35 - We Wanted 20 Rooms. We Got 2. Here's What We Learned with Micah & Adam

In this episode, Adam and Micah pull back the curtain on the brutal gap between expectations and reality as they prepare for their first major holiday weekend at The Wesley — aiming for 20 newly renovated rooms, delivering 2. They also dig into their marketing strategy for driving direct bookings, why building an email list has real dollar value at exit, and how AI is reshaping how hotels reach guests.

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

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This feels like a huge miss, but in the same time, this is the reality of real estate and construction. And we can have great ideas and timelines, but it takes what it takes. And it's up to us to continually solve for delays and become creative to make sure we can still make money.

SPEAKER_04 0:21

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

SPEAKER_01 0:25

We're short-term rental operators who made the jump into boutique hotels. And we're in it right now. Raising capital, renovating a 50-room property. We're figuring it out as we go. This is the Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast, and these are secrets.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

Welcome in, Boutique Hotel Nation, to another episode of the official Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Walls, co-founder of Comeback Hospitality. We're documenting our story going zero to one, making the leap from Airbnbs to commercial boutique hospitality assets. Not just me, thankfully. So let me bring in my mister from another sister, Micah Thomas, live from room seven. How are you doing, sir?

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Man, I'm doing good. And this might be a sad thing to announce. This may be my last week in room seven.

SPEAKER_03 1:13

So our little boy's grown up. This is leaving your dorm or something.

SPEAKER_00 1:17

This is isn't the life, it's not gonna be the same here at the hotel now that I can't live in my infamous room seven. But I'm doing good. There's construction happening, we're approaching the holiday. There's plenty to talk about. We're getting about 26 boxes every single day. So it's like Christmas. But if you woke up every day and it was Christmas, it kind of isn't fun anymore. You're happy, but also I don't want to do this. I don't want to do this again. So very excited, glad to be here, and we got plenty to talk about today.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

I love it, man. Yeah, and just to kind of timestamp this conversation. So this is happening the week or weekend before Memorial Day weekends, May 2026. Just to remind you, we bought this hotel in December. We got under contract in July, right? So this is already Mike and I have been focused on the Wesley for well over a year at this point, but we're seeing it come to life. And we were really excited to maybe have 20 rooms online by Memorial Day weekend. This was kind of like on our little vision board. We're trying to manifest it, we're trying to manage it, we're doing all the things. What's the state of the union? Where are we? I we're gonna have some new rooms, but not 20. So maybe we could kind of break the news to people and just kind of talk a little bit about expectations versus reality on a hospitality commercial project.

SPEAKER_00 2:35

Yeah, that's a really good point. And it's devastating news. We wanted to have 20 rooms ready, 20 new rooms ready going into Memorial Day weekend. We tried to incentivize the general contractor. It really didn't seem to move the needle at all. And instead of 20 new rooms, we have two new rooms available for Memorial Day weekend. Close. Very close. Maybe a little off. What is that? I don't even know the percentage. Was that 8%? 10%?

SPEAKER_03 3:00

It's not good. It's not good. But talk about why we've got 20%, we're working in systems. And so it's like 20 rooms have a lot of stuff done, but they're not at the point where we can sell them. So what's holding this back? And maybe you can talk about kind of they're not going to trickle in like we originally were kind of thinking. It's going to be like a batch upload of new rooms at the Wesley.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

Yeah, good way to put it. That's exactly right. So the rooms, the flooring is done, the paint is done, we have desks going in, the bed frames, mattresses are into the rooms. But what we're really waiting on is tile. And until the tile gets done, we can't install the toilet or the sink. And those are things that we can't rent the room without. So while we can rent a partially finished room, some things need to be present. For example, our doorways, we widened our by two inches, but the doors are being custom made and they're just not ready yet. So we some things we can get away with, while others we just have to kind of bite the bullet on. And like you said, things are progressing pretty successively. So while we may not get one room today and one room two days from now, it feels like we're gonna get 20 rooms all at once, and then soon after we'll get an additional 10 rooms. So while that's great news, the disheartening news is we're approaching a big holiday weekend where the town sells out, and we need to have as many rooms available as possible to make some money. We talked to our GM today and we talked through a strategy of getting some other rooms online, and maybe you can mention a little bit about what we're planning to do.

