STR Brand Identity Direct Bookings: Scaling to 175 Properties with Lisa Roads

“I’d rather be small and personal and well known for that than just be a generalist.”

What does it take to build a vacation rental business valuable enough for acquisition? For Lisa Roads, the answer wasn’t having the most properties—it was building an STR brand identity that attracted direct bookings, earned owner trust, and created systems that could operate without her constant involvement.

In this episode of the Booked Solid Show, Lisa shares the strategies that took her from furnishing her first Cyprus property to managing 175 coastal villas—and eventually exiting during one of the most challenging periods in travel history. Her insights on niching down, building trust signals, and understanding your ideal guest avatar offer a masterclass for any host looking to grow beyond OTA dependency.

Summary and Highlights

👤 Meet Lisa Roads

Lisa Roads is The Holiday Property Coach and founder of the Women in Short-Term Rentals community. With over 25 years in hospitality, property marketing, and management, she built and scaled Lifestyle Assets Property Management in Cyprus from zero to 175 coastal properties before successfully selling in 2021.

Starting her property investment journey at just 22 years old, Lisa developed a full-service model that handled everything from interior design and furnishing to marketing and guest management. Her approach attracted hands-off investor owners who wanted turnkey solutions—and her company became known as one of the most professional operations on the island.

Today, Lisa works exclusively with female STR business founders, helping them develop growth strategies, build direct booking brands, and prepare their businesses for scale or exit. She lives in the Cotswolds with her partner Clive and their rescue dog Poppy—who, as you’ll discover, inspired some powerful insights about niche marketing.

🏗️ Building Infrastructure Where None Existed

Lisa’s journey began with a problem most hosts never face: there was literally no support infrastructure for vacation rentals in her chosen market.

When she invested in Cyprus property in 2003, the short-term rental ecosystem simply didn’t exist. No furniture companies. No established cleaning services. No property management support for overseas investors like herself.

Rather than waiting for solutions to appear, Lisa created them. She shipped entire containers of furniture from the UK, built relationships with customs brokers, and assembled her own network of contractors, cleaners, and maintenance providers. That resourcefulness became the foundation of her business model.

Her “Investor Complete Service” took empty properties and transformed them into performing investments—handling interior design, furnishing, marketing, and ongoing management. In one particularly intense month, her team furnished 25 properties from empty to guest-ready. This full-service approach attracted hands-off investor owners who valued professional management over DIY solutions, and it’s the same foundation that helps hosts today build direct booking brands that guests actually remember.

🎯 Why Niching Down Beats Being a Generalist

One of Lisa’s most transformative business decisions was deliberately shrinking her portfolio from 225 properties to 175. The reason? Focus.

She identified that her best-performing properties shared common characteristics: period and character coastal properties within three kilometers of a beach, serving hands-off investor owners. Properties that didn’t fit this profile—regardless of their individual potential—diluted the brand and complicated operations.

Lisa explains the math simply: “If you are a smaller business, you’ve got limited resources, limited marketing budget, limited time. You are better to focus what you do have and be niche and well known in a niche than the scatter gun approach.”

This principle applies directly to building a direct booking niche that fills your calendar year-round. When you try to serve everyone, your marketing message speaks to no one. When you curate your portfolio around a specific guest avatar, everything aligns—your photography, your messaging, your amenities, and your direct booking website all tell the same story.

Consider a property owner looking for management services. Would they choose a company with a mixed portfolio of studios, coastal villas, and mountain cabins? Or would they select the expert who specializes in exactly their property type and understands its unique requirements?

The specialist wins every time.

🔑 A Logo Isn’t a Brand: Building Trust Signals That Convert

Lisa sees a common mistake among property managers attempting to transition away from OTA dependency: they think having a website equals having a brand.

“They think that having a logo is having a brand. It’s not,” Lisa explains. “Outside of the OTAs, they haven’t really proudly shouted about who they are, why people should come to them. Where’s the trust? None of that really exists.”

