34 - ⁠What We'd Do Differently on Hotel #2 (And Why We're Still Glad We Didn't) with Micah and Adam

In this episode, Adam and Micah pull back the curtain on the final stretch before opening newly renovated rooms at The Wesley — tackling everything from 18 pallets of tile and FF&E sticker shock to their first real advertising budget. They also share an honest reflection on whether staying partially open during renovation was the right call, and why they'd make a different decision for hotel number two.

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

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http://bit.ly/4tCjOu4

Transcript

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In my heart of hearts, I'd say I would probably do it the same way again as a first-time hotel operator. But for hotel number two, I think we shut it down. I think we we save the stress, we save the night the headaches and the nightmares of what could and will go wrong. And we just say, let's just eliminate all of that. Hey everybody, I'm Adam Wallace, and I'm here with my co-host Micah Thomas. We're short-term rental operators who made the jump into boutique hotels. And we're in it right now. Raising capital, renovating the 50-room property. We're figuring it out as we go. This is the Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast, and these are secrets. Welcome in, Boutique Hotel Nation, for another episode of the official Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Walls, co-founder of Comeback Hospitality. This is the show, this is the series, your favorite HGTV show. Chronicling two guys going from zero to one. We come from the Airbnb short-term rental hospitality space, and we made the leap over into the commercial boutique hotel space. We're starting with our proof of concept, the Wesley of 50 Key Hotel in Page, Arizona. And we're doing it, man. We're in it. Without further ado, let me welcome in my mister from another sister, Micah Thomas. How are you doing, man? Man, I need to take a deep breath today. I am I'm great. I'm overwhelmed. There's so much motion and just mobilization at the property. It's almost hard to manage, but I'm doing great. I'm happy to see progress being made, visual progress being made at this point. And we're pushing right along. So excited to jump in this episode and talk about logistics and FFE and advertising, and the list goes on. But so many interesting topics as we really shape ourselves to open with brand new rooms to the public right before the holiday weekend. So there's a lot to take into consideration when doing that. And I think we'll dive into that. So excited to dig into that today. That's beautiful. And just to kind of time stamp it for people, it's early May. It's actually Seco de Mayo. So happy Seco de Mayo if you're celebrating out there. Yesterday, of course, famously Star Wars Day, may the fourth be with you. All that MIT Wolves still in the hunt, baby, took down the nugget. They're San Antonio. I don't you're a San Antonio, I can't call you your Philly guy, but are you on Wemby's side on this one or no? My favorite player in the league right now is Ant-Man. So I am very much a Timberwolves fan for the next few series at least. I like it. I like it. Okay. For our non-sports fan, they're like, come on, get to the hotel stuff. All right. So, anyways, I just wanted to kind of timestamp it. That's where we're at in our journey. Remember, we bought the Wesley December 23rd. We've been chasing this since last summer, but we're about five months, six months into the storyline. Let's maybe start there with the money because things are about to change. For a long time, money's been going the wrong way, like you said. We underwrote this thing to be six months of kind of no revenue. We're two weeks away from some fun stuff happening. So why don't you talk about just where we're at in the process, going from zero new rentable rooms to X rentable rooms? Yeah, that's exactly right. So we underwrote this thing like we would not be making any money for six months. And for the last five months, more or less, we have not been making any money. But we're finally at the phase where we can open brand new inventory, we can rent them at a new rate, a higher rate, and bring in some real revenue that will definitely help us, and especially our bottom line. So we just want to be strategic in how we think about this. What does advertising look like? What does the flow of the property look like while there's still renovation and construction going on? And we have guests on site. So managing expectations while also providing a great experience to guests who are coming during the holiday weekend or whatever weekend it may be for vacation or leisure or business or whatever. So a lot to think about. And we're a full we're doing a full court press right now. Every day we're getting 15, 16, 20. Last or was it yesterday? We got 18 pilots of tile. That's shower tile, that's bathroom floor