SPEAKER_03 4:37

Yeah, I think rooms was it two two through eight, two through nine. So we've got about eight rooms on the Bowling L side. But kind of the one of the big breakthroughs is the back building, right? So that's where we've actually been housing our GC and kind of the crew that come up from Phoenix to work on the property. So it's a mix of some day laborers and some people close to home that can come work at the hotel and then go home at night. But a lot of these guys are coming up from Phoenix, right? So they're making the drive up Monday morning, they're taking off Friday afternoon, and they're trying to get as much stuff accomplished over the course of the week. So we've obviously had many debates about that. About when was four o'clock really the time that we're putting away our tools, gentlemen? So again, you've lived life there at the Wesley, helping to clarify what's happening today, where we at, where are the bottlenecks, how can we kind of unlock and increase flow? But I thought this was a genius move to say, hey, what if we moved out our construction crew? Up until this point, we it was almost like just an assumption that seven, eight, nine rooms were occupied by the folks that were working on the property. But now that we're at a huge compression event, Airbnb land, right? We kind of all live for these. Every market, it's a little bit different, but I don't know many markets where Memorial Day and Labor Day aren't great or the 4th of July. So lots of people want to come, right? School's out and tourists are descending. And the name of the game is how many rentable rooms do you have? So we'll be able to go from kind of eight old rooms, two new model rooms, and then eight rooms by vacating our construction crew just for the weekend, right? They'll be able to kind of move in next week. But I think this is going to be a conversation moving every week forward from here on out. We might just be out of rooms for them. This is what we'd already discussed at the beginning of the project. And part of when he scoped it a little ambitiously to say, hey, I think I can get you 50 rooms by the first of May. That hasn't come true. But the question is, how many weeks do we continue to give up free housing to our day labors? And at some point, they need to demo their own rooms, right? We'll flipped and converted most of our rooms into new rooms. It'll just be time to start on their rooms anyway. And they'll have to figure out housing for the crew. So, anyways, 18 rooms is certainly better than two or four or eight. I like that we're in the double digits. We're approaching almost 40% of our possible capacity at the hotel. But yeah, I'd be lying if I said that I would be satisfied with that number. I wanted the ratio of new rooms to total capacity just to be higher. I don't this is a baseball game, or if this is a NBA finals and I'm two for 18 from the floor. Like I think the coach is sitting me down and talking to me.

SPEAKER_00 7:20

Yeah, that's exactly right. And we promise to be very transparent and vulnerable, and I think that's what we've done. This feels like a huge miss, but in the same time, this is the reality of real estate and construction, and we can have great ideas and timelines, but it takes what it takes, and it's up to us to continually solve for delays and become creative to make sure we can still make money. But it's just where we are right now. But like you said, we are definitely not excited to be telling this news, but it's the reality, and it's something that we have to bear and prepare for as we move forward. So with that being said, I'd like to transition to how we prepare to have 20 rooms ready, which means that we ordered FF and E for 20 rooms and what's FE again, remember that is furniture, fixtures, and equipment. So if you think about the bed frame, stools, blankets, sheets, pillows, anything that exists inside the hotel room could be qualified as FFNE. Maybe not the toilet, but everything else is essentially FFE. But yeah, we've started ordering, we've got really dialed in on what goes in each room type, what the dollar amount is, and we have done very well with value engineering these rooms to stay within budget and have more room for our courtyard and possible rooftop bar. But we ordered for let's say 10 rooms, and that stuff started arriving before rooms were quite ready. And the big question is where do you put this stuff? We're in the exterior corridor hotel, and we don't have built-in office or meeting space. So we have to be really creative with where we put this stuff, and that's on top of things going out of stock and us ordering the entire hotel amount. For example, light fixtures that we ordered, I believe 74 at once. So there was a real world last week where 74 boxes showed up and they all had to have a home inside the hotel somewhere. So that's been fun.