Building a direct booking brand requires layers of trust signals that OTAs provide automatically but independent operators must create themselves. Lisa’s checklist includes team photographs showing real people behind the business, a clear story about why you do what you do, client and guest charters that communicate your standards, credentials and accreditations that establish credibility, and transparent policies that remove booking friction.

These elements work together to answer the question every potential direct booker asks: “Why should I trust you with my money and my vacation?”

The Direct Booking Quadrant framework breaks this down into four essential pillars: Branding, Presence, Channels, and Funnels. Lisa’s approach addresses each one, but she emphasizes that branding must come first. Without a clear identity, the other elements have nothing to amplify.

📸 Photography That Sells the Dream

Lisa’s insights on property photography go far beyond “hire a professional.” She emphasizes staging your photos to tell a story that resonates with your specific ideal guest.

The principle is simple: show prospective guests exactly what their experience will look like. For family-friendly properties, that means photographing the pack-and-play set up next to the master bed, the high chair at the dining table with kids’ utensils ready, and safety gates installed throughout the home.

This approach transforms photography from documentation into aspiration. Parents scrolling through listings aren’t just looking for amenities—they’re imagining their family in that space. When they see a property clearly designed for families like theirs, the mental leap to booking becomes much shorter.

Lisa experienced this principle firsthand when booking a dog-friendly cottage in Wales. The owner had staged dogs in every photo, included clear signage about pet policies, and communicated immediately that this property wasn’t just dog-tolerant—it was dog-friendly.

“I wasn’t even looking to book anywhere,” Lisa recalls. “And before I knew it, I was booking it.” The conversion from casual browser to confirmed guest happened in hours, driven entirely by photography and messaging that spoke directly to her needs as a dog owner.

This same psychology applies whether your niche is families with young children, corporate travelers, wedding parties, or any other specific guest type. When your visual presentation clearly demonstrates understanding of your guest’s needs, you’ve already overcome the biggest barrier to direct booking.

🌐 Preparing Your Website for AI Search

Lisa and Gil discussed an emerging challenge that many property managers haven’t yet considered: how will AI search tools like ChatGPT find and recommend your properties?

Traditional SEO focused on ranking for broad keywords like “vacation rental in [location].” But AI-powered search operates differently. Users describe specific requirements in natural language: “I need a dog-friendly cottage in Wales with a secure garden, walking distance to hiking trails, that allows dogs on furniture.”

Properties with detailed, specific content that addresses these long-tail queries will surface in AI recommendations. Generic listing descriptions optimized for old-school SEO will increasingly become invisible.

Lisa notes that she’s used ChatGPT to plan her own travel itineraries for the past 12 months, asking detailed questions about dog-friendly accommodations, specific amenities, and location requirements. The properties that appear in these results have invested in content that answers specific questions—not just keyword-stuffed descriptions.

This shift creates opportunity for hosts willing to invest in content development. Landing pages addressing specific guest needs, detailed guides about local attractions, and blog content that demonstrates expertise all feed the AI systems that will increasingly influence booking decisions. Understanding niche marketing strategies for short-term rentals becomes even more critical in this new landscape.

🚀 The Business Case for Direct Booking Websites

Lisa makes a compelling argument against relying solely on PMS-provided websites: you don’t own them, you can’t meaningfully customize them, and they’re unlikely to be optimized for AI search or conversion.

“There’s a very big business case argument for having your own direct booking website,” she explains. “I think it might be time to migrate away from what’s given to you and actually have something that’s really gonna work for your business.”

The key differentiator is control. When your website exists on a platform you control, you can update messaging instantly as your brand evolves, A/B test different approaches to conversion, add content that establishes authority in your niche, implement tracking that reveals what’s actually working, and build email lists that become long-term assets.

PMS widgets serve a function, but they’re designed for operational efficiency, not marketing effectiveness. A purpose-built direct booking platform bridges that gap, connecting operational data with conversion-focused design. Hosts ready to make this transition can explore options that don’t require WordPress complexity or agency budgets—platforms designed specifically for vacation rental marketing and direct bookings.

