Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast

33 - ⁠The Human Premium: Why Hospitality's Edge Has Nothing to Do With AI with Mike Sjogren

• Micah

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In this episode, Adam and Micah sit down with boutique hotel mentor Mike Sjogren to explore how AI is reshaping hospitality operations — from direct booking pages to revenue management — and why the operators who thrive will be the ones doubling down on human connection, not replacing it. They also dive into the Wesley's pre-launch strategy, the power of leveraging local community relationships, and Mike's newly funded 47-room Outer Banks development that came together after one casual conversation and a $12 million ask.

Connect with Mike:
Find him on Instagram: @mike.sjogren

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Connect with Micah:
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🏨 Check out The Wesley Boutique Hotel in Page, Arizona: https://www.thewesleyaz.com/visit
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SPEAKER_00

Everybody will automate everything in the business, and you're going to lose that personal touch. And the way that you're going to stand out is you're going to have human beings interacting with guests, and that will be the premium.

SPEAKER_01

Hey everybody, I'm Adam Walls, and I'm here with my co-host Micah Thomas.

SPEAKER_02

We're short-term rental operators who made the jump into boutique hotels.

SPEAKER_01

And we're in it right now, raising capital, renovating a 50-room property. We're figuring it out as we go.

SPEAKER_02

This is the Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast, and these are secrets.

SPEAKER_01

Hello, Boutique Hotel Nation. Thanks for tuning in for another episode of the official Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Walls, co-founder of Comeback Hospitality. Myself and Micah Thomas, we're on a journey. We're going from short-term rentals, the Airbnb game, making the leap of faith over into commercial hospitality with the boutique hotel. We're telling our story. We're building them public. We're starting with the Wesley, a 50-key hotel in Page, Arizona, but we're documenting the entire way. Micah, let me check in with you. My Mr. from another sister. How is it going in room seven?

SPEAKER_02

Man, it's going good. So much to talk about today. I'm excited to talk about AI, marketing, our ramp up. We got rooms coming online soon. So love to dig into that. And we have a very special guest with us. So ready to dive right in.

SPEAKER_01

I love it. So Mike Shogren, he's back, baby. He did episode one, kicked us off. I think we've posted what 25 plus episodes at this point, kind of telling our story. But man, we're we found Mike Shogren online. I think Mike and I both from an Instagram advertisement and said, Who is this guy? What's the story? Very cool guy. He's helped hundreds of people over the years. We met him in person, first in Nashville, then we came to the Freedom Factory out in Boston. We're using his playbook, his mentors, his protocols to just get smarter and honestly compress the time to success, getting in rooms that we didn't think were possible a couple of years ago. So excited to have you back, Mike. Let's just start by checking in, man. How are things in your world?