tile, and bathroom wall tile. So managing expectations, pushing the logistics to make sure these rooms are ready, but also just kind of keep my head on straight while all of this is happening. So there's a lot to keep an eye on, but also very exciting because if we do this the right way, which we're pushing towards, we'll have a lot more money in our bank accounts. And I think that's the main reason we're getting in this to begin with. Exactly. Financial freedom, time freedom, other things, build generational wealth. So that's all at the end of the rainbow if we make it. Uh man, 18 pallets. Where does one put 18 pallets of tile? And yeah, let's just start there. Man, how are you scoring all this? 50 mattresses. There is a bunch of stuff at the property today. Yeah, that's exactly right. And not to mention, we have real inventory constraints too. So some things, even though we know we will only have 20 to 30 rooms ready in the next few weeks, we're ordering 50 of everything just because they're at risk of being out of stock. So maybe we wait a month to order the rest and they're just not in stock. So do you run the risk of running out of inventory or do you just order everything at once? For some things, we're willing to wait. For others, we're like, let's just order it all now. And these are pretty key statement pieces for each room or for the property, and we need to have it sooner than later. But yeah, so what started out as the contractors depolitizing and unloading each set of tiles into the room, that way it would make it a lot more efficient on the back end when it comes to installation. We still had extra tile for the rooms that weren't demolished. So what do you do with that? Luckily, I was able to shake hands and kiss a few babies, and we got a forkliff, and we were able to move the remaining pilots into a covered, kind of secure and monitored location, kept them pilotized so they're not at risk of walking off. And we kind of just have to be creative with our storage space right now until these rooms come online and we can free up some more storage space because those items that are currently in storage go into the actual room. So yeah, we're finding ways more than one to be creative. Some people even mentioned putting stuff on the roof as a storage option because there's almost no way things go missing if they're on the roof. But it gets crazy and creative, but we're all working together to make this work. And we know it's just a temporary solution until we get further along in the project, and then this is not even something we ever have to worry about again. But man, it's been an adventure. It's definitely been an adventure every single day. We walk outside, and once you see the UPS or the FedEx truck, you can almost bet your bottom dollar there's about 20 items that need to find a home until it's ready to be installed. So yeah, a lot of fun. That's sounds chaotic and hectic and exciting to finally see this. And uh people have been listening long, they would also know that we went through the SBA 7A loan program. So effectively, we put down, let's call it 20, 25% LTC loan to cost. So that basically says the bank is gonna give us leverage where they're gonna help us buy the property and then put up money for the renovation and repositioning. So it's a lot of money, but the bank always wants to give you the money as a reimbursement once it's done. And for the last couple months, I feel like we've been fighting this every single draw, every single month. Going our GC going, hey man, you're asking me to buy $200,000 of X and to send 20 guys in lots of labor, but I don't have any money. So I love the fact that we've got flooring, we've got tile, we've got HVAC, we've got retro refrigerators, we've got roofing for the entire building. And that's this is the first time where that's been true. I feel like we were going in kind of three-room tranches, five room tranches, ten room tranches, and we're at that point in the show where it's like, let's just get it all. And the bank's kind of on our side, which has been great. But let me ask one question to you because one of the strategic decisions we made at the beginning of this project was to not close down, to actually remain partially open. Today we have old rooms that are for sale. I'm just wondering if where we're at in the story, like on Hotel 2, or if you were giving advice to Micah starting this project, do you think that was still the right call? Or would you push back and just go, you know what? This would be a lot cleaner if we could just shut all the rooms down, demo everything, and truly have zero revenue. We've got a little, like a trickle of revenue to literally offset some payments. But I'm curious about your thoughts. Yeah, it's a double-edged sword when you think about it, because I see benefits and real risk for both. Like you said, we have very minimal but some revenue coming in right now. But it would be way easier to manage guest