SPEAKER_03 9:32

It's like Jenga, man. I'm moving all these pieces and where is it gonna fall? And we were talking about putting stuff on the rooftop at some point, exactly. I think one of the and we have two kind of shipping containers or connects on the property as is, but they were filling up, and we just ordered in order to not stock out on, for example, our little mini retro fridges, we're 50 at a time. So we've kind of gone from ordering five or ten at a time to having enough of these stock out to just go, oh no, let's just let's get all of them for the entire property. So that's cool. You get 74 pendant lights all together, you get 52 mini fridges all together. But where are you gonna put them? And you think of the manpower and the time lost, you're just filling up room 17 to then move it over to room 16 or to room 12 or to you're moving stuff from one room to the to another. The more time that those guys touch that box before it's actually installed, right? That's potentially some lost productivity. So we did make, I think, a pretty creative decision to augment this and support this. It wasn't originally in our line items or whatnot, but do you want to talk about the play and the decision that we just made recently?

SPEAKER_00 10:46

For sure. So what was some a topic of conversation was the two old storage sheds that we have, and they are very dilapidated and made cheaply and deteriorating to say the least. And the big question was do we try to reconstruct what already exists, or do we just tear it in completely down and maybe put something like a spec shed from Home Depot or Lowe's in that place? We also have two storage containers on site that the contractors are using to store all of their materials, equipment, tools, etc. And I think it was actually one of our advisors, Joel, or coaches, who mentioned, what if you just bought a storage container to keep on site permanently? So as we knew more and more boxes were coming to the property, we had to solve for this pretty quickly. I reached out to the storage container company that provided us with the two that are on site now, and he gave us a few different options. We could buy a new storage container, we could buy a used storage container, we could get a roll-up door installed on the side. So it was almost like a pimp my rye, but for storage containers based off of all the options we had. We could add a different locking mechanism on the door. Adam and I talked, we decided we're gonna buy a used storage container and we're gonna paint it anyway. It'll likely end up having a mural on the side of it, so it won't really matter. And the guy at the company was nice enough to send photos of a few different options, and he knew our vision and what we plan on doing at the hotel, and he said, I think this one will work best for you. The floor is in good condition, the doors are in good condition, and they actually have a year warranty to be airtight and watertight, so that was great to hear as well. And they could deliver it as early as this week. So I talked to him on Monday, and he said he could get it here as early as Wednesday or Thursday if we needed him to. So for me, I thought that was very useful information because we have incoming shipments every single day. And then once we finish with the actual renovation, we can turn this same space into a permanent storage for cleaning chemicals and linen and soap and you name it, in the same footprint we have, we're able to optimize our space. So while it may not seem like such an exciting update, this was really big for us because as you can imagine, 20 to 30 boxes showing up every day and having to find a home for them and pull manpower away from one area just to move them to another area two days later. That's not really efficient and a little bit frustrating. So very happy that we were able to get that done.

SPEAKER_03 13:20

Yeah, and you've got an asset, like even if five years from now, ten years from now, we wanted to sell it, right? Like you could shipping containers all the time are bought and sold or rented, and just people are going, I have no idea how much that costs. A lot of the costs are actually in the transport. So we're talking about give or take a thousand bucks, fifteen hundred bucks to ship it from Phoenix, for example, to Page. We're about four hours away. So if you're closer to major metro, maybe that number goes down a bit for you. But okay, $2,500 to put a shipping container on my lot and then to pick it up. But it's a hundred bucks a month to to rent it. It's just sitting there. And I think this was something that our coaches were we were explaining that we could sure use another rental or two. But when you kind of look at the mathematics, it's like you're paying a lot just to move it there and move it back. So what if you bought instead? And again, boy, if I could walk the listeners to that shed right now and open it, the floor is falling, the roof is falling. Roberta, our GM says she hasn't really put anything valuable in there because there could be rodents, there could be scorpions. Like it is not weatherproof, airtight, rodent-proof. And so with a shipping container, you're coming in with a steel box. And we might need to think through like cooling or insulation or some of those sorts of things if it's long term. But it helps us out today, and I think it gives us some capacity to hold things, right? If we're gonna order some extra FFE, like two TVs, rather than keeping those next to the in the manager's office or in the laundry room, right? Some of that, let's call it higher dollar value, larger, bulkier stuff that is infrequently used. Man, you got a new home and it's in the shed. So I think I think it's a great move, man.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Yeah, and we really repurposed, we found a way to repurpose space that we were already intending to use for storage, and we just are going to demo the current sheds and replace it with a more permanent structure that is a good quality material that'll last for years to come if we absolutely wanted it to.

