The Direct Booking Machine Behind Joshua Tree’s Most Recognized STR Brand with Patryk Swietek

Summary and Highlights

👤 Meet Patryk Swietek

Patryk Swietek is the co-owner of The Cohost Company, a full-service short-term rental property management company based in Joshua Tree, California. He entered the industry in 2018 working for AvantStay, where he trained directly under one of the founders before launching out on his own during COVID.

After buying his first property and scaling to five owned units, Patryk shifted gears — purchasing his first property management company instead of adding properties one by one. That strategic move unlocked economies of scale he couldn’t have achieved otherwise. Today, The Cohost Company manages 130 doors in one of the most competitive desert markets in the country, with Patryk and his business partner Josh focused almost entirely on revenue-generating activities: pricing, marketing, and owner relationships.

Patryk is also the host of the Patryk Real Estate Show podcast and a sought-after speaker in the STR space.

🏗️ Why Buying a Property Management Company Changed Everything

Most co-hosts grow their portfolio one contract at a time. Patryk took a different approach. When the opportunity came to acquire a bundle of 15 management contracts, he took it — even without knowing everything about what he was buying.

What he found was a falling knife. Owners wanted to leave, communication had broken down, and revenue was underperforming. But within the first month of taking over, Patryk and Josh drove 30% more revenue than the previous owner by adjusting pricing alone. Then came new photography, new systems, and a full team overhaul. The company turned around fast.

That experience shaped everything that followed. Patryk went on to acquire three more companies, including a recent strategic merger with a 25-unit operator whose owner became their Director of Operations. The lesson isn’t that acquisitions are easy. It’s that when you have the right team behind you, you can move faster and serve owners better than a solo operator ever could. If you’re curious how other operators have scaled STR portfolios with intention, this kind of structural thinking is what separates growth from chaos.

🎯 The Power of One Market

Patryk sold his Smoky Mountains property to go all-in on Joshua Tree, and he has no regrets. He explains why with a simple question: if two property managers are competing in the same market — one focused on five markets, one focused on one — who has the better pulse on pricing, demand patterns, and guest behavior?

The answer is obvious. But the implications go further than most operators realize.

When you’re deeply embedded in one market, you get economies of scale with vendors (negotiate better prices by offering volume), operations (one team, one supply chain, one office), and data (130 live units generating real-time revenue intelligence that no scraper tool can match). Patryk’s team can look at their own portfolio and tell you exactly which property type performs best in Joshua Tree, which weeks have hidden demand that pricing tools miss, and which features justify a premium. That’s the kind of market knowledge that makes understanding your ideal guest avatar feel more like science than guesswork.

And from a direct booking perspective, one market means one focused audience — one Instagram feed, one email list, one brand story. The Cohost Company isn’t trying to be everywhere. They’re trying to own Joshua Tree.

📲 The Instagram Funnel That’s Driving Real Bookings

This is where the episode gets tactical. Patryk and his team have built what Gil calls a “beast of an engine” — a top-to-bottom direct booking funnel that starts with content and ends with conversion.

Top of funnel: Instagram content. Working with social media strategist Dustin, The Cohost Company posts daily reels designed specifically for their guest avatar — millennials aged 25 to 40 who discover Joshua Tree stays through Instagram. They focus on high-quality short-form video and have become deeply intentional about what hooks get views. Their most recent breakthrough: an all-AI reel built entirely from photos turned into video, featuring people who were never actually there. It hit 120,000 views in one week. Their last 30 days generated 720,000 total views. Building a consistent content presence like this is one of the clearest paths to organic direct booking growth.

Middle of funnel: email capture and drip. Every follower who engages gets offered a 10% discount in exchange for their email. Once they’re in, a 10-email drip campaign runs on automation, building the relationship over time while seasonal promotions keep the brand top of mind. This mirrors what the most sophisticated operators in the space are doing with guest retargeting and email marketing — the hosts building these systems now will be far ahead when OTA policies shift again.

Bottom of funnel: the booking site. Patryk’s team is actively testing conversion improvements on their direct booking website. Fewer clicks. Better mobile experience. Intentional CTAs. As Gil points out, 95% of guests don’t book on their first visit to a website — and e-commerce research shows it typically takes eight touchpoints before someone converts. That’s why the combination of retargeting ads, email drips, and a high-converting website isn’t optional for serious operators. It’s the whole game.

If your website isn’t set up to capture that journey from first visit to booking, you’re losing real revenue. Platforms like CraftedStays are purpose-built to help operators run this kind of full-funnel strategy without needing to engineer it from scratch.

🤝 What Real Economies of Scale Look Like at 130 Doors

Patryk breaks down what running a focused, at-scale property management company actually looks like operationally. The Cohost Company maintains a 1:10 property lead ratio — one dedicated team member per 10 to 12 properties, on payroll, responsible for inspecting between every single guest stay. These aren’t gig workers. They’re invested team members who know the homes like their own.

The team meets weekly to address issues, share learnings, and cross-train. A senior trainer runs quality audits and conducts VIP owner stays. A Director of Operations oversees the whole system. And on the revenue side, Patryk and Josh focus exclusively on pricing, marketing, and owner consulting — the activities that actually move the needle on income. That’s the philosophy behind large-scale property management that actually works: everyone in their lane, compounding their expertise over time.

For owners, this means one thing: their properties make more money. And for Patryk, the scale unlocks what he calls “the dream state” — a billboard in the Joshua Tree market that says “book direct,” the ability to run $5,000 to $7,000 ad campaigns, and an ecosystem where repeat guests who loved one property come back and book another. None of that is possible at 15 units with one person doing everything.

🛑 A Simple Tactic Anyone Can Use Today

Gil closes by asking Patryk for one tactical piece of advice that any operator — from a first-time host to an established manager — can implement right now to drive more direct bookings.

Patryk’s answer is beautifully simple: put your property name and your company name in your OTA listing title and description.

When guests shop around after seeing your Airbnb listing (the billboard effect at work), they search for what they remember. If your brand is in the title, they’ll find your direct booking site before they ever re-book on Airbnb. It costs nothing. It takes two minutes. And combined with a strong direct booking website, it creates a pipeline that quietly builds over time.

📚 Book Recommendation

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Patryk revisited this classic recently and came away with a new level of appreciation for it. In an era where AI is automating more of how we work, he believes human connection will become even more valuable — not less. The ability to genuinely connect with people, build trust, and maintain relationships is what sets great operators apart. And it’s exactly why the vacation rental space, where people travel to be with each other, remains one of the most human businesses you can build.

⚡ Rapid Fire with Patryk Swietek

📖 Most impactful book? How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie — more relevant now than ever as AI changes the way we work.

🧠 Mindset advice for someone starting fresh? Confidence comes from doing, not from knowing. Patryk’s first acquisition was a falling knife — and he didn’t realize it until he was already in the deal. His naivety was his advantage. He took the risk, learned from it, and every deal after that felt easier. Stop waiting for certainty. Take the step. Build confidence by doing.

💡 One tactical tip for more direct bookings? Put your property name and company name in your OTA listing title and description. Let guests find you when they search.

🔗 Connect with Patryk Swietek

• Instagram (Personal): @patryk_swietek
• Instagram (The Cohost Company): @thecohostcompany
• Podcast: Patryk Real Estate Show
• Website: thecohostcompany.com

Transcription

Patryk: I mean, there’s a lot of really good books. But How to Win Friends and Influence People has to be number one. And I think the book is about connecting with people, talking to people, networking. I mean, it’s a very fundamental book, but I think, you know, I’ve revisited it recently and I’m realizing more and more.

That we have to think about that book more deeply and it’s gonna become more relevant than ever, even though it’s been written so long ago and it’s still relevant, um, but it’s gonna be even more relevant as we drive into an AI dominated society. I think the human connection is going to, people are gonna be craving that a lot more.

And I think that’s why being a, in a short term rental space is awesome. In the vacation rental space, people wanna get away and be with other people in person, and I feel like. You know, with automations and AI, there might be a possibility of a world where. We have more time to do those things and spend time with the, with our loved ones, which is kind of cool.

Gil: Before we bring on my guest, I wanted to talk just a little bit about something that I’ve been hearing a lot from Host. I keep on hearing the same thing. I know my website isn’t converting, but I can’t afford $8,000 on an agency to rebuild it. Here’s the thing, you’re letting. All these marketing strategies, you’re driving traffic and you’re putting it all to work.

But if your site isn’t really built to convert, you’re basically lighting your energy and money on fire. And even if you could afford an agency build, every time you want to test something or make a change, you’re having to pay them again. You can’t iterate, you can’t test, and you really can improve on things.

You don’t need a custom $10,000 website to get the conversion rates that really matter. You just need the right platform. That’s why I build CraftedStays. It’s purpose built for short term rentals and design from the ground up to help you drive more direct bookings. You can finally turn that traffic into bookings and you can keep on testing and improving as you learn, you can make changes all on the platform.

You don’t need to learn something new. So if you need some help or you wanna get started, go ahead and go to Craftedstays.co and start your free trial. Now let’s bring on our guests and dive deep into hospitality and marketing.