expectations if we just shut the entire property down, took all the rooms offline, demolished them, and re-renovated all of them. But in the other hand, I'm thinking we're first-time operators, and what better way to learn about operations, the property staff than when you're partially open and you see how they currently do things and you can work through solutions while you're not busy and there's not a lot of people staying at your hotel and even managing guest expectations. That's something that's very important. And what better time to work on that than when your property has a 20-foot dumpster in the back of it and there's dust everywhere? So just making sure that we share our vision and everybody's aligned, that's a lot easier to do when people are currently working versus if you send everybody home and say, hey, come back in six months. In my heart of hearts, I'd say I would probably do it the same way again as a first-time hotel operator. But for hotel number two, I think we shut it down. I think we we save the stress, we save the night, the headaches, and the nightmares of what could and will go wrong. And we just say, let's just eliminate all of that. Let's take one variable away from this that we don't have to deal with. Let's underwrite even stronger than we already did, because even though we were conservative and we knew we would be partially open, let's just say, no, maybe we're closed for nine months. And in actuality, we only end up being closed for six months or whatever the case is. But we just eliminate that other factor of stress that doesn't have to be apparent. And hopefully by then we know a lot more about operations and hotels. So it's not necessarily as much exploration on, okay, this is how check-in works at a hotel versus an Airbnb. Um, so yeah, I I see it both ways. I think for the first time, hotel renovator or owner, it's very beneficial to have your doors at least somewhat open to see how the property operates. And then you can look directly into what the bottlenecks are, the pain points and areas to improve. And essentially, we've had six months or so to make those improvements. And of course, there'll be more things that we learn along the way, but this has really been a trial run this entire time to see what works, what doesn't work. Some ideas we thought we could do early on. Turns out we probably can't go in that direction, but I don't think that happens without actually seeing for yourself uh if it will work, would work or not. Yeah, I see it two ways. Yeah, and again, on the positive side, we didn't have to lay anybody off. If you walk in and shut down your property, then what's your staff that was gonna be manning the front desk or cleaners or your GM? What are they doing and why are you paying them? Becomes a very real conversation. So I think I'm with you. I'm glad that we did it the way we did it, but it's very interesting to think through. Would you advise other people to do that? Uh, would you on our own hotel too? Are we gonna kind of follow the same flight path? But I think it's allowed us to get to know our staff, get to know the guest experience, what's working, what's not, and start kind of tinkering and experimenting. So I love that. And I suspect on the next property with a new GM, new players, new characters, it'll take on its own shape in its own form. But maybe one positive here, speaking of staff, so our general manager, we were able to actually get her healthcare. Uh exactly right. I haven't seen. And again, I don't want to like give away too much information on a public-facing podcast, but had some health challenges in the past. I was taken to the hospital. Insurance did not cover anything, and so she just got really jaded and skeptical about the whole system. And I feel like this is more Americans than we want to admit that are kind of I don't want to say paycheck to paycheck, but like insurance becomes this less a discretionary or not. And so for the past few years, not having health care, but running into some recent health challenges and just dealing with that whole thing of being sick, needing help, but not having insurance, it's a really scary place to be. So we had talked about maybe a year into the journey once we got paid, like maybe then turn on healthcare and some of the fun things. But I mean, with my healthcare background and both of us just with caring hearts, it's like, how do we feel? And how would that make us feel knowing we're pushing this person? Roberta works very hard, she goes above and beyond more than she probably should. And we're like, you know what, we can't give you healthcare, you're gonna have to take care of yourself. So I think just us being good human beings, we're like, we have to take care of her. We have to find a way, we need to find a solution to make sure she can take care of herself, so to speak, because she's giving everything she possibly can to the property, and she's done that for previous years as well. In one