SPEAKER_02 15:31

Exactly, exactly.

SPEAKER_03 15:32

But let's let's let's move on to I feel like there is a rainbow, a bright part. Certainly in your you've been like on property for the last two months pretty much non-stop. So you have a beautiful thing coming up in the future, slightly terrifying to myself and Roberta because what do we do without Micah on the ground? But but I thought, yeah, to the extent you're willing to share with the audience what's coming up, and then maybe we can talk about okay. Adam's flying in the June 1st to play the mica role. He's putting on the mica hat. Well, what the heck do I do, man?

SPEAKER_00 16:03

Yeah. Very excited to be going to Italy for two weeks. It'll be me and my wife's one-year anniversary, and we got married at the courthouse last year, so this will be our actual ceremony of our family members, and it'll be three days worth of events, just like a traditional Poulian style wedding in Italy. That'll be fun. I want to be as available as possible, but for obvious reasons, I will only be so available.

SPEAKER_02 16:28

Absolutely. I want you to not be available, man. It's a big deal.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, you're right. You get to take over my role, and it'll be a lot of fun. I'll say that. You'll have a grand time. I'm lucky enough to have gotten into a rhythm and I know what I need to do, what I don't need to do to be efficient and still be able to hop on calls and get meetings and emails answered, and so on and so forth. But I will say if you aren't very diligent and structure it while you're on site, you can very quickly get pulled in a thousand different directions. And you look at the end of the day and you're like, okay, I just made a decision on like where the outlet goes. And then I had to get lunch and I talked to somebody who was interested in the project for two hours. So you have to be very controlling of your time while you're here and make sure the things you commit to doing while you're on site are high-yielding activities. Like where the curtain rod goes might be a good example. Today we made that decision, and that's a decision that I want to be a part of. But if you're asking me if the sh if the tile needs to go in room 22 or room 23 until we get another room, I don't honestly care where the tile goes, just get it somewhere exactly. So yeah, it's just being dialed in on that and having a good control of your time and being able to say no, especially when they know what room you're in. And I've been a really good advocate of room seven, they have a very good habit of walking to the door and knocking on the door. So sometimes I'll close the curtain on purpose just so they don't know I'm in here taking care of something else. But all in all, it's good to have ownership on site. I've heard it before. There's just a different sense of urgency when they know that ownership is on site. There's no lollygagging, everybody's moving with purpose. I can't speak for when I'm not here. I can only speak from what our GM and others say with us being here and us not being here. So I think there's great value in you being here. You'll be able to delegate and make decisions in real time about things. So I'm very happy to have you here while I'm gone. And I would love to hear on the backside of this how everything goes.

SPEAKER_04 18:40

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SPEAKER_00 18:46

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

SPEAKER_03 18:50

Yeah, how it goes, man. And again, the the goal is to try and get as many of these rooms done, high quality, on time, delivered within budget, et cetera. We're while we were shooting for 20 for Memorial Day weekend. Wouldn't it be lovely if you came back from Italy? And I don't know if it's gonna be five, 10, 15, 20 rooms. They went system by system, right? And once we get rolling, I think the flooring guys were a great example of that, right? They showed up and we were thinking that was going to be a constraint, and then boom, we woke up and those four rooms were done and looked to your left or did a podcast, and then another four rooms were done. So those guys were flying, and I feel like we almost solved it with tile. I don't know if I can't remember if we talked about that or not, but we had eyes on more tilers and then it it fell apart. So I feel like tile and HVAC continue to be something that we manage every single day. And I think on June 1st, I'll probably be talking about Tile and HVAC.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Yeah, yeah, those are every project has a bottleneck. I've said this probably time and time again, and these just happen to be our bottlenecks, and I think tile will probably be the biggest bottleneck just because there's not enough hands on deck, and this has been an ongoing conversation that we are trying to solve for the best way we know how. The good news with HVAC is the mini-split units should be available on Thursday of this week. So I'm hoping by the time I get back, most, if not all AC units, even in the non-demo rooms.