SPEAKER_00

I'm great, man. And kudos to you guys for 20-something episodes deep. That's friggin' awesome. And Micah, shout out to you for getting out of your comfort zone on Instagram and sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly over at the Wesley. So it's the only way to do it, man. It's not all sunshine and rainbows when you get in this game, but it's worth it. So nice work.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, thank you very much. And again, we know that your time is super valuable. You've been jamming the last couple months on lots of different things. But as Micah said, maybe today we can kind of dip our toe in some of the AI pieces, marketing as we prepare the Wesley for Memorial Day. So just to kind of timestamp this audio or visual for folks, we're talking at the end of April 2026. And we're excited about where the world is going. But you've been knee deep in this stuff, man. It sounds like you went from tinkering and kind of saying, oh, AI is kind of cute and interesting to all in. So I would love to hear what you're up to, what you're building, and how it's going so far.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's one of those impending waves. You know where it's going, right? And it's going to change everything, not just this industry, but everything. And so I wanted to really get my hands dirty and dive into it to see where we were at right now, what the capabilities were, test some different use cases for it, and eventually delegate it, right? I've got a developer on my team that works for us that is building some tools, but I wanted to get my hands dirty so I could at least understand it. And so what I found is I started with Manaus, and Mana's is awesome. If you're new to AI and you want to really understand what you can do with AI, Manaus is great. It can get a little on the pricey side depending on what you want to build, but it makes it very easy to know. A lot of you have probably seen some of these dashboards that people can build and all these things. Manaus makes it extremely easy to do that. I read I rebuilt a direct booking web page in an afternoon for one of my properties that looked amazing, fully integrated with my PMS and everything else. I built some deal analysis tools on MIS. And then I started to, as my bill started to incrementally increase on Manaus, I'm like, all right, let's test some other stuff, right? And so played around with Claude a little bit and then went fully down the rabbit hole, bought the new Mac Mini, got OpenClaw set up, played with that for a few weeks. Once I got comfortable with that, then I graduated to install it on my very expensive Mac Studio with all sorts of RAM, and now I'm running local LLM models on it. I installed Hermes, which is a new type of OpenClaw. So I'm split testing how those perform against each other. And uh yeah, man, just been doing a lot of tinkering the past couple months, really getting my hands dirty, testing some different use cases for it and having fun. I've spent a lot of money on a API tokens and AI tokens the last couple months. And I've definitely wanna share some different pointers and different frameworks that I would encourage people to think through before you just start building random stuff with AI. Because you it's addicting, it's fun. You get a dope a dopamine hit, you're building and creating all this stuff. Uh but the question is, is it useful and is it improving your business and getting you time back? Those are the two sense checks that I would always ask people before they get in and start building something. It's okay, cool, you spent a week building this pretty dashboard and tinkering with it, but what's the point of it? Other than it looks really pretty, uh, what are you doing with that thing? Yeah. So that'd be the first thing I would say. And I actually got this from Dan Martel's been preaching this for a long time. But if when you think about applying AI, look at how you're currently doing things in your business. And we talk about the Casper framework a lot at STR Secrets and Boutique Hotel Secrets. It's the framework that I put together anytime I build a business. So C stands for clarity. What are we building here? Why are we building it? And where are we going? What's the vision? Then A is for acquisitions, how do we generate new business? S is for systems and processes. How do we replicate and create repeatable processes and systems to run the business? And P stands for people. How do we bring in people to run those systems and processes? And then E is you elevate yourself out of the day-to-day and build that management lay layer. And then R is reassess, right? It's like, all right, I've got this business going. Where do I want to go? Am I still on track? Do I want to do something else? Like, where are we going? So when you're looking at your current system as an example, what does your pipeline look like for finding hotel deals? Map that out A to Z. What actual steps are you taking to go out and find more properties that you can acquire, or maybe you want to build a management business, whatever it is? What does that end-to-end process look like for acquisitions? Then take a step back and look at what are the biggest time stocks and what are some repeatable things that you get pulled into doing? Is there a use case for AI that can go out and do that? Can AI go out and scrape some different listings? Can it scour the internet for different resources? Like how can I apply AI to the acquisitions piece of the business? And if you translate it over to the operation side, what are the key pieces on your operations that maybe AI could step in and do for you? The one thing that I will say where I believe everything will go within the next two years, maybe more, maybe less, but within two years, AI is gonna become even more easy to use. And what will happen is everybody will automate everything in the business and you're gonna lose that personal touch. And the way that you're gonna stand out is you're gonna have human beings interacting with guests, and that will be the premium. If you go to a Ritz-Carlton or a Four Seasons or any of those other hotels, yes, they look nice, but the reason they can charge those premiums is the personal person-to-person interaction that they deliver is part of your experience. That is not going away. I don't care what anybody says, you can automate your revenue management, you can automate all your automated messages to make it easier for them to get to the hotel and self-check in and all that. But if you can curate a customized experience for somebody based on what their interests are, and read unreasonable hospitality or any of those books, if people feel that you care and you've put in the effort to create a custom experience for them, they will gladly play a pay a premium for that and they will talk about you forever. And your marketing just gets easier and easier.

SPEAKER_02

That's exactly right. So, first off, I want to hint at the fact that you're now a part-time developer. You've been developing software with AI for the last few months. So kudos to you for becoming a developer in your spare time. Most people can't brag about that. It sounds like a pricey hobby, but it's creating solutions nonetheless. So that's great. But what I want to talk about a lot is you are basically explaining where AI is likely heading in the fact that we're going to be leveraging human relationships as the value ad now. Before it seemed like AI was probably the value ad, but in the future, once AI is the norm, we're now having to go back to human interaction and optimize that interaction because it's going to be very few and far between. So just want to think through that and get your ideas on how you would start training staff knowing that AI is in place and moving at such a rapid speed, how would you train staff to create a better experience or to maximize the interactions they have with guests for just a better overall business?