hand, I see it as it's a benefit that she gets health care, but in the other hand, it's no, we're just taking care of somebody who we truly care about, and we want her to grow with us. And one way to do that is to make sure she keeps her health in good shape. So very happy that we're able to do it. If you would have asked me, we say this all the time. You asked me six months ago if I thought I would be giving health care to an employee, it'd be like, What are you talking about? What? Hell yeah, exactly. It just doesn't make sense. But being in a position where we can do something like that, I feel overjoyed that I'm able to help someone and I've been put in the position, you as well, Adam, we've been put in a position to help others. And I think that's why we're doing this. And it's way bigger than just you and I. And financial freedom is great and all, but helping others around us and then helping the guests as they come and giving them experience that they've never had before, that to me feels like the real reason we've started and we've gone down this path. So very happy that we've been able to give her health care. And I think that this is probably just the beginning of things that she'll see as a benefit and we'll see as a benefit. We've talked before. Hopefully, she doesn't listen to this podcast. But we talked before about having a dream trip for her to New Mexico and the balloon regatta. Yeah, please don't say anything. Don't say anything. But yeah, so hopefully we can make that happen. But we're just finding ways to enrich and change people's lives in the best way we know how. And hospitality is the greatest platform to be able to do that. Uh so just very excited to see where we go. And I'm ready to get to that next chapter as well. And what's kind about this is this is the tweak, right? We came in, there's so many people that have made a ton of money over decades, generations in the let's call it economy and mid-scale segment, where it's just beige boxes, you're offering a very minimal product, very low expectations. Man, if we can make that toast a little cheaper, if we can make that plastic fork a little lighter, just like everything is about we win through reduction of expense and fattening up the margins. And I don't know, I used to travel 150, 200 days a year, so I know hotels pretty well. I've backpacked for nine months across the world, I've stayed in three dollar rooms. So I've I know the gamut. We've been to a Mongiri, that's $3,500 a night. Not sure, still not sure it's worth it. But so anyway, there's all these price points, all these jobs to do for kind of different folks at different times. But I think what's cool about uh boutique hotel secrets is about uh being able to innovate, to have to make money not just by reducing and reduction and subtraction of benefits and forks and baggels and all the things, but it can be additive, right? There were coming, we added a mural to to Page Arizona, we added healthcare to RGM, we added these guest experiences and amenities that just didn't exist. And so I think I didn't know that kind of at the outset, but this has been one of kind of the best parts of the job is figuring out okay, how do we actually make this project more expensive? But in return, maybe this is a good segue to Thephania at scale, or you may want to talk about advertising, but like actually putting more money into the machine is exactly what the doctor ordered. You kind of hit the nail on the head, and I'm gonna use this as a great segue when we're speaking about adding things. We're adding advertising budget, I should say. We've talked to our advertising revenue management platform, Diamo, and our account rep to think about exactly how to roll out advertising. Are we doing SEO? Are we doing meta ads and what that looks like? Are we doing advertising on the actual OTAs as we rebrand? Right now, we're still operating under Lake Pow Canyon Inn, but soon Lake Pow Canyon Inn will be no longer once these last 10 rooms go offline. If you're getting value from this, follow the show and share it with one person who's ready to move beyond short-term rentals. And if you want to learn more about the boutique hotel secret community, the link is in the show notes. Lake Pow Canyon Inn is history, so to speak. Rest of Nara. And I am not upset about it the least. Just thinking about that, and this is a property that probably hasn't seen advertising in over 15 or 20 years, if even that. So this is this is the Hyatt in town. I looked this up the other day, does not advertise. I mean, they advertise at a macro national level, but there's so many kind of franchisees or flagged hotels that just don't market in a small tertiary kind of rural environment. They just rely on brand recognition that I've got Hyatt points, so I stay at the Hyatt. Oh, I've got Marriott points, I stay at the Marriott. But if you're independent, this is the game. If you are not visible and you do not, if you suck at branding, like