 Gil: Hey folks. Welcome back to the Booked Solid Show, the show we bring in top operators to discuss hospitality, operations and direct bookings. On today’s show, I have Patryk Swietek. I’ve known him for many, many years. He is one of the most influential property managers. In the Joshua Tree market. Outside of that, he’s really well known for sharing his knowledge on acquiring property management companies.

And this is a way that he’s been able to scale to 130 doors. I’ve known him for a while. I’ve seen his growth and kind of how he went from purchasing his first property in the Smoky Mountains, how he sold that one and really doubled down in the Joshua Tree market there. He’s doing some phenomenal things, really more recently.

Probably in the last year on really doubling down on direct bookings and really leveraging a wide array of strategies to drive his direct bookings. On today’s show, I’m gonna have him. Talk to him, talk to us about his journey and how his growth has been, and also some of the key activities that he and his team has been doing now to really amplify and really make the impact that he’s been doing.

He’s grown his social media following by two x in six months and some of the tactics that he’s been using, some of the things that are tried and true, but also some of the bleeding edge things that he’s been playing with on the AI front too. So without further ado, let’s bring in Patryk.

Gil : Hey Patryk, welcome to the show.

 Patryk: Hey, thanks for having me, man.

Gil : Yeah, it’s good to, it’s good to have you on here. I see you probably more than anyone else in the industry because you’re pretty much at every single conference that I go to.

 Patryk: That’s hilarious. I feel like I see you at every conference too. I think we go to the same conferences. I think that’s what it is. Um, are you going to, are you gonna level up your listing?

Gil : You know what, I, I haven’t, I haven’t talked to Tatiana about this, but like, I bought my ticket last year when I was at the conference because I was like, okay, this is a really good one. I want to, I want to go to the next one. And I bought it and I completely forgot about it, but pretty much like said it there.

And then we were planning our spring break trip with our kids. And we booked a trip to Japan, ends up becoming the exact same time. So I need to find someone to get my ticket to. So if you’re interested in going, hit me up. Uh, hopefully. Yeah. This show will probably air before, before that, but I was actually, that’s actually one of the most fun conferences in our industry.

You were there last year, right?

 Patryk: Yep. I was, I go every year. So I think it’s, it’s definitely, it used to be all, all female and then, um, you know, it was one, we were some of the few men and, uh, now it’s just blown up and it’s all everyone’s can go and, um, it’s been awesome. I, I love, you know, I think it’s one of the most interactive, it’s, I mean, people can get their nails done and their hair done.

It’s crazy. How, how fun. I mean, it’s a, it’s a good time for

Gil : Yeah. And it, there’s like this sense of like, I don’t know, the people can be really vulnerable there. Like, there’s no like ego there when you’re, when you’re going, um, people talk about their stories. I I absolutely love it and I. It’s so historically, yes, you’re right. It’s like a almost all female. And then I think like two years ago, they started opening it up to allow men.

And I was like, okay. I was thinking about doing the prior year. Um, and I, I messaged Natalie and I, and I asked her like, can men go? She’s like, yeah, the, the plus ones. The plus ones go. And I was like, okay, I don’t wanna really wanna be a plus one. I don’t, I’m not gonna be tagging along. So I opted not to go.

Uh, but last year, um, my arm was twisted and I had to go. Um, and people were like, people were like, you have to go. And I’m so glad I did. Um, I was the, probably the only Asian male there. Um, so I stuck out like a sore thumb, which is good. Which is good. Um, but I had a blast. I had a blast. And I wish I, I, I wish I could make it this year, but I owe it to my kids to, to take a little time off.

 Patryk: I think Japan is gonna be a great time for you guys. You guys can enjoy it for sure.

Gil : It’s, it’s gonna be our first international trip since I started the company. So I’m, I’m excited and. You and you came back from, you just came back from an international trip yourself?

 Patryk: Yes, I was in Tulum, uh, I was for my business partner’s wedding. Um, Josh, it’s a great time. It was one of the best weddings I’ve been to. Uh, super fun jungle vibes, um, fire dancers and all sorts of monkeys and all sorts of things, so it’s cool.

Gil : I haven’t gone back since my honeymoon. It’s been a while.

 Patryk: Okay.

Gil : It’s been a long while. Um, well, before we get too, too deep into it, Patryk, do you mind giving folks an introduction to who you are? I.

 Patryk: Yeah, so I’m Patryk. Uh, I, you know, I’ve, I’ve been in this space for a good amount of a decent amount of time. Um, you know, I started with yvo Stay in 2018, um, as a product manager, and they’re one of the bigger management companies in our space. And from there, you know, I worked directly under, you know, the, one of the founders and, um, learned a lot, uh, realized it’s a great business.

COVID happened. Uh, and then, you know, I started venturing out on my own and got my first rental. And then met Josh, my current business partner, scaled to five rentals I owned, and then, uh, bought my first, uh, short-term rental property management company and bought three more, so

Gil : wait, wait, wait, wait. Hang on. You bought your first property management company,

 Patryk: Yes, correct.

Gil : so you’re, you’re not, you’re not talking about buying more properties. You’re talking about straight up buying other pmcs.

 Patryk: Correct. Yes. So the opportunity, I was trying to get into co-hosting and, you know, the, the opportunity came where somebody was looking to, um, sell a bundle of contracts, which I thought was interesting because I was just looking to get one contract to, you know, to manage and, and to get rental income coming in.

And that’s kind of how it started. Um, and I thought I was pretty good at managing, right? I had my own units, I was doing top 10% of all units, you know, comparable properties. I thought, I was like, you know, lemme try this out for other people. And somebody gave me a portfolio, 15. Um, we, we took the deal down, um, and I realized, uh, you know, like in terms of like, uh, capital, I realized that it was a lot better to have.

You know, 15 units, um, versus, um, you know, going one by one because it’s just faster. Um, and I also realized that there was a lot of value add that I can bring to the table, right? Like I think day one that we took over that management company, I was focused on the thing that I think I do best, which is sales, marketing, um, pricing, revenue management, um, you know, making sure that the place is making great money and the house is being taken care of.

Um, and that. I think, you know, we did, the first month we did 30% more than adjusted the first seasonality than the previous owner, just in pricing alone. And then we started adding new pictures and doing the whole thing. And we like completely turned around. Uh, the company, the company was actually, it was a falling knife in the sense that a lot of owners wanted to leave.

The communication wasn’t there. I wasn’t making as much money. We came in and we completely turned it around. Um, got great employees and uh, started hiring VAs. Um, you know, just all the, the things that you gotta do as a business, you gotta have a big team to operate, uh, a business of, of this. And yeah, it was great.

Gil : So I know you as the guy in Joshua Tree, was this, was this PMC in Joshua Tree or was this someone else?

 Patryk: Yes, it was a Joshua Tree property management company.

Gil : Wow. And since then, did you now figure and niche down because you sold your other portfolio properties outside of Joshua Tree now, right? Was that kind of like impetus of like really now focusing your energy towards that one market?

 Patryk: yeah. I had one property in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. It was my first one ever. I sold it to focus on Joshua Tree. Um, because I believe in focusing in one market, I think, you know, you get economies of scale, uh, not only from, uh, you know, uh, operationally, you know, making sure that people, you can have supplies delivered.

You can have an office, you can have a billboard, you can have, uh, you know, people that inspect the properties that are on your payroll. So you get really a lot of economies of scale being in one market. And so, you know, direct bookings as well, right? You know, if you have to focus on two markets, now you’re splitting the, the time and energy to do all the social media or all the marketing to be able to funnel into, you know, buyers into, or guests into that market.

Um, so yeah, it’s just been really great to focus on one. And yeah, Josh, she’s the, the magic one right now.

Gil : Yeah, so it sounds like you, when you started focusing on that, there’s almost like three things that start to compound on each other. Where like, one, you gotta focus on your operation, so you have a team that’s locally better economies of scale, hiring top talent in one area, not having to like spread yourself across multiple.

Two is from like a marketing perspective, you’re now able to really supercharge your direct bookings because you have a very niche market of portfolio properties there. And third, it sounds like almost like a brand recognition where you now are the one property manager in the, in the area where if someone’s looking to have someone self, men like have you manage, you’re that one rather than, like if you were to do this in multiple markets there, you would have been diluted, you would not be that holding that like one position there.

That is that, is that, is that true?

 Patryk: Yeah. Um, it’s, it’s basically that. Um, and also just the idea of you’re gonna learn that market really well, to be able to balance four or five different markets. It’s great for some people, but for me, if I’m focused on one market versus somebody’s focus on five, who do you think is gonna have better pricing?

Who do you think is gonna have a better pulse on that market? Who do you think is gonna understand that this weekend is, you know, something? So it’s something special. There’s a lot of demand for this weekend. Why is that? Maybe price types doesn’t even catch it before we do. Right? Like, we have an advantage to be able to focus in one place versus trying to do, um, you know, try to do it everywhere.

And so that’s kind of the, the place that we wanna be in. Um. But also in the idea that we can go to vendors and we can say, Hey, we can give you 50 homes right now. So get your prices down and like, make sure that like, and, and the vendor gets to work with one person, right? And so we can get lower prices for our owners.