SPEAKER_00

So before I look at where I'm going to implement it, I would look at where is your team spending the most amount of their time? And what are some things that necessarily aren't guest-facing or that don't enhance the experience but take a lot of time? And how can I automate that piece of it? Everything from is there a way to monitor your supplies and restocking and a lot of the back-of-the-house things? Is there a way to automate that? The other thing that I'm looking at more on the front end is how do I create a really dialed-in marketing system where it's helping me create content calendars, script out content that's going to help convert, scraping all of the local newspapers and different websites for local events that are going to be happening to make sure my team is aware of it and make sure that we can promote those things through our content. So I'm looking at a lot of the front-end marketing side right now for content generation from social media and also vetting influencers. If you've been in this game, you know that you're going to get influencers in earmarks reaching out to you for free stays and everything else. What's a good vetting process to make sure that they're the right fit that's going to bring people to your hotel and set up that marketing machine around that leveraging AI? So again, map it out as if you were going to do it manually. Forget about how many hours it would take you, but map out the steps that you would need to do manually to do that process and then leverage AI to go do all of those things for you to save all that time. When I was talking about creating that custom experience for the guests and maintaining that person-to-person interaction, again, I'm not doing this at the moment, but I could see where this would go and there'll be regulations around what you can do. But imagine you get a guest that books your stay. You ask them what brings them to the area. Oh, it's a family vacation. Okay, cool. Can AI go on their Facebook and Instagram pages, figure out, scan all their photos? What do they like to do? Maybe their kid's a baseball player. Maybe they're going to, I don't know, LA. Okay, cool. Can you go grab some Dodgers gear for them and have it waiting for them in the room? But do all the research and then have your team take that research to create that experience for them instead of the team manually having to do that stuff. So any of the research type things, I do believe revenue management, it will be a big focus for AI. And it has in the past with a lot of different pricing tools, but leveraging those tools and leveraging AI on top of those tools to review those adjustments and highlight anything that you should look at, whether you click the button to approve it or not, that'll be your decision. But a lot of those types of tasks I can see going down the AI rabbit hole.

SPEAKER_01

I love that. And I think one of the anecdotes from Unreasonable Hospitality, he was talking about asking guests where they parked when they came into one of the world's best restaurants. Is it Leaven Park Madison? I think it is in New York City. Michelin star of Michelin Star. They were nothing, then amazing, and they obsessed over the guest experience. And one of the stories is when they asked where did you park and found out it was on the street, they would offer to go put coins into the machine, right? So that you didn't have to get up halfway through your prefix dinner to go put 50 cents in the thing. So it was relatively cheap to do, but the fact that you were even thinking about it, that you asked, right, gave you an opportunity in a very small way to add value. I think I told Mike I back in the day, I used to travel up to 200 days a year in a professional services management consulting context. And one time I was in India staying at a five-star hotel, and the housekeeper noticed that my toothpaste was running low. So it's one again, I've stayed at thousands of hotels in my life. And it was someone took initiative to buy a $2 toothpaste, but it matched exactly. And they just said, hey, we noticed this and we took care of it for you. So it's personalized, it's proactive, it's permission. I didn't ask for this. It just kind of happened in the background and it was extraordinary. So I love this idea of adding value through human touches. Or even here in Lafayette, there it's this big thing about if they're gonna pass some measures to increase funding to some of the schools. But if we don't, in our local jurisdiction, we're talking about moving, like my son Oliver, going from 22 students per class to approaching 30, which is getting closer to Oakland. Part of the reason people want to live in better, kind of nicer neighborhoods with better school districts or whatever, it's that ratio, right? Of in schools, it's teachers to students. In hotels, it's staff to guests, right? So this quest for efficiency and productivity, it's all fine and but when we free up or unlock some of that time, what do you do with it? Can we add some of these flourishes? I think is a really interesting uh kind of place to go. But I should mention we were on a call earlier today, and uh Joel Weigel had mentioned that I think he was even at Will Moncrief's uh launch. And so since we're kind of talking about AI, launch, marketing, et cetera, it sounds like hotel soma, what he's built down there with his team is extraordinary. Uh I've never personally met him. We exchanged a few texts or whatnot, but uh I don't know, thinking about uh Will's case study, your own case study, Mike and Adam coming up. Maybe we could shift over to this topic of launching a hotel. Uh what have you seen work? What's not working? Just so again, we can kind of get a realistic preview.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So we were talking offline around some of your timelines, right? And so the way I look at it, you guys are gonna do very well because Mike has been posting content and showing all the behind the scenes, right? And it creates this buzz around it's even like folks that listen to this podcast, like they're hearing your journey. And so they there's all this anticipation about getting to go experience the finished product, right? Because they feel like they've been a part of the story from the beginning. And Will's a great dude. I actually texted him yesterday. I said congrats, because he's been working on this for a while, like well over a year and a half, two years. Uh and it looks awesome. But he's been documenting Soma's journey and showing every little bit from the beginning to breaking ground all the way through to the launch. And the better job you can do at showing that transformation, that's why HGTV was so big, because people love to see those transformations of properties. And then when you get to go experience it yourself, that takes it up another level. But what I always say is, okay, if I let's just assume your opening date, grand opening, it's gonna be September 1st, just to throw a date out there. And that's the date in your mind that you want to have the hotel opened. Right now, we're the end of April, I would have your PMS open starting in November 1st. So you giving yourself a two-month buffer because when it comes to heavy construction and big renovations, things can go awry and they could take longer. But a two-month buffer is pretty good. So at least as you're starting to put out content around it, it's like you can pre-book your stay for November 1st, start to build up some buzz, start to generate some bookings now. And the closer you get to that September 1st date, if you can slowly start to open up the calendar closer and closer to September 1st. Ideally, if you can start that process at least two months before you're ready to open. So if it's September 1st, if you can start that push in June or July, when the rooms are gonna be a lot further along, and you'll probably have maybe one or two model rooms done so you can show what it's gonna look like. Then you can really start to push heavy for that November date, and then you can back it to September. Because what you don't want to happen is you're pushing and pushing, and then September 1st comes and you're open, and nobody knows that you're open. Where's all the people?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, that's a great point. And that's we were talking with one of our coaches, Joel Wiggle, earlier today, about just that. Don't get 50 rooms ready and we're like, the doors are open, everybody come. There needs to be some type of buildup, some type of anticipation and a plan in place. And what does that look like? Is that social media? Do we have influencers that come at grand opening or before? Are we using products like launch boom to get our information and hotel out before we actually do the grand opening? So just a lot of things to think through. I know, probably from the outside looking in, most people think, oh, once the rooms are done, you just you're open for business and people hear about it. But no, we need to let people know we are the first hotel or the first boutique hotel in town, and we have great amenities and brand new rooms. And that just that just doesn't happen organically. It can, but a lot of that has to be intentional marketing that we're working on. So just from a person who has a strong following and may or may not have dibbled and dabbled in marketing, just want to hear your thoughts on what it takes to build not just personal presence, but also a brand presence to allow people to learn about who you are, what you're doing, and get behind your story. What takeaways would you be able to give us with that?