you're probably going to struggle in this space. So you need to add to create differentiated experiences and like cool things that you can talk about, but then you need to probably add some firepowers, you know, put some money behind some of this content so it can find the weekenders from Phoenix. And Joe Wygo, our advisor, says it and coach, he says it best. You can build it, and if you build it, maybe they'll come. But if they don't know where to go, then they'll never come. So yeah, if you build it, they will come. We're building it, but we also need to let people know what we built and where we are and what we're doing. So that's part of the advertising, just letting people know there is the first boutique hotel in Page, Arizona, and you can do more than just go to Horseshoe Bend in Antelope Canyon. You can stay for a day or two. We have a pool, we have amenities. And this is a location that people can visit for a weekend trip, or if you're even on an international trip, you can stay an extra day in Page and take a break instead of just being on the road every single day. And that's exactly what we're targeting. And our goal, and we understand you have to put a little bit more in advertising, especially on the front end, but our goal is eventually to increase our direct booking a percentage. So we want to be 60, 70, 80 percent direct booking and have some recurring guests. That way we don't have to continue to pay 15 to 20% commissions to the OTAs, which are very beneficial, but also take a huge portion of your profits. And just thinking through that, and maybe you can touch a little bit more on what our actual plan is and how we plan to roll out. There was some big words that uh Colby from Diamo used yesterday. I think it was like PBX or something. And I was like, all right, you're like losing me. Slowly but surely you're losing me. I understand we will be doing advertising, yes. But then after that, I think I'm lost. So maybe you could touch a little bit on how we intend to roll out advertising with old and new rooms. Sure. And it always can almost one of the early questions that if you hire a marketing agency or you're gonna do it yourself, it's just kind of what's your budget, man? Because if you got five bucks, okay, throw it into the wind. Okay, come back next year and try again. But but how much do you need? Can I do something with a hundred bucks? Can I do something with a thousand bucks, five thousand? At some point, what's interesting is you need to run some experiments, you need to pay attention to the analytics, double down on winners, cut some of the losers, and then amp it up, but there would be diminishing returns at some point. So us spending five hundred thousand dollars in advertising, it just doesn't make sense. So there is this sweet spot, it's almost like Goldilocks. You don't want too little, you don't want too much. There's an optimal amount of spend. It's TBD, we kind of don't know what it is right now, but we gotta we gotta find out. But I will say, what last month, maybe two months ago, we turned on let's call it level one or maybe like level 0.5, which is and we throw 150 bucks at Expedia and 150 bucks at booking.com. These are kind of the two largest OTAs in this world. You can use what is it, SiteMinder and all these things. So you show up on Agoda, and there's thousands of distribution points where people can connect to. But by and large, in our space and most likely in your space, Expedia and Booking.com are kind of the 800-pound gorillas. You gotta feed them. Historically, again, this hotel's been around for decades. It's had zero percent direct booking, uh like digitally, I should say. Even if on their old home page, if you found them online on your way in, if you booked through them, you were booking through Expedia or Booking.com, and then they were losing 15, 20, sometimes 25% of that sale. Now, again, we did get some walk ins, so I guess we could call those direct bookings. So that's kind of fun to get. A handful of those, but that's not like a great strategy, like town sold out, and so you're the only guys with hotel rooms. Do you have one? I'll take it. Um so, anyways, I would say we went from let's call it 300 bucks ad spend only on OTAs. And just for context, when I go into like Google Chrome incognito mode and I go to Page, Arizona, and I look at hotels currently organically, we're sitting in like 50th place. Like there's 25 hotels in town. We're dead last, and then a bunch of Airbnbs beat us. So hoping that somebody clicks that far down and then finds us and then buys us is pretty, I don't know, like lucky. So the idea of an OTA placement ad is just saying, hey, you've used Google, you've used other things, you probably understand how advertising works on the free internet. It helps place you towards the top, or then at least you've got a fighting chance. But then people are gonna check reviews, they're gonna check photos, and they're gonna and they're gonna check