Uh, the, the vendor wants to work with one person. We wanna work with one vendor. That’s, we want the best vendors and the best vendors will gravitate towards the companies that can give them enough business and are easy to work with, quite honestly. Um, and, you know, we try to make ourselves as, you know, uh, simple and streamline and we pay everybody on time and we try to get, treat people well and, you know, I hope, you know, hoping that also continues to attract really great talent.

Gil : Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s amazing. You, you found like eco, like true economies of scale in short term rentals, which is really hard because a lot of times hosts are maybe too small and they don’t have the leverage there. They’re too diverse in terms of where their properties are, so they don’t get to like, be able to advantage of that.

But like, because you’ve like really, really niched down, and we talk about this in like a lot on our podcast about like niching down on the guest avatar, but you’re niching down on the guest avatar within a specific area. So like you’re known to be one of the best. And I think one thing that’s inspiring is some of the more recent builds that you’ve been doing, um, some of the new acquisitions that you’ve been doing.

You’re a lot, like if you look at your portfolio now and some of the projects that you’re taking on and some of the magnitude of the things you’re doing on that you’re doing now, it’s much more aggressive. But it’s based on so much learning that you know the market so well. You know that like if you were to invest on this type of unique stay in Joshua Tree, it’s gonna pay out like you don’t have, it’s not guessing.

I.

 Patryk: Yeah. I think that also is to the benefit of the owners, right? We have, you know, people use Aird NA, and so Aird NA is great, but there’s two problems with Aird, nna or any other scrape tool. Um, and more, actually, more, but the most, most of the problems are, one, is there’s a delay in the data, right? You know, six to nine months.

It takes you to, to recognize that data and to show up and to, to really help inform a future buyer of a decision. Second thing, it’s not real data. It’s scrape data, so it’s not always accurate. And so those two things we have, because we have 130 homes, so live right now, and so we have the ability to look at our portfolio and say, what did really well this month?

Okay, where does this month stack up versus other months? Okay. Why did his property do that versus other properties did not? Like, we’re constantly looking at the numbers and why certain homes make money and certain homes don’t. And so we know exactly what kind of property to buy. And so now if somebody comes up to us and says, what property should I buy?

Like, how should I put, I know ex exactly. The property you should buy, exactly what you should put in the property. Um, and maybe, maybe within reason, right? Like I have the data and I could from through historical data, can give you, even last month I could be like, last month this pro a comp did $20,000.

This home is just as good as a comp, if not better, it should be doing that, those kind of numbers. And I know that this home can do $180,000, whatever the case may be. So I have the data to be able to inform our buyers and to inform everybody else in our, in our collective how to best benefit. Their, their properties.

And I think the only way you can do that is really knowing your market, right? So I know all the, I know all the agents that are working in the market. I know which agents are putting people into bad homes, and then those homes come to us and why or not they’re not producing money is because of X, Y, and z.

I know exactly the, not exactly, but within reason. The, the homes that are gonna do really well with social media, for example, on, on direct bookings and, and that kind of thing, versus, Hey, you should probably not do social media for this house. It doesn’t make sense to make that investment. But you also get the benefit from the, from the attention that we get from our other homes.

And then you get to have bookings on your home because people don’t always book the home that they find the cohost company with people sometimes will come and we’ll have a really good guest and then they’ll repeat, repeat, um, guests come in, maybe they came in with a group of 12 and then they come in just them and their significant other and they need a different kind of home.

And so I think. The benefits of that ecosystem has been huge. I’m a huge believer in focusing in one market. I will, you know, I think that you can’t, you can’t, uh, we just see like people that are in multiple markets, our competition, our market, and they’re not doing as well as we are because we, we just know the pulse on our market.

Like either they’re undercharging or overcharging or, um, you know, they just don’t understand the marketing side of things, how to put a listing together, whatever it is. So, yeah,

Gil : Are you still acquiring at this point, acquiring properties, or are you now more focused on the contracts and getting homeowners and really making sure that they’re successful?

 Patryk: yeah. I think one, one thing that I’ve realized, and I think people also realize in this space, I think the last acquisition we did was we, we, we do, we did a few acquisitions, so. The last acquisition we did was more of a merger. It was strategic because there was this company and they had 25 units live.

They had around 30 total was signed great units, great properties, um, great owners. Um, and we realized, okay, they, they wanted to get outta this space, but one of them was actually open to continuing on, but they didn’t, they didn’t know, they didn’t want to do, like right now in their current state, they were the owner of the company, 25 units.

They were doing all the guest communication, they were dealing, all the operations they’re doing, you know, they’re doing so much. I mean, yeah, they had employees, granted, they, he was still checking homes. He was still, you know, cleaning. Like he was just super involved in these things that like really at that small of a scale, it’s hard to.

Not be involved in those things. And people are like, well that’s great. They’re involved in those things, but it’s like different for us. Josh and I, we’re both only focused on the team, right? So making sure the team’s all happy and high level strategy, high level decisions, you know, talking to a great partnerships with owners, that kind of thing.

But more so on revenue generating activities for a portfolio. We do the pricing and we do the marketing. We literally focus on making these clients money. And so fundamentally, if somebody’s time is split and they’re only focusing five, 10% of their time on, on the money generating activities because they are trying to balance everything versus we just focus on one thing, who do you think is gonna do a better job of doing that thing?

Right? And so he realized that, and, and I think the benefit was when he merged into us and he became our CEO. What happened was we had a full team to take care of all those things. So now he’s focusing on, you know, actually dealing with really good operations to get closer to that, you know, 5.0. Um, you know, uh, uh, average rating, right?

He had a 4.99 average rating with his portfolio. Like, I think, you know, really bringing that kind of talent in and then allowing us to even more so focus on marketing and pricing and revenue generating activities for our homeowners. Talking to homeowners and consulting them on what things they can add to their property to elevate their, their assets, right?

Like basically like asset managing for owners almost at a certain point. So I think that benefit and, and the ability for them to get the benefit of all the social media stuff we do for the direct bookings that they did not have before, they didn’t have any direct bookings. So now you have this open flow of.

We’re big enough to be able to spend five, $7,000 on, you know, ads. Like you, you couldn’t do that when you were, you know, 25 units. We have a billboard in the market saying book direct, like, we have these things because we have the scale. And so I, once I realized that the homeowners started making more money.

So it’s not just about taking care of the homes. It’s really easy. Sorry, lemme take back. It’s not easy to take care of homes. Homes. It is really hard, but it’s, it’s easier to focus on one thing and get really good at it. It’s harder to be a master of all things if you don’t have the team for it. So when you have the team for it, and everyone’s focused on one thing, we have an onboarding person.

Our onboarding person is just making sure that the launch is perfect because when the launch is perfect, then you’re getting all five star reviews and then you’re going to, you’re, you’re, you’re off to a good start. But the launch has to be perfect. And the only way to do that is to have somebody that focuses on that.

Right. Otherwise you have. The owner that’s focusing on that, but then there’s taking them away from the other homes that are alive and that you know it, and you know, I think there’s just a better economies of scale. What I’ve realized is the, the bigger you get, the better that it gets with making, with the foundationally, allowing our owners to, to make more money, but also take care of their homes and the hospitality side of things.

It all kind of comes together. You, you make better hospitality, battery guests. You can order like Joshua Tree Coffee in bulk and then offer it to, to uh, guests. You can do this kind of stuff because you have a full team behind you. And that’s the difference. And I think, um, I realized the moment I realized that, that’s when I started realizing that a lot of these smaller companies, when they work, when when we come as part of our bigger collective, they get the benefit of being as part of the bigger collective and.

We can help everyone win because we have the resources for it. So anyways,

Gil : Yeah. Yeah.

 Patryk: kind of my

Gil : Yeah. So, so it sounds like you’re really focused on really gaining as much scale as possible, maintaining a really, really high level quality, and really focusing on your team to make sure that the team is well oiled, so that you, as from a management point of view. Our focus on the revenue generating activities that ultimately drive more revenue for for your homeowners.

 Patryk: Absolutely. And I think we have one property lead for every 10 to 12 houses ish, meaning that we have them taking care of their homes like it’s their own and they’re checking in between every guest stay and we’re paying, they’re on payroll. But the thing is, these, these people that are on payroll, they, it’s like almost like, uh, you have the benefit of the larger collective, but you also have one person that really cares about your home and that that kind of, um.

That kind of element is, has been very effective for us. Um, and scaling in a way that’s responsible. Right. And it’s not just taking on homes, not taking and getting one person that takes care of 30 homes or 40 homes or relying on the cleaners, right? It’s like, no, we have a whole system in place to check and make sure these homes are taken care of.

Right? We work with a lot of luxury homeowners, so,

Gil : I, I, I forget which conference it was, um, but it was probably about, it’s gotta be over a year, a year and a half ago. But I remember you bringing in actually your team members along for. The conferences and you wanted to get them exposure to it, you might remember. I, I don’t remember which one it was. Um, but it kind of, when you mentioned like you have one out of one to 10 ratio of one lead per 10 properties and how invested they are, and it kind of, it really lines up with really nurturing your team there.

You spent an enormous amount of energy nurturing your team. It sounded like you really care about your team and you’re really invested in making sure that your team has what they need and you’re not necessarily like treating them as disposable employees. You’re really investing in making sure that they have the resources that they need.