💡 Rapid Fire Highlights

Book Recommendation: Surrounded by Idiots by Thomas Erikson — A personality profiling guide that helps you understand guests, team members, and difficult landlords from their perspective rather than your own. Understanding what drives different personality types transforms communication and relationship management.

Mindset Advice: “Be open-minded. Be willing to learn. Don’t go and make mistakes because you don’t know. Save yourself a lot of pain, time, and money by speaking to people who are further ahead in their journey.”

Tactical Takeaway: Before advertising anywhere—OTAs, direct booking website, or social media—make sure your product is absolutely right for your ideal guest. If that alignment isn’t there, no amount of marketing will attract the guests you want at the prices you deserve.

🔗 Connect with Lisa Roads

Lisa welcomes connections from property managers and hosts looking to grow their businesses strategically.

Website: theholidaypropertycoach.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lisaroads
Facebook: The Holiday Property Coach
Instagram: @theholidaypropertycoach
Community: Women in Short-Term Rentals on Facebook and LinkedIn

🎧 Ready to Build Your Direct Booking Brand?

Lisa’s journey from empty properties to a successful exit proves that systematic brand building creates real business value. Whether you’re managing 5 properties or preparing to scale to 50, the principles remain the same: know your ideal guest, curate your portfolio to serve them exceptionally, and build trust signals that make direct booking the obvious choice.

🎧 Listen to the full episode to hear Lisa’s complete insights on scaling, exiting, and building businesses that attract both guests and property owners.

👉 Ready to take control of your direct bookings? Visit CraftedStays.co and start your free trial today. Build a website that reflects your brand, converts your ideal guests, and grows with your business.

Transcription

Lisa: If you are a smaller business means you’ve got limited resource, limited marketing budget, limited time you are well, you are better to, to focus what you do have and be niche and well known in a niche than the scatter gun approach and dilute everything so, so thinly that you are not known to be an expert in anything and then you are competing with all the other.

Lisa: You know, big players that are gen, you know, who can afford to be more general because they’ve got bigger teams, bigger budgets, you know, bigger exposure. So I think I’d rather be small and personal and well known for that than just be a generalist.

Gil: Before we bring on our guest, I want 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.

Gil: 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.

Gil: 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.

Gil: 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 podcast where we’re bringing top operators to discuss hospitality, operations, and direct bookings. On today’s show, I have Lisa Roads. She has built a portfolio over the last 20 years. Uh, she reached 225 properties and had to whittle that down to 175, and she was able to successfully exit that during the head of the pandemic.

Gil: She’s the founder of the holiday property coach where she brings on clients that are looking to really scale and figure out how do they move their business forward. She’s typically working with larger property managers, typically within the 30 to 50 property range there. She has a wealth of experience.

Gil: She’s also the founder of Women in Short-Term Rentals. , She, we just, today’s show we talk a lot about really brand identity, what it means to really build a high converting website. She, we really emphasize really understanding your ICP. It’s a lot of topics that we’ve talked about on this show. But she has unique perspective.

Gil: She has a lot of experience in this space, so it’s definitely a really good show to listen to. So, without further ado, let’s bring in Lisa.

Gil : Hi, Lisa. Welcome to the show.

Lisa: Hi, Gil. Thank you very, very much for inviting me to be a guest on your show. I’m delighted to be here.

Gil : Yeah, it’s the start of the year right now. I was just, watching some of your reels the other day, and I saw that you had a kind of a rough start of, of the year. I’m sorry to kind of hear that, that, that you’re having to do with that.

Lisa: Yes, yes. I have started 2026 with a bang and I’ve gone and broken my left ankle. A very silly accident happened a week ago, but you know, I’ve got another leg, so I’m a glass half full-timer person. It hasn’t stopped me working. It’s just stopping me from driving at the moment. So we’re all good still.

Lisa: I can still coach, I can still do my normal things, and my other half is incredibly supportive, so he’s been helping out with the dog and the chores. While I’m not able to kind of do as much of that as I would normally do,

Gil : How, how long is the recovery for you on this one?