SPEAKER_03 20:16

Yeah, like we got the HVAC for every single room, same thing with pile, same thing with flooring. So we were tired of hearing that these were constraints a month ago, two months ago, when we were ordering five, 10 rooms at a time. And so we just said, Hey, how do we remove this constraint? Get it all here. Yeah, but as you've heard, that kind of compounds your inventory management or storage issues when you have yeah, seven pallets of something delivered. It's like, where do you store this stuff and keep it secure?

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Yep, that's exactly right. So I'm in the best case scenario, I think I come back from Italy, honeymoon phase, as you may say, and we got 30 rooms done and they're ready to be rented. And I'm gonna say money to go out of the country more often because every time I leave, things get done. So I'm hoping that this happens.

SPEAKER_03 21:02

That's my hope is I can be an asset, not a liability, right? We can accelerate and the team does better. But yeah, I think there's something about fresh eyes on a project, new voices. You know, again, don't want to spill all the tea, but definitely, for example, I come down once a month and there's a different energy when I show up, right? Again, I'm connected to investors and and they know that I'm kind of the money guy. And and there's good pressure and there's bad pressure, and we try and be conscious of that. We're trying to push, but be reasonable, make some accommodations or compromise on some things. So, anyways, I think it's just a it's a dance. And I think there's probably just this larger point for anyone moving from Airbnbs. If you've ever undertaken uh renovation or you've added some amenities or you've redesigned or refreshed your property, those might be on four or six week timelines. Like we're all of a sudden now on four to six month or and year timelines. Some of our Mentors doing 100 million plus dollar deals are on a three-year development cycle. So I think there's levels to this game. We knew it was going to be a jump. It's been challenging, but I think, and I've heard from investors that they're more confident in us because we've got boots on the ground that we're not just sitting in our home office just asking for reports at the end of the day. We're physically there and we're invested in the property and we're actively managing this asset. Because remember, at the end of the day, like life insurance, rental properties, my own home. We put a lot on the line to be successful here. So we kind of are examples of the burn the boat strategy. Just believe in yourself, give yourself no other option but success, and then will it into existence. Might not be on the timeline that you love, but it's gonna happen. I'm confident.

SPEAKER_00 22:51

Yeah, uh, couldn't agree with you more. And speaking about timelines and just brand awareness and getting the word out there that we are a new entity, a boutique hotel in Page, Arizona, something that has not existed up until this point. We started conversations with some marketing companies and more specifically our social media marketing and meta marketing. So wanted to maybe get your two cents on it, and then I can share maybe some things that I learned from talking to a company today, just to kind of give listeners and viewers a chance to understand what exactly goes into the marketing strategy from a social media aspect and then kind of price points for like A versus B.

