getting started do you have we mentioned personality test but do you have some just general tips or maybe questions that they might want to ask yeah um well before getting into the questions they ask I really I look at it as you're a recruiter right especially when we're talking Frontline um an example would be when I needed a

housekeeping manager I got to a certain skill I needed one um I didn't find her on indeed or a jobs board um I ended up finding her as a hostess at a steakhouse went up and handed her a business card she ended up working for us for 14 years never missed a clean she was amazing and I never would have um gotten to interview her or work with her had I not been aggressive and and saw somebody who was a hard worker I could tell she

was basically running the steakhouse from the hostess stand that that is somebody that we one on our team right so I heavily encourage you to be a recruiter um and always have those business cards or some type of card ready to handle them and say hey wouldd love to talk when you see somebody out in the field doing good work whe whatever that is and then as far as um having uh going through an interview and what questions to ask having a structured interview is so

critical I used to just ask kind of my favorite questions off the cuff and kind of make something up over time but it's really important to have very specific question questions for the role some situational questions um that's a part of we we offer um interview guides but even if you didn't use us and you just just go research online good interviewing um questions for specific roles and there are plenty of guidelines out there or guides that you can go um find on Google or whatever

um that will help you to do that the reason why you want to have a structured interview process is because when you're considering multiple candidates you want to ask the same question of each candidate and then rate them that way you're objectively looking at it you're not just doing it on feel because I'll tell you I used to think gut instinct was great you know and I just know people um generally study after study will tell you gut instinct is not going to be a good

predictor of whether somebody's going to be successful in a role so it's important to have that structured interview process in place even at the very beginning and again I think the first higher is the most important higher um it's the most expensive one if you screw it up so yeah I would agree um and I guess all this you know I know there's people out there that have been hiring or trying to hire and it's just a giant pain in the butt it's it's not easy

but it's something that gets easier right the more we do it uh and so luckily there are services like yours where if someone doesn't want to go through all the work to find um someone for their team um they can turn to a service like yours so you want to talk about better Talent what you guys are doing now yeah certainly so we are a talent acquisition and optimization company um we're a little bit of service or a lot of service and a little bit of

software so um we are a software company in the sense we have an applicant tracking software basically a hiring platform that you use to take people through the process we do most of the work for you though you you tell us what you want we create the job ad we create the job graphic we push it out on all the channels we send it to our database and then we set a job Target based on a personality traits we're looking for for a particular role so

if you need a housekeeper or a maintenance tech or housekeeping manager somebody from marketing whatever that is we're going to set a job Target based on their personality profile that is ideal for that position and filter applicants for you so we handle all the applicant uh marketing all the applicant communication kind of the back and forth up until the point that you decide you want to interview them or not uh we take them through the personality testing and we look at their resume on your behalf

based on the parameters that you gave us and then we send you applicants until you ultimately hire somebody we again hand you that interview guide with the specific questions in there that you can utilize to objectively ask those those applicants and we do this all on a subscription basis so it's a low cost um if you've ever looked at recruiters before I certainly did used to use them occasionally they charge a lot of money 20 30% of the salary um we don't we're not even close

to that we're really close to just what you would end up paying for indeed is our monthly subscription cost so um you can use us on a single higher so if you're early stage and you just want to do one um we we do that as well so and again we help with full-time part-time independent contractors Consultants Bas anything that you would need uh in and you know you hear the the term Tech stack we all have one right we use all the different technology we

call it the people stack and that's all the different people that up what you need to do and it's not just full-time employees and I'll tell you every day better Talent we actually talk people out of doing a full-time higher in some cases um because they're not ready for that particular thing and we sometimes will use a Contractor on a more part-time basis so um we're not here to pump your expenses we want to reduce your expenses and optimize that big expensive cost structure which is

the biggest one in you know as in this industry so good stuff good stuff there there um well we'll make sure we have all your info of course and our show notes so anyone can find you but couple couple more questions before we we wrap it up uh a lot of people are hiring virtually now especially after coid things have just been come you know calling from Zoom across the world is no longer uh like a um what would you call it like something it's expected

now you know we're expected to use zoom so how are you guys looking at um hiring virtually and and sort of incorporating that into what you guys do yeah I mean I encourage it everywhere I can sometimes some roles obviously have to be boots on the ground anytime there's a role that can be remote we encourage um our clients and partners to to expose that to the marketplace go as wide as we can because if you're looking for somebody that's a really good digital marketer and