SPEAKER_00

So just a fundamental principle in marketing is yes, you want to build your own brand and your own audience, but a hack to growing it a lot faster is to leverage other people's audiences, right? So if you apply this to what we're talking about, the more you can get involved with your local chamber, any local tourism offices, and have them do a PR blast about your property, you're leveraging their audience and their credibility to promote your stuff. So when we were going through everything with Salem over the last couple of years, I was actively working with the local tourism division, which is a huge part of their economy, keeping them up to date, sending them progress photos. They would tag us on Instagram, they would tag us in their newsletters, we would pay for advertisements in their annual publications around Halloween of yes, we will be open for Halloween. Room bookings are available as of this date. Leveraging other people's audiences to drive traffic to yours is like pouring gasoline on a fire, right? The old adage, if you build it, they will come, maybe. But if they don't know about it, they're not gonna put it. Where are they going? So I would definitely do that. Even the local coffee shops and things like that, like building those relationships so that when people pop in and they're talking about hotels, oh, did you see the Wesley? Like they're gonna be open next month if you got people coming to town. The more word of mouth you can generate within the community, it's like it just has this spider web effect. The bigger net you have, the more of that audience you're gonna be able to capture. So leveraging other people's audiences, especially at the beginning, is gonna be huge.

SPEAKER_01

Well, I'm curious, what would change for you if you were partially open versus fully closed and then fully open? So I get that like A B hey, we're offline doing all this work and then kind of doors open. That's kind of what was in my head is the red ribbon and oversized, I don't know, scissors.

SPEAKER_00

Maybe the mirror we've done that.

SPEAKER_01

Yes. Well, I want to do that, and at the same time, we made a deliberate decision to stay open. And so we're we just sold out eight old hotel rooms, and we think we're three weeks away from having 20, maybe 30 of our new rooms available.

SPEAKER_00

So how would your rooms that are open now, are they updated or are they the originals?

SPEAKER_01

Original, old.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. So what I would do is inside of is there's a lobby in yours, right? Is there like a lobby? Yeah. I would have renderings of what those new rooms look like with a coming soon date on them. And ideally, if you that's very smart, if you could whip up some type of matter port animation of what those new rooms would look like in your lobby to show guests here's what's coming in the next two months. These rooms will be ready. We'd love to have you come back and we'll give you a discount on testing out some of our new rooms. The more they can experience what that'll look like when they're there, right? So it's like, yeah, this room was fine. It's like, wait till you see what we got coming. These are gonna be all your mind. I would do that. And I would still talk to your local tourism chamber, all of those folks, like, hey, we're open and we also will be able to show guests what those new room concepts look like that'll be ready in sixty days. Yep.