They know the market really well. I’m actually interested in hearing like what does the cadence, the team cadence look like? Do you guys meet at with, with your team, and how do you make sure that like the team is well oiled and like maybe like, I don’t know if you implement like the EOS system at all, or something like that, but I’m interested in kind of hearing the mechanics behind how you make sure your team is aligned with you.

 Patryk: Yeah, EOS for sure. Um, I think we only use like 30% of all the stuff in EOS, which I look, I’m happy to do more. Um, I think. It’s a lot of stuff to implement, but we, we do, we do apply a lot of those. And, and yeah, obviously we, we do meetings specifically for that. Um, what, you know, I definitely gearing towards making that even more efficient.

Um, but currently how we align really, I mean values is, is huge. Understanding, you know, culture, understanding, you know, development of each individual employee. Um, and just really honing in on, um, training too, development. I think a lot of times people are like, it’s emergencies and just let’s just take care of all emergencies, and you just never spend time on the development or the growth.

Um, I think we’re at a place where we can start spending that time and energy because when you’re, when you’re, when you’re like at 20, 30 units, maybe upwards of 50, 60, really everything’s, it’s just. You need firefighters, you need people that just respond to issues. And that’s it. Like, shoot, you don’t even have time for meetings maybe once per week.

That’s it. We have a little bit more time now to just take meetings, um, to, to align our team on different aspects. Like for example, I think property lead training is huge. So like every property lead has 10 to 12 homes now. Look, they come from all walks of life and each one has their own strengths and weaknesses.

Some are way better handy, um, others are more communicative. Um, others are better with guests and love, you know, showing up and helping guests with stuff and others, you know, maybe not as much. And so everyone’s, it’s personalities, right? Everyone’s different, but at the end of the day, they need to get the job done right?

And we teach them the basics. Um, but then you start talking about, okay, well how do you. Converse with owners, um, what’s great communication tactics that, you know, maybe don’t be defensive when something happens, right? Like just training, you know, people. ’cause you know, sometimes like things get escalated and we, you know, you know, think things don’t always go perfectly right.

You know, just like any business. Um, and, you know, just being very intentional with how you go about, um, you know, your day to day. And like, a lot of times it’s, it’s funny because it’s just, you know, it’s not that they’re bad at it, it’s sometimes they just don’t know what they don’t know. And sometimes you realize, oh, it’s not that I was trying to avoid telling the owners about all this stuff.

I just didn’t wanna bother them. He’s, he’s so busy. Like, I don’t wanna, you know, and so it’s like, it’s like teaching them, it’s like, oh no, it’s fine to re, you know, over communicating is better, right? Like, we want to tell ’em about all the things going on. So things like that. Or like, Hey, here’s what’s a good property lead, right?

A good property lead. Well leave. The soap out in this way. But if you wanna be a great property lead, you wanna make sure it’s aligned in this way so it looks better when people come in. It’s presentation, right? So it’s like, how do you get somebody, uh, if you’ve ever read the book, good to great, right? How do you get somebody from Good to Great?

And I think that always takes training no matter how good they are. There’s some that have doing, been doing this for six years, and guess what? They always, there’s always something to learn. There’s always something to learn. Somebody does something better, somebody does something. Uh, some interesting, uh, tricks.

Like, you know, they’ll, they’ll come up and we’ll go to a house and we’ll do a walkthrough and be like, what’s wrong here? What can we do better? And it’s like, and it’s somebody’s house. So they’re like, guys, let’s not, you know. Shit on them completely. But like, let’s give them constructive feedback. Like, what can we do here that would be better.

Oh, the supplies. Yeah. Like maybe you should add more supplies just in case there’s a bigger group that, you know, uses that, that stays longer. Let’s say they stay for two weeks, like there’s not enough supplies in here. So it’s like, you know, you wanna always prepare for that. And so like, things like that, little details, um, it goes a long way.

And, um, it’s been really fun to see people learn and grow. And I think, um, one of the key fundamentals, if you guys, uh, if anybody listens to Tony Robbins, uh, one of the key fundamentals of humans, um, nature is growth. Like every human needs, every human needs purpose, right? Um, and that’s important. And that’s, we always talk about purpose too.

Like what are we doing? Really? Why are we here? What, what are we accomplishing for all these people? Um, you know, it’s, it’s not like flipping a burger at McDonald’s, right? Like it’s, um, it’s truth truthfully. Um, you’re creating life experiences for people and you’re maintaining these. Expensive assets for people that people, you know, it’s million dollar homes.

Like this is ev, somebody’s everything. Right? And so, you know, you have to really take that seriously. And I think people feel that ownership and feel, uh, that purpose and then the growth, right? They need to grow somehow. They can’t just do the same thing for six years. It needs, there needs to be some growth album.

Like, oh, I can do this. Oh, I can teach, oh, I can train other people. Oh, like, it, it gives more purpose to, to your work for sure.

Gil : Do. Do you do any type of cross pollination where your different leads get to shadow each other or learn off each other? Or like how do you make sure that like those learnings aren’t in silos between all the different folks? Because you may mention like someone grows in the span of six years, they’re learning a lot, but really it’s the network effect of like, oh, I learned something this week.

How do I get this to all the other team leads? And how do you motivate them to, to have that kind of sharing mentality?

 Patryk: I think there’s, well, the, the trainings are group trainings, which is great. Um, every week they meet up for, with a couple leads talking about, what do you guys have, we have time slots, this is your time slot. What are, what are your problems last week? What can we solve? Okay. Moving on. And, and we, we address those every week.

And we have these meetings, uh, at our office now. Uh, you have those, right? And so developments there, obviously individual development as things come up, um, when you’re getting started, obviously you get shadow and all that. We do have somebody at the senior. Um, he’s also, uh, a trainer and he also does like, owner stays.

So like owner VIP stays. So if owner comes in, something like that, he’ll go in and, and make sure everything’s dialed for that owner ’cause it’s great for retention. Um, but, you know, I think, um, you know, that person like the trainer is, is really where that ha happens, where they’ll do like a quality audit on a house and if things need work then they’ll, you know, go check the house with them and like show them around, like how this is how you do it.

We also have the operat director of operations. She also will go in and, and, you know, make sure things are good with the, the leads and things. Training’s great, you know, so it’s, there’s development training individually and also people that have more experience. So there’s multi-facets for that. And we also have like, excuse me, like, um, like holiday parties and.

Place like bowling outings and things like that where people will get together and they’re, they’re, they really get to know each other. And I mean, they’re, they’re friends, you know, they all, they all kind of get along, which is great.

Gil : Yeah. Did you, uh, if you look back at yourself five years back, did you expect to be here where you are today? Was it on the path that you expected or did it turn. One way or the other.

 Patryk: yeah, five years ago, five years ago, I was buying my first short term rental. I, at five years ago, I told myself I didn’t want to manage purposely because I was like, I don’t wanna manage, I wanna build wealth with real estate investing. Uh, that was like my whole philosophy. So there’s a lot of things that you learn.

I mean, I was 24 at the time too, so, um, I just, I mean, look, the way I look at it is I, I’m very grateful for the moment and where I’m at, and I’ve surprised myself in a lot of ways for sure. I didn’t realize how hard it was gonna be, but the one thing that I’ve always had is a vision and, you know, call it crazy, but I, I already had visions at 18.

Years old that I was gonna have a company, and I had company since I was 14. So I, I knew that this was a direction I wanted to go and I wanted to continue doing. I just didn’t know what it was, but I knew I already had visions of myself, you know, just like mentally, you know, commanding a room, uh, going to doing sales calls and, and crushing it.

And, um, you know, just having this time freedom, like I already knew that this was gonna be the life I was going to live. I just didn’t know how I was gonna get there, to be honest. And I didn’t know what life was gonna throw at me. That was COVID. I obviously, nobody would’ve suspected COVID would’ve happened, nobody would’ve suspected all these things.

But I had the end goal in mind, and I realized that the human brain is really powerful in the sense that we can figure things out really well. Um, but we get over. We get over, like, it’s very overwhelming to try to figure out, oh, like you can freak out that, oh, I’m not nowhere where I want to be in life and blah, blah, blah.

It’s like, well, let’s just put the destinations to the GPS. Okay, let’s just do that. And that’s the first step, right? Before you get in your car, you, you get in your car, what’s the first thing you do? You put your GPS on. You’re like, okay, what’s my destination? Then it’s like, okay, well this is crazy. It’s gonna take 10 years. Maybe the traffic dies down. I’m in LA so traffic can die down and uh, maybe thing doesn’t take as long, maybe it takes longer, but the goal is there’s gonna be things that happen throughout the journey, and I don’t know what’s gonna happen because maybe this is a new area for me, but I’m gonna figure it out.

And you’re gonna take the right turn. You know, if, I don’t know if there’s gonna be, uh, uh, too many cars in the row and I can’t take a right turn, guess what? You figure it out. You figure out, eventually some person’s gonna let you in, and that opportunity comes. And that same thing happens in life, is just the right opportunity comes.

Somebody lets you in, somebody let me in at, you know, 22, 23 years old. I didn’t know. I was, thought I was stuck in Chicago and somebody gave me the opportunity to work for Evonte and, you know, um, he just gave me the opportunity and it just happened. And I worked for a short-term rental property management company.