your price point and just go, does this make sense? So we're just trying to increase our visibility with OTA placement ads. But then you're exactly right. Well, okay, once you've we could amp that up, which is what we're gonna do. So we're gonna start increasing that budget up to $500, maybe a thousand dollars just on OTA placement. Um, but then at some point we switch over and then we get into kind of the Google SEM, some of the again, I'm not pretending to be a marketing guy, but the combo of AI, YouTube, our coaches, and Colby at Diama, who is a general manager, has been in hospitality and understands this space very well. Again, this is learnable. So start with a couple hundred bucks, see where the data lands, make some decisions, and then keep loading up. But I think what's cool is we can start having some ads run and we can start offering some kind of discounts for direct bookings. Hey, save 20% if you book direct with us. Because by the way, if you didn't, if you found us on booking.com and bought it that way, we lose 15 to 20% automatically. Exactly. So the guest ends up saving a little bit money, and our take-home pay is effectively the same, and yet we get to kind of control the narrative a little bit more cleanly. So, anyways, just kind of wanted to report back to you all that as of today, we've made the decision we're spending a thousand dollars a month on advertising across different surface areas, different vehicles, et cetera, for now. And then as revenue comes in, we'll be amping up. In a perfect world, Micah, if we had fifty thousand dollars just in a chest right now, you'll and others would just say, just deploy all of it for pre-bookings and then see where it falls. But I think we'll take a little bit more of uh an experimental approach, and then we'll ratchet up when revenue goes up. Yeah, that's exactly right. And we'll learn a lot with ad spend and word placement, and just there's a lot to learn before we go all in and say, let's put another thousand dollars into meta ads or yes Google hotels. But this will be like an a good trial run to see what works, what doesn't, what gets the best return on ad spend. That way we're not just blindly throwing money into the market and hoping that we get a 95% direct bookings just to be facetious. But but look, we're at like six X just for if somebody's walking in this going, Man, I have no idea what you're talking about. Again, I owned an Airbnb, just people found me on Airbnb or Verbo or some other site, and I didn't pay anything in advertising. I just let I built my listing, built, used a nice like listing copy, had professional photos taken care of, and then you just kind of wait and then you adjust your prices and you let people come to you. So it's a little bit of a defensive posture, a passive posture. Hotel game, I think, especially boutique hotel, you got to go on offense, so you got to be kind of mentally prepared. Like, we got to find the people that are coming through this area and get in their way, whether they're content creators, influencers, or just people that their default is the Marriott. How are we gonna get them off of that if they're loyal already to a brand? You do that through advertising. And right now, for every dollar that we spend in OTA placement ads, we're generating five dollars in incremental revenue. ROAS or some, there's all these different metrics, but it's kind of fun thinking about what if I put $100 into that black box? What if I put $10,000 in that black box? Now it'll probably come down in terms of like your percentages, but hopefully that even that basic description goes Adam and Mike are gonna go from spending a hundred bucks to eight hundred bucks on booking.com, but we're expecting that ROAS and some of the marketing returns to more than make up for it. So our calendar is gonna get more booked out because people just would have missed us in the past. Yeah. Yeah. Visibility is very important, especially as a new hotel. We're rebranding. Nobody knows there's a boutique hotel in town. So I think visibility is probably one of our biggest areas to improve as we rebrand. I want to pivot really quick to FF and E cost at scale, just because for the average listener, I don't maybe they do, but I didn't think about this. Now, granted, we budgeted for it, but until you see the ticket item, you're like, whoa. And I think we just signed off on somewhere to the tune of 26 or 30 grand to furnish a whopping 10 of our 50 rooms. So just to kind of give you some reference, uh maybe listeners, of what it takes. And there's different levels. You could probably furnish a room. What was the lowest? Like a thousand or two thousand dollars per room. So mattress, bed frame, like all FFE in a hotel room at the most economical, most budget. Like you're probably talking uh business coming from China, no modifications, no adjustments. Like, but what is the absolute bare bones? A thousand bucks. Courtney, our designer, when she went to