you're in a market where there's just not a lot of people that's going to be a really challenging ing placement um you know managing remote teams is is a whole thing um and you've got to be able to do that well we we've written articles on it we help with um resources around that um but I'll tell you what you get a much better quality of talent when you go remote and you can do it at a lesser cost structure generally speaking when you go remote

than if you have to have them in office housekeeping maintenance some components have to be boots on the ground anything else um doesn't really need to be some companies Lo everybody in the office um because they think they can watch them I'll tell you what when I had 100 employees I didn't know what they were doing you know just because they were in the office I only knew what they were doing because they had really strong kpis so when you're managing people whether they're in office

or remote having those key performance indicators that tell us you know that they're executing on whatever it is that they're supposed to do is really critical um but yeah no I 100% the best thing that happened out of Co for us anyways was was the fact that companies are so much more open to remote hiring than they were before it's forced um which is I think a good thing long term yeah no it's amazing there's I mean there's amazing talent everywhere luckily for us English is

sort of the vehicle language of the world right so most countries are speaking English and or at least learning their younger Generations are all for the most part learning English so I think our options are just going to keep getting better and better as we kind of move forward absolutely yeah I mean there's Talent all over this world um and you know there's some jobs that just make sense to have if you're in the US for them to be in the US but others you don't

have to be so um we look at it U what is the best outcome we can produce um from a talent perspective and that's that's kind of what our strategy is with clients Y and I I agree that's how it should be uh and if we want to grow in the industry you know a lot of times we we can manage our individual short-term rental or two or three but the more we do the more tasks we have the more work it is uh and the

reality is you know we can't continue growing if if we're trying to do it by ourselves so hiring bringing someone on the team is is the next step uh Steve I know just thanks for all the the good info a lot of great tips here today one question for you before um we let everyone know where they can find you is that the the name of this podcast is short-term rental riches and a lot of times people associate the word rich just sort of in a

financial sense but uh as we know you know we can live a rich life with not that much money really you know we see it all all over the world and so just wondering if there's something in your life recently that you've discovered or maybe a lifestyle habit or something that's helped enrich your life but maybe not in a financial sense yeah and I can tie it into Str strs and I don't know that it's necessarily new but what what brought me into this industry um

was the love for the product um I stayed as a young guy in a in a vacation rental with my extended family and we had the best time and when the opportunity arose for me to get into this industry I jumped in I have four kids we extensively travel in Str strs and half for the entire time I've been in it and since they were born and we were just up in Blue Ridge Georgia staying on a lake with a boat skiing and doing all that

fun stuff um if if you know you have your Str for a reason you probably you know got into it because of a similar reason don't stop staying in them go stay in you know competing markets go learn that way and you will discover a rich group of people okay and that you know where I feel like I'm rich in life is not monetarily it's my uh network of people in this industry and so there's a lot of amazing people here the way to meet them

is to go stay in their their properties whether that's a company or an individual I don't care go see it and and just experience that with your friends your family whatever um you will get stuff every time you do um and from you know understanding a new market or seeing a new property that type of thing and and I have been doing it for 26 years and I don't plan to stop so yeah I love that I love that and yeah I don't plan on stopping

either that's why the industry is growing so fast right people love these experiences and and they're worldwide so well Steve uh I really appreciate you coming on you have a world of experience we could have talked for hours um but I know you have a lot to offer to and a lot of resources what's the best place for anyone listening to to reach out or get in touch with you guys absolutely well first and foremost if I would love for you to connect to me on

LinkedIn it's really easy to find me Steve Trover I think I'm the only one on there but um and then better talent.com is our website um when you book a demo on there you're actually booking it with me so and I would love to meet anybody that is thinking about you maybe making their first hire or they're expanding the existing team whatever that is um I am about as soft sell as it gets um and usually when you leave a demo we've we've come up with

some things that added value whether you end up working with us or not would love that opportunity but if nothing else please connect to me on LinkedIn and by the way if you're if you're not on LinkedIn um there's a lot going on on LinkedIn with the sgr industry a lot of people are more on you know IG and and other platforms but I will tell you uh LinkedIn is a really cool place to go and and network so please find me on there love to

hear from you awesome well thanks again Steve it was great having you on all right thanks a lot Jim take care take care I've dedicated years figuring out how how to manage my personal portfolio remotely and it wasn't always easy and it took a long time but now my amazing team can professionally manage my properties without me and good news our team can also manage yours let us save you the stress and headaches and some money by offering you an industry low fee to find out

more about partnering with us head to Str Str riches.com hit the property management button answer a couple quick questions and meet with me personally that's Str Str riches.com rest easy knowing that with my team your properties will be in excellent hands