Just happened to be short-term rental property management. I got blessed to be in this space. And then just, somebody just happened, you know, when, when I went out and got my first offer in for my first house there, this was COVID like 2021. Like nobody get, like, you’re gonna have to put in 30 offers before you get a house.

First offer gets accepted. It just happens. I, I don’t know how to say life. And people call it lock. I call it, you know, I call it when opportunity meets the prepared. Right. You know, I was always prepared for these moments in the sense that I’ve always envisioned, like when I, and I had small visions too, right?

Like, I knew I was gonna own a property. I knew that was gonna be happening. I didn’t know how it was gonna happen, but it’s gonna happen. And so when opportunity came that my offer got accepted, boom. It is what it is. You know, or the opportunity came that I can make the offer. I accepted that opportunity.

I, I had it in my mind that I was gonna accept it. So that’s the mental game. Um, I’m not gonna get too much into it, but it’s, it’s very powerful.

Gil : Yeah. It’s, I, I, I believe it’s, it’s a lot more mindset than people are prepared to, and I think if you, it sounds like one, you had a vision and you believed in that vision, and two, you believed in yourself where you knew you’re just gonna figure it out. You’ll, you’ll find some way to get it done. You don’t necessarily need to know what the next five steps are and execute each step of them flawlessly.

But it’s really like making sure that you know where you’re going, you know what you, what you believe in, you know, what deals to say yes or no to, because I’m sure you’d probably turn down a bunch of nos eventually and more and more with more and more time. That vision got more and more clear. It got a lot more tangible.

And you’re staying probably no to a lot more things than you ever had before too.

 Patryk: Yeah. I think, yeah, the more, I think in the beginning, more, yes. Later, more, no.

Gil : Yeah.

 Patryk: I think more yes in the beginning because you’re exploring, right? You wanna expose yourself to as many things as possible and I think that’s really important honestly, because you get experience and you get, you start understand like for example, if I just stuck to long-term rentals and I didn’t move from long-term rentals, that would be kind of foolish, right?

Versus, you know, eventually I found my thing, right? I found my thing, zoning in on it. I say no to, you know, once I found my thing with short term rentals and it kicked off and I found my thing within property management and I really enjoyed it. I realized there’s no reason to right now, at least to pursue this hotel stuff, right?

People were telling me about hotels, people are telling me about RV parks. People are telling it’s the power of no is so critical when you get later into a thing that you have like a clear vision on, you know,

Gil : I I, I think even in the inverse, like you mentioned, even the power of saying yes to those things very early on and taking leaps where you don’t necessarily know where it’s going to go, um, and just kind of believing in, in, in that process is, is also powerful too.

 Patryk: Right. A hundred percent.

Gil : Yeah. Uh, I wanna switch gears a little bit to, to talk about kind of the brand that you’ve been building, um, at least on, on the outside in the last 18 months.

The coast company, like you’ve significantly invested in making sure that that is a recognizable brand and that you’re not just another Airbnb out Theret. Talk to me kind of like what led you to start that investment and maybe it’s been longer, but, but from the outside it, I’ve seen it rapidly grow in the last 18 months.

 Patryk: Yeah. I mean. So I, I don’t wanna discredit, um, or take all the credit for that matter on where a cos company came from. Right. The cos company has been a recognizable brand for a while. Um, that’s all to Brad, the previous owner of the cos company. He’s done an incredible job of making one of the most recognizable brands in that area.

Um, making it, you know, making you know, a lot of revenue for a lot of people and doing some of the best marketing that we’ve seen in our space. It’s all due, all due to Brad and, you know, we took over and, and obviously we ca we have to carry that torch. And I think that’s really hard when you have, you know, you know, you have somebody pioneering.

I mean, Brad pioneered, he did 10 years ago. He did lifestyle photos before people were, it was a thing. He did lifestyle photos in 20 15, 20 16, like he was been doing it for a long time and. Um, we just carry the torch. We did it, and we’re like, how can we make this better? How can we leverage AI now? How can we, like, we just really, like, how can we push the envelope as much as possible and what partnership do we need to make to help further our brand?

Right? And so, like, we know that we’re not the experts in everything that we do. And so, you know, we worked with, um, and you know him as well. Um, but Dustin, he’s, he’s great. You know, we, we worked with him. Shout out to him. He’s, he’s been awesome in, in terms of just marketing genius, um, on the like, like social media side of things.

Um, and I think, you know, what we really focus on is our, our guest avatar. ’cause you mentioned this, the guest avatar is important, right? Obviously we know our market really well. We also know what kind of guest go out there. So what kind of guest goes out to Joshua Tree? That’s. We know per it’s, it’s a few options, right?

One is you have the, the traffic driver of the national park. So you have the national Park dwellers, right? That’s what we call ’em. Um, so either they can be, a lot of times internationally they come out here, um, sometimes within Jo uh, California. Um, but they’re looking to see Joshua National Park. Like that’s really their focus and that kind of person comes out and they’re usually, they really don’t care as much about the combination, how luxury it is, but sometimes they do.

Um, and they care about the proximity. Um. There’s other people then that make, so that’s the jo, the National Park. Then you have the people that are going out there to experience the desert or to get away. And most times we don’t have big families that go out. Yes, there are families, um, but usually it’s a more sophisticated crowd.

It’s, it’s usually a millennial, um, you know, usually between 25 to 40 years old. That’s the kind of person that comes out to Josh retrieve, I’ve noticed. Um, and they, a lot of the old, there, there are older people, you know, the gen, uh, gen, there’s Gen X, uh, for sure. And, and the boomer, uh, crowd for sure. Um, but um, I think majority are that kind of millennial generation.

And where does that millennial generation hang out? Instagram and Facebook. Sometimes, but mostly Instagram. And so, okay, well we need to reach the audience. What’s the best way to reach the audience on Instagram? Um, video content that’s working really well. That’s how you get eyeballs. Okay. Let’s marry the two.

Okay. If that’s where our audience is, let’s get the, a tension on Instagram. So we make reels. We actually post every single day and we work with Dustin, of course. We post every single day. And, um, we make, we get these really high quality clips, and then we repurpose these really high quality clips in, um, different, uh, hooks and different, um, uh, orders and, and just like really nailing down virality.

And we’ve even done like all an all AI video recently that did 120,000 views. It was all ai. Yeah, it’s recent. This is last week. So now we’re starting to realize this is the first case study and also for dust, Dustin as well. This is his first case study where an AI reel went viral to 120,000 and produced a lot of emails and a lot of followers for us.

And the per, like, it was all photos that were turned into videos and there was people in, like, in the videos that were never there, that level of ai. Right. And so we realized we’ve unlocked a new and more, more so Dustin, I, I, I gotta give him credit. I’m just saying we as a, a team, a partnership, but he figured out a way to make really great content that way, to the point where we’re getting attention from, you know, the people that we were looking at and.

We want to keep doing that same thing. And I think we wanna replicate that process and see if we can continue seeing those results. But we’re getting, a lot more reels are hitting 50,000, a hundred thousand. Like we just kind of nailed it down and seeing what works and what doesn’t. And um, it’s been absolutely incredible.

Um, I’ve, yeah, I’ve been focusing on, on that, right? Because from there you get a detention, now you get in middle of the funnel. What’s the middle of the funnel? Middle of the funnel of the guest journey is, okay, well we need a relationship. So you give me your email and I’ll give you 10% off for your next day.

Cool. Now I have your email. Now we do a drip campaign, 10 emails, make sure that we cultivate that relationship with you, and then we constantly post as well. So we have constant reminders for you that we’re here and we’re ready to go. We actually do right now, and it’s growing. So we do 700. We just did a record, 720,000 views in the last 30 days.

It’s been, it’s been hovering around 500 to 600,000, but we just hit seven 20 and it, I think we’re, I think we’re, we’re gonna grow that even more. But, uh, what does that say? That says that we have a pretty good exposure, um, for organic content and, um, we. We have the, we have the relationships cooking, right?

And so now we have 30, we also grew from 14,000 followers to 36,000, I think last time I checked. So we over doubled in six months. Um, and it’s growing faster now because when you double it’s, it’s, it’s not as hard to get equal amount of that the next time around. Um, and we’re also getting, so we’re getting all that and then we’re getting all these emails.

So we have thousands of emails, and then we’re sitting them with these like seasonal discounts as well. And these kind of like, not seasonal discounts, seasonal um, promotions and um, like things that like, hey, like, you know, come out for this day or Memorial Day weekend, whatever. And then at the end we have the booking, right?

And so the conversions and the booking website. So being very intentional about what is on the website and like testing, okay, where are people dropping off in the conversion funnel, right? So people land on the website, the less clicks the better, right? There’s all these like little details and we’re still hashing a lot of this stuff out ’cause it’s like an ever-growing thing, but being very intentional about where are the details coming, where can we make better conversions?

Okay? Maybe if this dropdown was like this, maybe on mobile would be a lot better. Okay, well, you know, and then we, we drive those decisions so that eventually we get to the point where we’re converting more on, on direct. And that’s kind of the goal, right? Like if you can two x your conversions and you’re already making 50,000 on direct, like you could be making a hundred thousand on direct.