SPEAKER_02

Smart. That's great. I didn't think about that, and I'm so glad you brought it up because it's such a great idea. But It's kind of those you don't know what you don't know, but now that we've heard it, it's like, man, why haven't I thought about that three months ago? But so glad you gave us that recommendation. I would love to pivot. There's a great deal happening in the outer banks that I'm sure you would love to give an update on. This is a big deal. So would love to hear more and let the audience hear more about this.

SPEAKER_00

One one other thing that I'll say before we pivot to that, uh again, about getting yourself involved in the local community and with your banks and everything else and building that reputation. It'll open random doors for you that you maybe weren't even thinking about. So simple example, uh I got an email probably a year ago that our property, the COVID salem, had gotten nominated for the Massachusetts Economic Impact Award. Which I don't even know what that was. But it's basically at the state level, the head of economic development for the state nominates different businesses by region to get an award for the not only the dollar value impact, but also the amount of jobs created and all these things. And I was like, oh, this is cool, whatever. And as it panned out, we went through this interview process and then I went and gave a pitch in front of this committee. Long story short, we ended up winning it. And we had the award ceremony a couple weeks ago at Gillette Stadium. And I got to meet all of these uh heads of the state of Massachusetts, including the head of economic development and all these different folks. And it just also helped give so much more exposure to the hotel. Everybody's like, oh yeah, like I've been sending people there. I can't believe the transformation that you guys had and all this stuff. So again, all of that just continues to expand your web, uh, not just the traditional social media and all those things. Those are great. You want to do those. That is the future of marketing, but don't ignore all these other opportunities to get your face out there with bigger audiences.

SPEAKER_01

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SPEAKER_02

And if you want to learn more about the boutique hotel secrets community, the link is in the show notes.

SPEAKER_01

And Micah, you've been crashing on that, man. Again, right across the street is City Hall. So we're every time I'm in town, I'm in town once a month. We have lunch with those folks. And we're building Debbie Moses at the Glen Cannon Conservancy. We struck a deal to say, hey, every guest that stays at the Wesley, we're putting in an opt-out $1 donation. So again, they can tell us that they want the dollar to go away, and we'll do that voluntarily, but we're assuming that people visiting this area want to invest in the local infrastructure and fabric of this community. So I feel like the partnerships just at the local level are happening. And you're right, Mike, we have no idea what who these people are connected to and who they're sharing at the county level, the state level, the national level. Again, we're not going in with ideas of manipulating it. We're truly trying to be good stewards and community members. But I can tell already from some of our lunches and early conversations that they're hungry. They more tourists coming in for high quality stays, and then they tell their friends, it's just good for small towns to grow and prosper. So what you're saying uh really resonates. And honestly, pat on the back, high five to Micah, who's you know, organically doing a lot of the things that I think could eventually turn into something bigger.

SPEAKER_00

You're doing all the things that AI cannot replace. Like you're doing the actual work and building the relationships. Yeah, AI cannot take that and do that.

SPEAKER_02

That's such a valid point. Joke all the time and say I'm rubbing shoulders and shaking hands and kissing babies, just trying to make connections. And honestly, I think that's what it's all about. And for anybody who's listening who maybe has a hotel or wants to get a hotel, it's very important to understand the goals and the outlook of the local community. And the more you can align with the local community, the better off you'll be because they'll give you support. Just a perfect example. If you want to go one way and the community is like, actually, we saw the town going in a different direction. There's just so much friction you come across. But if you guys can align and you're both helping the community and the economy and the tourism, it just makes for a better product and a better output. So I think that's what we wanted to do from day one. I'm honestly just surprised at how many connections we've made because we've gone down that track. And like you said, Adam, every time you come to town, we're having lunch with a city official learning about analytics. What was the tourism data? How much was paid in hotel occupancy tax last month? And what are the trends moving forward as we go into the World Cup and so on and so forth? But just really good to have those connections and hear from people who live in that every single day that aren't in hospitality, but we have aligned goals to increase the economic developments.

SPEAKER_00

The one other thing that you just made me think of, Mike, uh, we finally finished the addition in Rockport. So we added eight more rooms, basically blew the hotel in half, rewired everything, reconfigured everything. Took two years, but it's done. And I was up there Friday and I was just touring some of the neighbors through it because they've been watching it and they were like, Oh, I'd love to see it. When you engage the community, now they're gonna go, and anytime their families come into town or anytime they're at the local shops, they're like, Oh, you gotta see what they did at the COVID rock board. It's unbelievable. This is where you want to stay when you come to town. To your point, when the local neighbors and community are bought in, one, it makes your permitting process way easier, but two, it adds to that web of people just sending you organic leads like constantly, right? And they feel like they're a part of it because it's part of their community and they want to support you just like you want to support them. So it's not just like feely good stuff of being a good steward, like it's also just business sense as well. But to bring it back to what you were asking me about, OBX.