commercial hospitality or design hospitality conferences, and she shared some of the reports and market data. And as you climb into higher categories of luxury, the price obviously goes up. But we thought, boy, if we could get rooms done for I don't know, four, five, six K, like that would be pretty strong. But this has been a pretty eye-opening process just to realize how quickly what's the term a value engineering, right? Taking a $400 item and making it a $300 item. Probably doesn't matter that much if you're doing one Airbnb. But when you're decorating and outfitting 50 hotel rooms, or like Joel and Sarah King in Bloomington, Indiana, 101 hotel rooms, right? Every dollar is multiplied. Yep, that's exactly right. Uh and it adds up quick. You're like, oh, that's only two $200. And we multiply that by 50 rooms or 100 rooms. You're like, oh my God, wait, that's like $20,000. So it can add up very quickly. And of course, there's a spectrum. Like we said, you can get this done on the very cheap end and have just a very boring, raw product for a thousand dollars a room. And I'm sure there's some rooms that are upwards of $25,000 per room at the nicest hotel. There's definitely a lot of play here, but I think it just gives some visibility into what it takes to actually furnish a room. For me, what really gets me are the little things that add up, like the grommets, the electrical gromps, or what's another one? Yeah, like just things that yeah, like wall hooks or tile hooks. You need them, but you're like, oh man, that's not a tile hook, it's like $30. Yeah. Door stops. So the list goes on and on. It's not the mattress or the bed or the dresser or the nightstand. It's the small things that you absolutely have to have, but they add up as well. And before you know it, you're $300 over per room, and we're not going to get back into unit economics, but that adds up rather quickly. So I think we've been really good at, like you said, value engineering and finding ways to cut costs in some areas so we can spend a little bit more in other areas and still deliver a really good guest experience when it comes to the room. But yeah, wondering what you think being able to speak to 50 rooms we've had to order for at this point. It's crazy because again, most of my context up to this point has either been for my own personal homes or my primary home or for an Airbnb. And so if you're thinking, oh, I want to redecorate or redo my deck, right? Again, you might be online on a weekend or whatever at a kids' baseball game. Kind of, oh, I'll just kind of open up my Wayfair app and just kind of look. I think most people probably listening to this uh show are probably guilty of because online shopping and dreaming about stuff that they would want. Cheap stuff that's practical, that's relatively accessible, but it might break or I might need to replace it a couple years later. Or is it a really expensive big investment statement piece that I'm expecting to be around when my kid graduates high school? So there's levels to all this. But for example, like our outdoor chairs, right? So when you go out outside, some of our rooms have a little patio, there's a little kind of uh side table, and then two chairs. They're wrought iron today, they look like crap. Uh we want to make those kind of sexy and interesting. We got a couple of them that we brought to our model rooms. We tested them, we loved one of them, but they're $1,500 for two chairs. And we're like, what? We're not the four seasons, we can't pretend to be. But for example, even that one, Micah, we've been going back and forth for a couple weeks because it keeps stocking out. We thought we found the chair, we ordered it, stocked out. We found a different vendor, a different chair. Okay, similar price point. Cool. Oh, it's that's stocked out. Can we get it through Minoan? Oh, nope, they're out. So you never know what's going to potentially be out of stock or availability. And at some point, you just go, okay, rather than just get me five or ten chairs at a time, give me all the chairs. But you're exactly right. We're staring at like 16 to 20,000 bills for outdoor chairs. And am I doing that right now in my spare time for my Airbnb, my personal home? No, that feels so I don't know, egregious or extravagant, or no one's got 20k sitting around for frivolous stuff. But in hotel land, it's not frivolous. This these small touches, what's the old saying? The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is a little extra, literally. Yeah, so it's that's what we're doing every single day. How can we add and elevate but oh my gosh, are you right? It adds up in in a way that emotionally hits you. It's not just the spreadsheet, it's how do you feel spending sixteen thousand dollars on mini fridges? That's right. And it's intentional spending, and there's a budget, and we're definitely making sure we stay within budget, but you can it doesn't matter what the budget is. I think once you multiply