It’s that big of a

Gil : I, I completely agree with you. Like I think there’s like two challenges that you need to do, and if you do these two things really right, you actually

 Patryk: this is your world. So

Gil : yeah, this is phenomenal. Like, well, I think one is like if you know how to drive traffic and you can do it in a consistent basis, that’s one. Two is, then how do you then turn those eyeballs, those clicks into bookings?

That’s two. If you figure out those two things alone, you have a beast of an engine because then, like you mentioned, if you’re able to bump up and produce high quality content and continue to grow, that’s growing your overall volume over time. There, it doesn’t degrade. It continues to grow as long as you keep on investing into, it continues to grow.

And then on the flip side, a 10, 20, 50, a hundred percent increase in your conversion. If you change things on your website or you move from one booking engine to another booking engine and you invest into it. That means you’re doubling your direct booking revenues almost instantaneously. And I completely agree with you.

A lot of the stuff that you, you mentioned about like doing tests, those are the things that we obsess over at craft disease. Like we are constantly doing tests and we’re doing tests with larger property managers that have significant amount of volume Yes. Already going through it. Because if we do test kind of all around the board and we have some of our smaller portfolio property managers, they might not get the volume to give us really concrete data on whether or not if we change the mobile experience, if we change the navigation experience, if we change the layout of the property pages, does it actually make an influence on things?

If we add content to it, does it hurt us on it? And so we’re constantly testing and we’re changing one our platform and then two, the templates and the structure that we have on it. So that, I think one of the differences that when you and Dustin do it, you’re doing in a very, like doing a specifically for your account.

When we do it, we do it across. Hundreds and hundreds of property managers all at the same time. So when we learn something that is a game changer, we end up rolling that out across the board and

 Patryk: about without, without like giving away secrets, like what’s one thing, like maybe an example of a time you’ve informed a decision that like, wow, this helps with conversions on a website,

Gil : yeah. So one of the things that, like a lot of the PMSs don’t provide rates on the property search pages. So like if you’re searching for a set of properties, you put in dates, you put in how many stays, some PMSs don’t provide. The rate that you’ll getting, you’ll be getting back like you would on Airbnb for instance.

So you’re having to click around and that’s really frustrating for someone to be able to like price shop on six or 10 different stays there. So now we’re one, we’re investing in making sure that any PMSs that already have the hooks. We’re pulling in live rates on the checkout pages or on, not the checkout, but the search pages.

And then for any PMSs that don’t have a robust booking engine that doesn’t support that, we’re now pulling all the rates, all the availabilities, and we’re storing it on our side so that we can then surface those rates across any PMSs that we support. And it’s like, it’s on, honestly, it’s on our side.

It’s a heavy amount of engineering and it makes no sense for anyone that’s doing this on their own to make that level of investment. But for us, if we make that investment one time, it benefits hundreds and hundreds of property managers all the same

 Patryk: right.

Gil : So we kinda like to your point of like when you niche down in your market, you get economies of sale scale on our side.

When we really focus on really making sure that we understand what conversions are, what conversion changes we can make, we get to roll it out and we get huge economies of scale on that one. Yeah. And I think

 Patryk: think ’cause you’re focusing on it, you’re just focusing on the website, that’s the thing.

Gil : that’s all we focus on. We obsess over conversion. And actually now more recently, probably in the last eight to 12 months, we’ve been focusing on conversion, but we’re now adding in traffic drivers as well too, because we’ve been investing pretty heavily on SEO on our side and making sure that properties show up in Google search and more, more recently how they show up in LLM search as well too.

So how they show up in chat, GBT, Andro Gemini. We wanna make sure that our property managers do a good job at creating great content that their properties are showing up in search there. So we’ve been doing a lot of tests, we’ve been trying things out, and unlike other industries, like for instance e-commerce, they have strong playbooks to make sure that your properties can show up in chat.

GBT, they’ve had partnerships and they’re building out these really great specs, but in the vacation rental industry. That standard hasn’t been created yet. So we’re trying to get one or two steps ahead, and I’m leveraging my experience in the e-commerce space because that’s where I came from. And really figuring out like, okay, what is e-commerce doing?

Because, you know, in e-commerce there’s a lot more money there. There’s a, there’s a lot more sophisticated marketing that it’s a lot more dialed in. So if I’m looking at any industry of where I can boost conversion, I’m looking at e-commerce.

 Patryk: yeah. All day. There’s the most sophisticated in online, um, website. Like just, it’s, it’s the game. It’s like the, the holy grail, like you want to study for from the people that have done the best. And I think, like, for example, like one thing that we don’t have that I think, you know, I think Dust Dustin’s working on this, but also, I’m sure you guys have thought about this intentionally, but abandoned car emails, it’s like, that’s a very popular thing in e-commerce, but.

For us, it’s like, okay, if somebody was about to buy the, or go to at the property but didn’t end up doing it, can we send them an email with, you know, the, the quote or, you know, Hey, are you gonna, are you still interested? You know, um, so I think that’d be really interesting.

Gil : So that’s the one thing that we’ve been focusing on pretty heavily on our side is card abandonment and, and really making sure that we are providing the underlying infrastructure for it. So it doesn’t matter if you’re using MailChimp, Klaviyo, lasso, or any of the other email marketing tools out there that you don’t have to become, like Dustin’s super smart.

He’s super, super smart. He spends an enormous amount of energy to figure out like, how do I drive more traffic and how do I bring people back there? But of a lot of these property managers, they may not be as sophisticated. They may be trying to figure it out themselves. If you remember like Patryk Wick, your sophistication may be like three years back.

Like, could you have done that without dust’s help? Like it’s really, really hard. So we’re trying to figure out like how do we integrate these email marketing systems into ours so that we can then send them events for when things occur. They visited, they, they, they went on the landing page. They got a popup for X percent off on their next day, or maybe a guidebook on the best things to do in Joshua Tree.

Drop their email. We are then sending events for that particular session. They visited these properties, they searched for these dates, they went down to the checkout page, they bounced, and then you now have the tools to then retarget them. Like that’s super powerful. If you like 95% of people, we ran the stat.

95% of people do not book on their first jump to your website.

 Patryk: Oh, I bet. Especially in this, it’s a high ticket item, so you know. Absolutely.

Gil : it typically takes, in e-commerce, it takes eight touchpoints for someone to book or to buy something. Eight

 Patryk: have retargeting ads, so that’s also something we’ve done too, which I think helps cohesively with the website. But knowing that, right, like what else can you do other than retargeting ads? Can you do emails? Can you like, you know, I think, can you continue doing the social media, right? I, I don’t know.

I don’t know. I, I, I’m

Gil : I, I, I, I do think that like emails is a fundamental, like no matter what tactic you, you have, it’s part of your funnel there because you’re gonna need to drive them back and it’s very, very cost efficient compared to ads. You’re in terms of like the amount of, amount of spend you need to do on the ad side versus email marketing side, it’s, it’s really, really effective and it’s also higher intent.

You can send them out email saying, we noticed that you checked out this particular property. You have a call to action to bring them back, not to the property page, but to the checkout. With those dates already filled in, you’re making it as easy as possible for them. If you, if you add into that really good copy, you test out the copy 10 different iterations, you get really good at what really hits them, and maybe you, you put in signals on like what they did on the page.

If you know that they visit this page, could we send them a different type of content? Like if you get really good at it, your retargeting campaigns are phenomenal. And if you can boost that, you’re basically, you can easily double your conversion.

 Patryk: Absolutely. That’s

Gil : Yeah. So those are the things that we just, we obsess over.

And I, I feel, I still feel like we’re still babies in this, at least compared to the e-commerce industry I was at, like Shopify existed. Shopify existed 15 years ago. Tools like Klaviyo existed over a decade ago, and Klaviyo is one of the most well-known email marketing tool. In the e-commerce space, it’s almost like the standard.

And we have nothing like that. We have no connected tools in our space. And so one of the missions that we have this year is, one, making sure that people have a great search experience. The guests have a really great search experience to make sure that they can, they can book. And two is really figuring out from a marketing perspective, what are the types of tools that we need to integrate into, to make it easier for our property managers to really execute on really sophisticated marketing without really trying to cobble everything together.

And it’s, it’s not, it’s been hard. It’s, it’s been challenging because we’re constantly doing learning. There’s not like a playbook on this.

 Patryk: There isn’t. And I think the only way you can do it is learn through other industries and see how other industries are doing it and pull inspiration from that. And I think that’s kind of where we land when ’cause, ’cause right now it’s, it’s tough because we’re kind of trailblazing these ideas that, you know, the OG managers really aren’t thinking about these kind of things.

The OG managers are fine with what they have. They have maybe really great direct booking flow, but a lot of times underpriced, um, you know, and things like that. But it just, they’re not adapting and they’re seeing all these things where it’s like, okay, well. People want to feel like an ex, like, like there’s just so many details that we have to take from other industries if we’re trailblazing in our industry.

And I think the best place to take a playbook from is the hotel space. It’s the most, it’s the closest related to the short-term rental stay. And you can see how their websites are very intentionally designed for conversion. Um, and you know, I, I think I heard this at the conference, uh, multiple conferences, like we’re around 10 years behind the hotel industry and I kind of see that, um, all the way through.