SPEAKER_02

So about North Carolina.

SPEAKER_00

Yes. So we uh this project has been in the works for over three and a half years. Three and a half years ago, one of my partners acquired the land. It was a old rundown, I think it was 20 room hotel. Took three years to permit it. And now that we've got it demoed, uh it's myself and two other partners, they brought me on about a year ago once they were getting close and they wanted some help with the fundraising and the oversight of the hotel operation, somebody with hotel experience. And uh we had set gone through, hired the SEC attorney, I got all the portals set up, all these different things. And then I was having a side conversation with a former management client of mine that we were catching up. Very smart guy, has a very successful business. And he's gotten into he has a new product now from his main business around private lending for real estate. And he's let me know if anybody in your world is looking for funding for construction or whatever. And I was like, Well, how much do you got? And he was like, How much do you need? And I was like, How about 12 million bucks? And I said it kind of jokingly because I figured maybe he could do up to a couple million, and he goes, Let me get back to you. Let me talk to the team. And long story short, we got all the funding that we needed for the construction of this brand new 47-room boutique hotel with a restaurant and an event space and an amenity building across the street from this project, and now we'd no longer need to syndicate it and share the upside with other investors. Don't worry, if you've been listening, I'll have other projects and you can invest with Adam and Mike on other projects. There's always opportunities, but it was just a funny way of how this whole thing unfolded. After months and months of doing investor pitches and all these things, now it's this is an easy button that one we can move a lot faster because we don't even need to go through the bank now to get it built. And then once it's built, we can go back and refinance. So we'll be able to move a lot faster because we're not dealing with draw schedules and approvals and all this stuff. We'll be able to build a lot faster. So yeah, we're scheduled to close on May 15th and finally break round. Still run 18-month build. I think we'll be able to do a little bit faster, but I underwrote it for 20 months. Again, always underwrite conservatively. I've got a lot of reserves built into the numbers, but yeah, man, I'm excited. I've been I've been involved in that for a year and uh really excited to get that one off the ground. It's gonna be beautiful when it's done.

SPEAKER_02

First off, congrats for getting closing May 15th. That's two weeks away, so that's like right around the corner. And I'm honestly very happy you don't have to go through the bank because we are going through SBA and God bless them for it.

SPEAKER_00

I told you it's worth it because you get good.

SPEAKER_02

Oh, it is, but it's not easy. Oh my gosh, like it. I'm so happy for the SBA product because it has it literally has brought us to get our first hotel. But yeah, you're right, like permitting and draw schedules and inspections and the list goes on and on. And I felt like I've given away both kidneys and whatever else you can name, trying to get just one draw. I think it took us a month to get something that should have taken two to three business days, and that's just the nature of the beast. So happy that you don't have to go through that, and you're right, that'll make construction and the timeline move a lot faster. You don't have to have delays because funding isn't available or they didn't release funding on a certain day. So very excited to see that take place. And honestly, Adam, we may have to take a field trip to the outer banks and twist my arm and get our hands dirty. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01

What's crazy? So on the front end, you look at small local banks. Can we get a conventional loan? We looked at USDA, we looked at SBA 504, 78, right? There's all these options out there. And then we it took us 62 no's to find a cliffing, to get a yes. So we got a bunch of no's. We learned a lot because we're always asking questions like, hey, what was missing? If you had feedback, how can we improve? Like our pitch, like on the 63rd, was just better. Uh, we were better prepared when they asked for, hey, can you send over your PFS? Yeah, I already we already have a folder, a drive of all of the information that you could possibly want. So we just we were in a better position moving forward. But I remember Micah, you and I many times talking about would we go hard money? Would we go bridge loan? You run into guys out there in the world who's just hey, come here, I got a back room and 18%. You can uh wire money today. But then if you don't make payments, watch out for your kneecaps, right? So there's a spectrum of cheap money that's hard to get or expensive money that's easy to get, and you got to find out where on that spectrum you want to live. But I think the deeper I get into this game, referrals are everything, and it's a relatively small world. And doing deals with people who want to do this professionally, credibly, build the right way, and do it over time, that is massive. So it sounds like you found a great partner to get this off uh offshore.