SPEAKER_03 23:33

Yeah. And look, I think because of your efforts, like us collabing on some different videos, podcasts, etc. So to me, there's like this there's this organic side where we're talking about our project as we're building it. And that in of itself is we're building kind of social proof that we're real people working on a real thing, like a little mini HG TV show and kind of playing out in real time, which is cool, but then there's this whole other world of paid, right? And how do you kind of get in the algorithm and all the social media is capturing people's attention? But ultimately, why is Facebook free? Why is Instagram fee free? Why is TikTok free? Name that platform. It's free because you are the product, right? The person scrolling at 11 p.m. thinking about where they want to go on summer vacation. You're a target for an advertiser. And all of a sudden now we find ourselves going from consumers to the other side of the table where we're learning about row ads and cost per click and all this marketing kind of jargon. It's been around forever. It's well documented, it's well understood. But the question is, yeah, how do you attack this? And there's levels to this. And I think if if we've got a three hotels that are kicking off two million dollars each top line revenue, you just have a marketing and advertising budget. And it might be five, 10, 20 grand a month that you're spending to try and raise your brand to reconvert past guests, to turn mild interest into maybe some active. Maybe they give you their email, or maybe they said that they were interested. Maybe they went to Muse or PMS and clicked on some dates and checked around. Somewhere in there, we're going from complete strangers to potentially customers, and we want to nurture that pipeline all the way along. To me, I think it's just interesting because this isn't 2016, it's 2026. AI is everywhere. The productivity, the leverage that you get, what agents can do, agentic workflows. There's so much cool stuff that's helping us be better real estate investors that I think that's at least where we start is going, okay, what's the DIY side look like? And then what does the more high-end agency uh look like? But maybe you can talk about uh even the vendor that you talked to today, right? We've created a list, we've worked with our virtual assistant to do some research here. We've set up some appointments, we're looking at features, functionality, but ultimately price, right? As new guys, maybe we're millionaires, but we haven't been paid yet, I think is the line, right? So it's like we got to do this efficiently, but there's probably some middle ground between Adam and Micah just complete DIY pretending to be marketers to full-scale, professional, outsourced, done for you service. So maybe, you know, maybe you can share a little bit about like levels, budget, some of the things that you're starting to learn about this space.

SPEAKER_00 26:27

Yeah. And I think another thing to note before I even get into that is the entire, not the entire, but a big purpose of spending ad dollars to get people to direct book is to develop a pipeline. So not only are you building your brand, but you're building your customer base. So now you can retarget and re-market. And these are things that let's say you spend zero dollars in marketing and ad spend, like this hotel did before we purchased it. All of their bookings came through OTAs or online travel agencies. So think about your booking, your Expedia. And what they do really is they keep all the guests' personal data away from you. The only thing you have is their first and last name, but their email, their phone number, the ability to retarget or offer them discounted rates if they book direct, it just doesn't exist. And you are penalized very heavily if you try to retarget any guests that come to the property via an OTA. So part of the campaign is to drive direct bookings and get access to not just the guest data, but better rates for the guests and sometimes a better experience because you don't have to go through a third party to get questions answered or things taken care of. You can come directly to the property and deal directly with the property itself or the hotel itself. So I would say that's the big initiative. And yeah, there's a spectrum. We can do done for you service, and I think we were we can get in the numbers here in a second, and you can do DIY, where Adam and Micah do everything from recording the content to editing the content to spending money on specific types of ads, whether that's Google hotels, whether that's meta ads, whether that's meta search. The list goes on and on for the amount of platforms where you can spend your money. And then there's something in between where with the use of AI and these marketing agencies, they can give you a template to use. They can give you the dashboard that shows you where your return on advertising spend is doing the best at, where people are actually clicking, how long people are watching videos or looking at posts, and you can use that data that's aggregated across other plat or all the platforms to make more skilled decisions. So there's a spectrum, there's a dynamic, and all of them come at different price points. So the big question is how much money do you have and how much time and effort do you want to put into advertising and marketing? I'll be the first person to say, I know my strengths. And advertising and marketing is not one. Am I willing to learn and do as much as possible? Absolutely. But if you say, Micah, we need you to take over the advertising department for the next year, I'm going to say you got the wrong guy. Right now, I think we're just deciding which works best for us. A specific company I talked to today, they do specifically hospitality advertising spend, and they do it for over 20,000 hotels across the world. So that's pretty remarkable. And they said they do marketing for chains, collections, and boutique hotels, and you have different products for each. They're well integrated with Muse, which was a big deal for us because Muse is our property management software. And our big bragging point about our direct booking website is we can get a guest from the time they land on the page in six clicks, they can have a reservation booked. Today he told me that they can get a reservation booked in two clicks, which is by far the craziest thing I've ever heard of. But they're leveraging AI, they're leveraging LLM systems to input all of the data on the front end. So if a guest gets on ChatGPT and says, I'm looking for July 1st through the in Page Arizona for a boutique hotel, they're able to send them to our direct booking website. It's already got the dates, it's already got the type of room they need. All they have to do is pretty much put their information in and click book now, and they can be complete. So it was just pretty remarkable to hear about some of the ways they've found to streamline bookings and just create less friction, which ultimately leads to more bookings and easier booking potential guests. So very exciting stuff. And I don't know if you have any initial thoughts or knee-jerk reactions off of hearing that.