So.

Gil : Yeah, it’s, it’s ironic, I, I had someone on, on, I forget who the guest was, but we had a podcast guest on the show and they were talking about how the hotel industry from a sophistication is much more like, like you mentioned, much more ahead of us than, than, than, than we are. But from a velocity and the energy to try new things, the STR industry is much more ahead there.

So we’re trying new things, like the thing, the stuff that you talk about using ai, it’s really hard for a hotel to put those stuff into practice. But for us, a lot of us are entrepreneurs. We’re getting into this, we are trying new things out. We’re really like trying to break the mold and a lot of times we’re trying a lot of new things that haven’t been done before.

There’s new software, like the amount of. Technologies company that have spun up over the last three or four years and insane, like craft to days like that, that was kind of part of that whole wave there. So you have a lot of these, like entrepreneurs, you have a lot of new technologies coming in, whereas the hospitality industry, they are stuck in this, well, they’ve been slowly iterating this over time.

But I think like right now, the agility to make changes really quickly, especially in this really fast changing world of ai, the, the way that people shop, the tools that people are using, um, the tools that we’re using are very, very different. And they’re changing week by week. Um, so I think over time I expect that the SGR industry is actually gonna be more mature and more sophisticated than the hotel industry.

I still think that we need to learn from them, but I also think that like we’re gonna probably in the next year or two, gonna outpace them. Yeah.

 Patryk: Wow. I could see it. Absolutely.

Gil : Because you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re trying, you’re trying thing already like that, that they’re not, they’re not trying, but also like they have retargeting already figured out. So there’s, there’s stuff that we can learn from each other both ways.

 Patryk: No, I, I agree. I I definitely think we, I mean, keep in mind it’s nimble. It’s nimble, it’s agile. I, I agree that we’ve, as the STR industry, we’ve been very adaptive and, and trying to do things differently in a lot of ways. But, um, you know, I think there’s, they’re, they’re a mature industry, right?

So more mature. So I think kind of learning from both, I agree. There’s a lot of synergies. Um, so

Gil : Yeah. And, and, and I always, I always say continue to look at the e-commerce industry because e-commerce is in that space where you get a little bit of both worlds. You have one really mature systems, and Shopify is actually like a little baby agile system. If you think about the big homers, the IBM Sterlings, these really big ERP systems that are driving like the top 100 IRR retailers.

They have those legacy systems. You have this like Shopify that are really helping the entrepreneurs. So they have this good mix there and they have a lot of the little startups that help you do wholesaling, do like a whole bunch of other types of e-commerce because you have that, also that entrepreneurship feeling in the e-commerce space.

So like if I were to like tune in on one industry, I would tune in on the e-commerce industry because there’s just such a wide base of knowledge and evolution already happening there, and people are paying attention. There’s so much money that is invested into the e-commerce industry. Yeah.

 Patryk: Oh, absolutely. I believe it. Um, so yeah, I mean, I think, um, let, let me ask you this. Do you go to conferences and stay on top of, uh, e-commerce? Uh, just what’s happening in the industry or what do you just like online? Just looking up.

Gil : I do, a lot of my network is already in that space. Um, so like my LinkedIn is already kind of fed with a lot of that stuff. I don’t, I probably not in the last year or two have I gone to any e-commerce conferences to be, to, to be honest. But like if you look at like, I think similar to SDRs, there’s so many influencers in that space.

There’s so many people sharing knowledge hacks that they’ve done. How they rank on SEO, like there’s a lot of different already, like sharing similar to how we have in the SDR space there. It’s actually from a, from a culture standpoint, from a value standpoint, it’s very, it’s very analogous. Um, but I don’t, I mean, I already have enough conferences that I’m trying to like tail you on.

Like I can’t do more than that. Than that.

 Patryk: I, no, I agree. I I’m conferenced out sometimes, so I get it

Gil : yeah, like right now I’m actually on a, like a conference low, if anything, like I’m, I’m really focusing on growing the company, serving our customers, and I think later on, like in Q3, Q4, that’s when, that’s the big bump of, of conferences I’m taking this low to like focus on internally.

 Patryk: Q1 and Q2 is less so about that. Yeah.

Gil : yeah. Um, Patryk, will you usually end the show with three questions?

I think that now is a good time to, to ask you those three questions. One, what’s a, what’s a good book recommendation? What would you recommend our listeners to, to check out?

 Patryk: What, what would I recommend or what do I think was most impactful for me? This is two different questions.

Gil : let’s, let’s, let’s do that one most impactful for you. What’s, what’s been one book that has influenced your life?

 Patryk: Um, I think the one book, how to, I mean, this is, um, I, I think the, the one book that really, I mean, there’s a lot of really good books, um, but How to Win Friends and Influence People has to be number one. And I think, you know, the book is about connecting with people, talking to people, um, networking. I mean, it’s a very fundamental book, but I think, you know, I’ve revisited it recently and I’m realizing more and more.

We have to think about that book more deeply and it’s gonna become more relevant than ever, even though it’s been written so long ago and it’s still relevant, um, but it’s gonna be even more relevant as we drive into an AI dominated society. I think the human connection is going to, people are gonna be craving that a lot more.

And I think that’s why being a, in the short term rental space is awesome. In the vacation rental space. People wanna get away and be with other people in person. And I feel like, you know, with automations and ai, there might be a possibility of a world where we have more time to do those things and spend time with the, with our loved ones, which is kind of cool.

Um, hopefully we’ll see. Um, so, uh, I think, but the human connection’s gonna be really important. I think that’s, people are double down on that. Um, and yeah, I would, I would really focus on not losing touch with. How to, you know, influence people and not only influence people, but um, you know, manage relationships like that.

Gil : Yeah. Yeah, that. I think that’s the skill that I had to grow over time, because being at my W2, I’ve been at like six other startups before doing this

 Patryk: Oh yeah.

Gil : being an employee is very different than being a founder. Being a founder, I think a lot of your success depends on just. How you learn from other folks, how you get in touch with it, how do you lean on folks to the right folks when you need them?

Um, there’s been so many people, and this is never the intention, like the intention’s never like meet enough people so that you, you gain your leverage there on them. But like more so like if you meet great people, you help them out, eventually they’ll help you out too. Like that’s, that’s always been my, my mentality is like, they’ll eventually come back to you.

It doesn’t have to be come back tomorrow. It doesn’t have to come back in in particular day, but if you are in like an area where you’re servicing others, it’ll eventually come back.

 Patryk: Absolutely. I agree.

Gil : Awesome. Patryk’s second question. What’s one piece of mindset advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new, that 24-year-old Patryk? Who, what advice would you give him?

 Patryk: Oh, it’s, that’s a good question. Um, you know, I think one thing that I’ve learned is that advice is timely. Meaning that, you know, certain advice to certain people might not resonate with certain people depending on where they’re, where they’re at with their lives. And I think advice should be tailored to each person individually, and, and that’s the most important part.

Um, but if you’re listening to this, um, and my mindset’s just, the big thing for me is, um, and, and for what I’ve learned is that, um, I’m gonna tell you guys a, a story. So, um. There’s a very big dinner table event where somebody sat next to Grant Cardone and Grant Cardone. I mean, a lot of ’em are hate him.

He’s done pretty incredible for himself. Um, and he asked like, you know about conversions and people, you know, doing online coaching and that kind of thing. And what Grant told him was most people won’t do anything about it because they don’t believe in themselves. I think it was like he said, 99% of people won’t make anything happen because they don’t believe in themselves.

And it’s not a reflection of you or your coaching or what you’re doing. It’s just people just, that’s the biggest block. And I think going back to mindset, I think really focusing on. Finding real belief, not just fake belief, just real belief in yourself, um, in doing big things. And the best way to gain confidence is by doing it.

So I think sometimes your brain tells you this is not a good thing to do. Sometimes you just gotta do it and you gotta learn and you gotta fail. A perfect example of that is when I bought my first company, um, I didn’t know what I was doing buying the company. It was a falling knife. I told you the, all, every client was looking to leave.

If I knew that information ahead of time, almost my naive self was to my benefit, right? Because if I knew that information ahead of time, I wouldn’t have done the deal. But because I, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And I took that risk and I took, you know, it was still a lot of great things came from it.

One of them being, I’ve done a deal before. So when I went into my second and third and fourth deal. They were a lot more comfortable with me taking the deal on because I’ve done it before and because I was in the space and because I had properties. Um, so I think there was a lot of benefit that came from out of it, even though all the negatives were there as well.

Um, you gotta look like, but where did I gain the confidence to be able to continue doing that? Taking on a deal like that is by doing it. So I think people have to realize that confidence, confidence stems from getting the thing done. And so taking action and building that confidence in yourself over time is gonna be a really important factor of mindset wise to overcome the self-limiting beliefs that you have off.

Gil : I, I completely agree with that. I always think about as you’re doing anything, things don’t always pan out the way that you want them to. But one of the things that you can always depend on is that you’ll always learn something from those, from those events. And I talk to my kids a lot about like, not everything’s gonna pan out the way you want, but did you learn something from it?

Are you growing from it? Did you learn something, a new skill or something about yourself that you didn’t know before? But I think you bring up a really good point that also when things don’t pan out, you also get the confidence to know that. You can do the same thing again. You already know what works, what doesn’t.