SPEAKER_00

Uh but there's gonna be a point, Adam. This would not have happened if I didn't have the reputation going into it. And I'm not saying that to toot my own horn. I'm saying that because this person has been a friend and client since 2019 and he's watched all these projects that I've done and I've coached him on some other real estate that he wanted to do. And so he's literally just betting on me because I I have that reputation with him already. Right. So the more deals you do, the more opportunities open up for you, and things can get easier here and there because you've displayed that you know what you're doing.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, yes, and we ran into a group said, Hey, we got five million bucks, kind of our minimum allocation is usually 500,000. We only had 200 available on the Wesleys. They're not going to invest with us on this round, but they said keep us posted on deal two. They also had pretty clear criteria going, we just typically don't invest in first-time operators. Nothing against you guys, but just I get approached a thousand times a day with different opportunities. Why would I take the risk on a first-time operator versus somebody who's done it a second time, a third time, a fourth time? The further down you get the path, like the I don't know, more credible, more reliable, more believable your story is. So I love that for you and anyone that sees the momentum you can gain, going from zero to one and then one to two, just gets a little easier. What's the old adage? Like it's to earn your first million bucks, like it can take you your whole life to get that first one, but then to get the second one, to get the fifth one, to get like you start unlocking this momentum and flow. So I love that you've got that. People want to learn more about this deal. It sounds like this one might be gone, but I don't know. Anything else you want to tell people about this deal or other opportunities? Or we're gonna at some point we got to plug this AI summit you got coming up in June.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, we can plug that in a little bit. They'll stick around to the end and they're interested in it. But uh, just follow me on social media, mike.shogren, s-j-o-g-r-n on Instagram. I'll be sharing more updates over there. I'm gonna be getting back on the SDR Secrets podcast pretty soon as well. More around private equity, valuations, more higher level conversations, interviewing other folks that have had big exits, just leveling up the conversation just because it's amazing. Especially it's kind of where we're at and what I enjoy talking about more. Excited for that. Uh yeah. That's pretty much it. I'm finished Rockport. Salem's getting rebuilt right now, breaking ground on outer banks in a couple weeks. The STR roll-up is in motion. Got the plan. We're gonna get to 500 doors in the Carolinas by the end of the year. So excited about that. Nice. Raising five million to seed capital for that to get that rolling for some operating costs and then some roll-ins initially for the outer North Carolina. And I think that's all that I got on my play right now. So I think that's for the time being.

SPEAKER_01

We got if you're game, maybe one of our next conversations, we could even invite in Isaac Oswalt to talk about the Freedom Fund and the roll-up and some of the cool. Again, I don't want to steal any of the STR secrets thunder, but honestly, if I'm a betting man, I see what you're building over there, and I look at Boutique Hotel Secrets. Again, there's a relatively intimate group, but we're action takers, we're builders. These aren't people just kind of sitting on the couch watching YouTube. They paid tuition money to get around people doing this. They're actively underwriting deals, putting in LOIs, getting deals. And I gotta imagine three years from now, five years from now, there is a pool of people that have built portfolios, and the same play could happen there. Again, not to speculate too much, but it's like you're doing it. You're already reading three chapters and you're messing up the story arc here, guys.

SPEAKER_00

It's amazing what you're building. That's for me, it's like that's the fun part of people come to us because they want to get their first or their second hotel deal and coach them up through that. You guys did the work, just like I told you. It's not gonna be easy, but it's worth it, and you're proof of that. There's other people doing that, and as that expands, then it opens the door for other possibilities beyond that, right? Yes. We talked about the fund and a whole bunch of other things where we can start doing bigger things together, which I'm really excited about. It's just not quite there yet. Yep, looking down the road, that is a hundred percent where things are going.

SPEAKER_02

Sounds like a great time to be involved in real estate if I had to say.

SPEAKER_00

Military guy. He's coming up on his 20 years and he's just trying to figure out what he wants to do. And I'm like, dude, he's how is it Ben? Real estate, and he's like, he's up and down, and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, any business is gonna have ups and downs over time, but real estate is one of those tried and true assets that if you buy it or you manage it, it'll be fine. But it's all about getting the right property in the right market at the right price. You can't fix a bad deal. You gotta make sure you get into the right deals that have the upside and the protection from the downside risk, and anybody can learn it. It's a learnable skill. And when you get around a community like we have, it's okay, cool, you guys are looking at deals, and then Joel's looking at it, Isaac's looking at it, Roshi's looking at it, I'm looking at it. You're just getting other sets of eyes to give you different perspectives to just watch your downside and make sure your numbers pencil, and it just works, man. It just works. And I that's selfishly why I love it too. I'll have those guys review my deals. I don't even know how many times Isaac and Joel looked at the Outer Bank's deal and some of this other stuff, right? I bounce ideas off of Rosh me all the time. It's like when you're in the right room, this thing just becomes your cheat code instead of trying to figure everything out yourself, like get around experienced people, everything just gets easier.