unknown 30:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:37

Look, I think it's a fascinating new world. I'm out here in the Bay Area, so I get to kind of meet up with some interesting characters that are very much at some of these major labs and product leaders and kind of rolling out new functionality and features. And one guy that I was chatting with, he's working in the automotive vertical with AI. But again, how do you get cars placed correctly and active inventory? So, Micah, if you're in the market looking for a new car, I want less than 50,000 miles, maybe two years or older. You probably have like this buy box in mind. You can put it in. All of a sudden, ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini is going to kick back some links or some ideas for you. Half the time, if you're looking for a specific product like this right now, it's going to link you to something that already sold, something that's gone. This already happens to me trying to look for new hotel opportunities. AI keeps finding great deals that aren't live. It's such a good deal it already sold. Imagine that. So I think it'll just be interesting to see how do brands, how do organizations, how do hotel hotels start to adapt their content, adapt their code, adapt their data so that it is friendly, it's ingestible, right? That it is set up to dock with all these MCPs and APIs and webhook endpoints. And again, we're all becoming mini IT employees over here. So, anyways, I'm attracted honestly to probably that like mid-tier. I don't know if that's right or wrong. I get scared when it's just you and I and Claude. Good luck. And I get really nervous about our ability to pay a full-scale agency $5,000 a month to manage everything for us. And oh, by the way, that's zero dollars in the advertising spend bucket. So realistically, you're talking at 10K, realistically, on a monthly average to spend to use kind of the big boy institutional type stuff the right way. So it's a sliding scale. And we know people that are spending more than that. And so there's all these reasons of the pros and cons of anywhere that you live on that spectrum. I think I'm most interested in okay, how do we do more than nothing? Right. But how do we be efficient and effective with our dollars? So if somebody's got hospitality expertise, marketing expertise, if they've got templates, if they've got campaigns, if they've got things where we can add our brand voice, our brand collateral, our imagery, us, right? The story that we're trying to tell, but it's in a proven way, or it's already in a format that kind of makes sense for the internet or for AI. I'm all about scaffolding and kind of standing on the shoulders of these giants. So I suspect that's probably where we're gonna go. But is that 50 bucks a month? Is that 200 bucks a month? Is it 500? So we'll talk with all these different vendors and kind of see what this maybe midpoint looks like. And then, oh, by the way, a year from now, if you and I are working on hotel deal two and we want to be completely divorced from this, we got to either figure out how to train our staff to run the templates and the campaigns and kind of the training wheel option themselves, or we just ladder up and we go done for you and pay an agency and just say, let's just outsource that. We don't need to become world-class in marketing. Let's pay somebody who can pay attention to that. And the economics, the physics of that investment, if we can put a dollar into a black box and get six dollars of revenue back or ten dollars back, how much money can we stick into this black box? So I think when revenue comes in and we're profitable, the conversation maybe changes. But right now, coming out of six months of renovation, Memorial Day weekend town's gonna sell out, and we have two new rooms to sell. I don't get the sense that I'm ready to turn on $10,000 worth of marketing ad spent.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And that's just a responsible decision to say the least. We what are we doing? We're gonna create a ton of traffic with two rooms available, two new rooms available. So yeah, we need to be very strategic and planned out when it comes to spending money on things that may not yield the best benefits quite yet. But again, this looks way different a year from now when we're stabilized and we're looking at the next hotel, and it'll be a great conversation to have at that point. But in the meantime, we have some decisions to make. There's a few more companies we're going to talk to, and I'm just excited to continue to build our brand and get that social media presence that really can turn out to be a great investment. Joel, one of our coaches, talked about how there's a value on an email list. And depending on how big your email list is, you get a different valuation when it comes time to look at the valuation of your property with your social media following. It has a dollar amount, depending on what it is. If you can prove that your click-through rate is a certain number, when people are actually opening and booking based off of email campaigns or text message campaigns, you name it, that's valuable and that has a value in your business when it comes to appraisals and sale and refinance. So definitely something to continue to think about and talk about versus taking the approach of no ad spin whatsoever, which I don't think we would ever do. But it's just again, there's different sides of a coin, different spectrums, and we want to hope to land somewhere in the sweet spot.