You’re way smarter, way more capable to tackle it the next time around. I never started a company before this company. I’ve always wanted to. I’ve been at other companies where I was employee number one, but starting a company was always very dreadful for me. And I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get back to a W2 after doing this.

Like I’ve probably spun up other small little startups along the way of all the little pet projects, all the things I’m trying to solve for myself. And I can imagine like maybe after this, after, after I’ve accomplished my vision and whatever, whatever, whatever may come down the road, like I probably would start another startup again.

Um,

 Patryk: let lemme ask you this. Knowing what you know now, let’s say that you were, you, you looked at crafted stays and, and you were in the same position. Would you start crafted stays again knowing how hard it was to get to where you are today?

Gil : I think if you asked me about a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago when it was really hard, I went from getting a healthy six figure tech salary to investing over six figures to build the company and play my employees at my own pocket we’re all bootstrapped. So everything came out of basically all my savings, our str, like all of it came outta that.

Had you asked me six, eight months into the company, I lost so much money, but I had a vision in place. I don’t know, I didn’t know back then whether or not it was worth it. Now. Now I, yes, now I would. Now that like I’ve gone over, like I think that’s another thing that like having that persistence, that grit to keep on going through and know that like.

This is something that you will, you have a passion in that you really believe in yourself. That goes a really long way. And I think after you get over that cliff, it just become, you start, that momentum builds up and that confidence builds up over time where you’re like, oh yeah, that wasn’t actually that bad.

It felt bad. It felt really hard when you’re in the thick of it. But if you’re able to get through that and look back at it, you can be so grateful that you took those leaps. I’m so grateful that I didn’t just think about, oh, what’s the next company I, I wanna work for? Like I saw this gap in the market. I coded the first version of it on the weekends, on the nights, shopped it bunch shopped around with a bunch of my mastermind peers and they convinced me like, Gil, like you’re onto something.

And I took a chance on myself and left my W2, went all in, hired the best engineers I’ve had a chance to work with over the last 15 years, and. It was great. In the very beginning you were on this big rush of like, oh, I started a company, I bought a domain, I did all this. And we got our first customer. Yeah.

And then after a while you’re like, oh, shoot, we’re not making much money yet. I’m still investing. I’m it, we’re not cash flowing. And it took, it took a little while to cash flow. Um, but we hit profitability last year, like hitting profitability in 14, 15 months of building the company. That was one of the biggest accomplishments, and that’s when I knew, like we hit it, like we made it.

Um, and everything here on is just really serving, serving the community as best as we can.

 Patryk: That’s awesome.

Gil : Like I still, I, I don’t talk about this outside of our team, but I still haven’t paid myself. I invest every single dollar back into building out the company, building out our team, because I believe that the vision is much bigger than we have accomplished so far.

 Patryk: Yeah.

Gil : My, my, my advisors are like, you need to pay yourself sooner, which I, I agree with them.

 Patryk: Yeah. Yeah,

Gil : in the very beginning, like you probably felt this in the very beginning, like you’re grinding because you have this big audacious goal and you put all your cash flows into the next deal and the next deal, and you’re trying to build that momentum there, and eventually you’ll step back like, okay, we actually did good.

Let’s start to, let’s start to be able to pull our dividends out of it and, and start paying ourselves. But in the very beginning, when you have this strong goal in mind, it’s really around like believing yourself and really continuing to persevere.

 Patryk: Yeah. Look, I still pay myself 52 KA year. It’s, it’s fine. But, you know, I have loans. I’ve, I’ve bought businesses. I’ve, I’ve done a lot of stuff and I have loans and I have properties I’m building up. Like I don’t see that money. So, you know, one day I’m gonna see that money and I’m still just like, I’m rolling the dice.

I keep taking that money and I keep reinvesting. ’cause I just know that I just, let me get to the next part. Let me get to the next place. But I think eventually I keep saying that it’s been four three, sorry, it’s been two and a half, almost three years I’ve been saying this, but, um, maybe one day, uh, we’ll really realize it, but I don’t mean to scare you.

Hopefully you take some profits, but, um, we’re still rolling the dice and trying to do the best for the business and the clients and all that, so,

Gil : Yeah. I, I think of it as like, would I rather, at least right now, would I rather put the money towards really making sure that I can grow the team to serve our customers? Because as we grow more and more clients, we need more and more customer service agents and as, and we’re very, very, very like. Product forward.

We’re very customer driven, so we, whenever we see an issue or we see an improvement there, we’re fixing the product on it. And we’re trying not to increase our load, but eventually, like if you grow your customer base, we grew our customer base by four X last year,

 Patryk: Wow.

Gil : so we had to scale our, our, our customer support team.

So and so, I was like, okay, we’re growing well. Like, I don’t want to take a pa like a, a, a payment now because I, I know that like, that will slow down momentum there. And yes, again, like my advisors are telling me I need to, I need to take a cut and I eventually will, um, a little bit at a time, but like, I just think that the vision’s much bigger than me right now.

 Patryk: Yeah. And that’s the power

Gil : Yeah.

 Patryk: entrepreneurship.

Gil : it is, it is. Patryk, we digressed a little bit, but the last question I have for you, we talked a lot about really how you’ve grown your portfolio, how important branding is, how important. Economies of scales are. Um, and then really diving deep into direct bookings and some of the tactics that the coves company has really invested into.

What’s one tactical advice that you would give to someone that’s either trying to get started in direct bookings or trying to amplify the direct bookings?

 Patryk: I think a simple tactical advice that we did that helped our direct bookings is like on all the OTAs and Airbnb, um, this is tactical. Like, just put your name of your company and the home name, that’s two SEO points where people can easily just put that in the title and people can easily find you. You know, so like the, you know.

Let’s say Mojave Rosa by the co-host company. Okay. If I search up Mojave Rosa, it shows up, um, you know, direct booking or to the co-host company, it’s gonna show up direct bookings, right? So, like, that’s just a simple way that people that wanna shop around and make it, and make, make the direct bookings cheaper so that people look and they’re like, and then they book, direct book.

So

Gil : Yeah, so you’re talking about in the title themselves to actually put your property name and your property, property management company in there. Not necessarily embedded in the descriptions.

 Patryk: yeah. In the title, but also in the descriptions, both,

Gil : Yeah. Yeah, it’s a good, it’s a good signal because I think that that tells the, the guests that like, oh, this is what they’re known for. This is their brand. You’re, you’re, you’re putting your brand before your amenities because I think that’s what a lot of people do, and they’re, and they’re listing just, uh, titles is they’re putting the amenities and they’re leading with the amenities you’re leading with your brand.

 Patryk: I mean, with the brand, but I think the amenities, I mean, for, we’re visual human beings. Human beings are very visual creatures. Like we, we, we can see in the photos are a thousand words, right? So in the photos, they’re gonna, they’re not gonna even look at the description until they’re gonna see five photos.

And then those five photos are gonna tell ’em everything they’re gonna need to know about the place. And if you don’t have the sauna and the pickleball court and all those things that you wanna put in the tags, in the, the first five photos, then, then you’re not doing it right to begin with. So,

Gil : That’s a good point. Like I think that, that, that’s why a lot of folks want to is because they want to showcase, like, this is why we’re special. But if you’re already showing them by other means, that’s

 Patryk: look on Airbnb. How, why, why did Airbnb minimize the, the words and AP amplify the, the pictures?

Gil : Yeah.

 Patryk: They, it’s, they’re doing the same thing except at big way, bigger scale of conversions and all those beautiful things that, that you’re doing okay. But, um, you know, I think, you know, you gotta be very intentional with knowing that they do that and realizing, okay, well if that’s the case, how, how are users behaving?

And I’m assuming because they’re building it like this, they’re furthering the user behavior of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 swipes, right? 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 maybe. So top 15 photos, what are those photos and are those value propositions for your property? Right? Are you trying to sell your property there? And then they’re gonna click on it and then go through and be like, oh, and then that’s where the branding, but, but they’ve already decided that they wanna stay there at that point.

And the branding just helps them find an, a cheaper way to do that if they want to direct booking, for example. Um, the only time I can see it working is like if nobody has a pickleball court in your market and you type in pickle and you put in pickleball, but you can also put in the description too, so you can put it multiple times in the description and it’ll still SEO show up when somebody Google, like Google is like Airbnb and Nashville with pickleball court.

Okay, you show up, right? So,

Gil : Awesome. Well, Patryk, it was a huge pleasure having you on. I’ve been wanting to have you on for a little while now. Uh, I, I’ve been. Trying to find time for the, the both of us to be able to record together, but I’m, I’m glad we’re able to have you on. I’ll probably see you at the next conference.

I won’t be at Level Up, but I’ll find, uh, I’m sure we’ll, we’ll cross paths later on this year.

 Patryk: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, man. And you know, all good things, you know, uh, happen. So, um, you know, really excited for your business and, you know, hopefully people got a lot out of, you know, that that was unscripted. This whole thing was unscripted, so like this raw talk about business and, and life and the struggles and, uh, all things.

I think it was a really well-rounded podcast. So thanks for having me.

Gil : I appreciate that. See you, Patryk. Bye.