SPEAKER_02

That's that's exactly right. And it feels so good just knowing that you have somebody to look over your shoulder.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And I'll maybe close with this. So this weekend I was lucky enough to get together with a bunch of friends. So celebrating my 45th birthday. So my wife and I had a great dinner, got a massage, then she put together kind of like 50 people at a local brewery, told some stories, roasted me on not knowing the difference between a cucumber and zucchini. By the way, my wife and I met at a comedy club. So she got on stage and literally let me have it, which is beautiful. But anyway, with some of the interactions with friends, I bet you five different people through the course of the afternoon that we were chatting with were just talking about how they're a little disenfranchised, just not into their jobs. You just like, oh man, I would love to get out. I earn good money, live in a great place, but just I'm not in love with it. And meta just announced they're laying off another 10,000 people. And it's just like we see so much productivity gains. We're lucky in the Bay Area to be connected to so much technology and AI companies, et cetera. But I just hear people being exhausted and stressed out, and a lot of people going, man, if the car wasn't driving so fast, I might open the door and jump out. But real estate has been kind of that proven vehicle, that airbag system for so many people. It was for me as well. I got my team got laid off and I was already in real estate and kind of had the pieces, but bet on myself. So I think you're right. And I'll let you know. Last night I actually watched, it's called the AI doc, how I became an apocalyptimist, which is hilarious, and it won some awards at Cairns and all this. They interview the CEOs of all the big LLM labs. They talk about it, but what the guy describes, and right there in the title, is kind of interesting. There's this doomsday scenario. AI enslaves humans and some nasty, terrible things or kills humans, right? Or there's this protagonist, like we live in utopia. We kind of don't know. The promise of AI is so great. The peril of AI is so great. How can we collectively align and choose a better path moving forward? But I kind of love quite personally getting back into the analog room. Hotels, the Grand Canyon's not going anywhere. Hotels aren't going anywhere, right? So I see this as almost a hedge against no matter the future, building great experiences, taking care of people, using AI to enable that, but not to uh outsource or replace that is just makes a ton of sense to me. So, anyways, for folks looking for a good doc, there you go. The AI doc is one I'd recommend to folks. All right. I know we we got to get out of here shortly, but yeah, any closing thoughts, Mike? Uh Mike, I certainly enjoyed the conversation.

SPEAKER_00

Anything you want to leave the people to plug like Michael was alluding to. We're doing an AI summit coming up June 23rd to 24th up here at the Freedom Factory. So whether you're in hotels or strs, basically putting together a two-day summit on how you can apply AI to your hospitality business. Uh so if you go to STRAISummit.v is in victor vfairs.com. I'll get a cleaner URL that you guys can put in the chat, but that's the event software we use vfairs. But strasummit.vfairs.com, grab a ticket. We're gonna have some amazing guest speakers that I have not announced yet, but really diving down the rabbit hole of AI and how you can apply this in your business and also on the personal side to get you time back to focus on the things that you want to focus on, move your business forward and spend more time with your family and friends.

SPEAKER_01

And we'll put a link to that, of course, in the show notes. And I think that's capped at a hundred people, is that right? So this one's gonna sell out for sure. So if you're thinking about it, this is not one to like kind of bookmark, I'll come back to this in a couple weeks. And then if you are interested in this and you're listening to us, you probably are like just go ahead and do yourself a favor, like grab grab a ticket today.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, they will go quick. We're about to send out uh an email blast to a pretty big email list that we have uh next week. So whenever this goes live, I would check it out. And that's not like a fake number. I can legally only have 100 people in the Freedom Factory for fire code, so that's all we can do.

SPEAKER_01

It's another story. Yeah, we hopefully no PTSD yet on the fire stories, but we'll maybe on a future episode talk about your journey there.

SPEAKER_00

We will walk through learning lessons on the flyer.

SPEAKER_02

Micah, anything else to close us out, brother? No, man. I'm good. This is a great episode. I'm glad you were able to join us, Mike, and looking forward to having you on again. Likewise, fellas.

SPEAKER_01

Appreciate you guys. Okay, thanks so much. That's the pod. Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you on the next one. All right, that's it for today on the official Book Geek Hotel Secrets Podcast.

SPEAKER_02

If this helps, be sure to follow or subscribe and send it to someone who needs that bigger push. And if you want the community or the resource and the playbook to find what we're learning, the link is in the channel. Quick note we're BHS community members here in our own experience. And if you have questions or topics you want us to cover, reach out and let us know. We're building this channel for operators just like you at DellMX12.