SPEAKER_03 35:52

And I think something like the graduate hotels, I think they were acquired by Hilton, was it a year or two, something like that? Build that up, kind of university focused, got kind of high-end. And now they're scaling globally. So now there's Princeton, Cambridge, all these high-end kind of elite schools. I still love the one in University of North Carolina, room number 23, Michael Jordan's dorm room. So high-end experiential storytelling on brand around campuses. But I want to say during their sale that just their brand assets alone, $100 million. Wow. Intellectual property, the following that they built, the brand. So again, you've got to create it. It takes energy, it takes money, it takes time. But that's again what it can start to look like over time when it compounds. But, anyways, I know look, we're just about at 40 minutes. We promised to tell our story. And I know we're gonna have guests coming up in in future weeks as well, but we we like to kind of open up with people. But hey man, if you're thinking about this at all, boutique hotel secrets. How are you listening to the podcast? Why are you not in the community? If you're thinking about doing this, jumping from four-week renovations in single family to four-month in hotels, you need people around you that have kind of done this or played at bigger levels than you. So certainly gave us confidence to do it. Again, we'll make sure that there's a link wherever you're seeing this to schedule a discovery call to see if joining a group like this might make sense for you or not. By the way, just a quick shout out to Floyd. We met a lovely man recently in Costa Rica who's trying to take down his first boutique hotel. So, again, we're international. We already know some people overseas, but this is not just a US only thing. People every day are uncovering new opportunities, but they're going, I don't know how to do this. How do you underwrite this? How should I develop this? How should I phase this out? How do I install playbooks? How do I lead a team of 20? These are new muscles. And again, we'd be the first ones to say YouTube university is not the place to learn this or Facebook groups. It's cool to start to get some awareness and basic education, but if you want to do this for real and put your assets and your family's future on the line, I hope you would consider joining a group like this. So just kind of always want to plug at the end, man. There, if you're listening to this, you're clearly showing some interest. And we just encourage you when the time is right, when it feels right, no pressure. But we'd love to talk with you or connect you with Mike Shogren, Joel, Rashmi, Isaac. There's so many lovely people in this community that that that we're learning from every single week.

SPEAKER_00 38:25

Yeah, that's I couldn't have said it better. And yeah, it sounds like a shameless plug, but it's so true. There's a community and they are so supportive, and we're a part of it. And every week we have the pleasure of jumping on these calls and getting real world advice from people who have done exactly what we're doing right now and they can speak from experience. And I don't think there's anything more valuable than that. So very great, grateful to be a part of this community. And please reach out if you have any further questions.

SPEAKER_02 38:52

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 38:52

And I hope when you come back from Italy, again, we'll keep we've got some fun guests kind of on the docket in the future. We'll keep telling your story. We'll find out how many atom rooms got done the first week of June. So wish me luck. And we'll find out. Some other students are putting in LOIs literally this week. So I think a lot's gonna happen as the calendar turns from May to June. So yeah, anyways, we're we're committed to sharing our story kind of publicly online. And if we can be of service, if we can help you, no strings attached. Just set up literally a call and let's kind of size up where you're at and if this would make sense at this point in time. Okay, enough commercial there. Thank you so much. Thanks for tuning in. We'll catch you on the next one. That's the pod.

SPEAKER_01 39:33

All right, that's it for today on the official Bookie Hotel Secrets podcast.

SPEAKER_00 39:38

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 BHS community members sharing our own experiences. And if you have questions or topics you want us to cover, reach out and let us know.

SPEAKER_01 39:58

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