it by a certain quantity, like you said, sixteen thousand dollars on refrigerators is still sixteen thousand dollars you spent to keep items cold. And at some point you ask yourself, what the hell am I doing? What am I doing? I think the what this reminds me of is when I bought my first Airbnb, I bought five TVs all at once. And for those who don't know, I don't watch a lot of TV, I watch sports, and that's about it. And I'm like, what if this doesn't work? Like, why am I buying five TVs to furnish this home when I don't even watch TV? But you quickly realize it's way bigger than you, and this is what it takes to compete and have a great quality product in this space. Uh and that's what we're doing. You have the psychological side of things, and then you have the logic side of things, and logically, this makes perfect sense. Each fridge costs $200, and you multiply that, and you get your number, right? But the other side is like it's still a large ticket item that we just spent on keeping items cold. So we've I think we we go through that with just about every large purchase that we've had up until this point. I think the logic always takes over and we're making the right decisions. We're not doing anything that's like a splurge and we don't think is going to give us a great ROI. I think everything we've done to this point has been because we believe it will yield really good results. So yeah, man, it just I don't know. Another day, another crazy idea or thought or something else that wakes me up in the middle of the night, but I am so excited to be in this. And there, man, we want it exactly. Just as a football analogy, what are we like? Maybe on the 20, we're in the red zone. Like we can see these. We're in the red zone for sure. There are plays that score. There are many other plays we don't score, but at least get us closer to the end zone. Yeah, every day we're just battling, we're fighting, we're dealing with all the things. And uh, maybe in the future we can talk about our aspirations for exterior courtyard area. We've got some there, rooftop bar is the big dream. So, anyways, more to share in future episodes. But look, if you're doing this, if you're investing in this space, or if you want to make the jump yourself and build a boutique hotel, there is, I can't think of a better place than boutique hotel secrets. Man, we got to rep it again because that's how we're doing this. We've got mentors, we've got classes, we've got one-on-ones, we've got playbooks, spreadsheets, vendor discounts. The network is massive. And as Micah said, people in the hospitality space are generous, they're giving, they're others focused. And that's exactly what we found in Mike Shogren's Boutique Hotel Secrets. If you're on the fence or curious at all, man, you can schedule literally a free chemistry call with Shogren himself or one of us would be happy to talk to you about your dreams, your future, if this might be right for you. But the fact that you're listening in, hearing our story, hopefully it's helpful to hear somebody going from zero to one. Our goal, once again, it with comeback hospitality is to go do this three times in five years. How can we reposition, acquire, and build up a brand, a portfolio of hotels, and go from amateurs, we're not sure how to do this, to seasoned veterans, right? After three hotels, five hotels, et cetera. I think this gets easier and easier. And our goal is to build out loud, be helpful, be useful, hopefully add value, uh, maybe have a little bit of fun along the way as part of where we're up to. So, anyways, let me flip it over. A closing thoughts on you, Sadman? No closing thoughts. Uh, this is it's an adventure, I'll say. And it's a lot of work, and this is a team game. And I don't think we could do this without one another and our mentors and our support groups. The world of commercial real estate is a daunting one, but it's one that fortunately you get to do with other people. You don't do this by yourself. So very happy to have the support system and the reassurance and someone looking over our shoulder to make sure we don't run this into the ground. Uh, and I wouldn't want to do anything else in the world right now than be repositioned in our first boutique hotel. So just excited for how far we've come and where we're going, and can't wait to hop back on the pod and talk about, I'm sure, more crazy updates uh come next week. Other things, but we'll leave it there. So thanks again, everyone, for tuning in. Uh, on behalf of Mike and myself, thanks so much, and that's the pod. All right, that's it for today on the official Bookie Cotel Secrets podcast. 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 playbook to find what we're learning, the link is in the chat. Quick note: we're VHS community members sharing our own experiences. And if you have questions or topics you want us to cover, reach out and let us help. We're building a channel for operators just like you at Delphead.com.