Lisa: about four to six weeks.

Gil : Oh. Are you missing out on snow time then because of that?

Lisa: Uh, well actually I hadn’t planned to go skiing, but strangely I had almost planned to go to Spain for a wrecky visit, for a retreat. We’re running end of the year, and it was due to go this week. And I’m like, that’s not happening, is it? I’m not getting on a plane for the, for the foreseeable. So I’ve moved the dates for that and actually my next travel is not until early February when I’m, I’m a strategic, uh, well, women in short term rentals is a strategic partner for the host Planet Roadshow, which is, uh, six venues around the uk.

Lisa: The first of that is in Cornwall in February. So, um, somebody is very kind of giving me a lift down to Cornwall for that visit because I won’t be driving by then. But yeah, we, we, we’ll manage.

Gil : awesome. Well, before we get too much into it, uh, Lisa, do you mind giving folks an introduction to who you are?

Lisa: Not at all. So I’m Lisa Roads. Uh, my business is Holiday Property Coach. I am a, uh, short term rental business strategist, marketing strategy, ex, uh, growth and exit strategy coach and consultant. Uh, but I’ve been in the sector for a very long time, like 20 years. Um, I started investing in property when I was about 22, so a long, long time ago.

Lisa: Um, I’m only 12, but you know, long, long time ago. Um, and I started investing in short-term rentals in about 2003. Uh, I diversified our investment portfolio. I think like a lot of people had residential properties in our portfolio and we decided to diversify into short-term rentals. And I selected Cyprus as the market to invest in having done a lot of homework about where in Europe to invest.

Lisa: I chose Cyprus. For a number of reasons. It was very aligned with UK, um, laws and, you know, the, uh, being, uh, they were about to go into the eu, so it made buying property in Europe possible. Um, and after buying property off plan in Cyprus, uh, realized along with lots of other investor owners like myself, that the infrastructure for supporting a property that you then want to rent just didn’t really exist.

Lisa: So, um, I had a marketing agency at the time in the uk, a very successful marketing agency. Um, I decided that if the services didn’t exist, then I would create them because I needed them. And so did lots of other investor owners needed that support as well. So I founded, uh, lifestyle Assets Property Management in Cyprus in 2005.

Lisa: And organically grew that business over 18 years until we scaled. We did scale to about 2 25 and we scaled back when we decided to niche, uh, and scaled back on properties that were not performing as well as we would like them to. And we sold at 175 properties in 2021. At the end of the pandemic, I was selling the business right in the middle of the pandemic, which was a bit of a pain, but we got there in the end and sold the business in 2021.

Lisa: And subsequent to that, I’ve been an industry educator, keynote speaker, coach, and consultant.

Gil : Wow, what a story. There’s so much going on in my head right now in terms of like where your journey is, but what we say is like one of the biggest learnings that you’ve kind of gone through, going through the different kind of stages throughout your, your hosting and property management career.

Lisa: Well, I mean, when you start a business in another country, from another country, you know, you, you have none of the connections, you have none of the business connections on the ground. You have to, you have to make those connections. You have to build those relationships, whether it’s contractors working for you, cleaners working for you, you know, suppliers working for you.

Lisa: Even down to, we were taking on a lot of off plan, you know, unfurnished, no interior design properties for investor owners that were like, we just need someone to take care of this for us. So the first service I actually created was called the Investor Complete Service, which was, we will take an empty property, we will identify the market that that property is going to be right for.

Lisa: We will interior design. And project manage the full purchase and installation of all of the, uh, inventory needed for that property, we will then manage it and we will then market it. And that’s how I layered the services. We started right at the beginning of the property journey and we layered on the services to the point that we then got a full turn key service from empty property to, um, performing, um, investment for the owners that we were taking care of who were completely hands off investor owners.

Lisa: So those, those were tricky, tricky times because, you know, where do you start?

Gil : yeah. So when, in, where, in that stage of that, in your career that did you start doing kind of full service property management, where you’re even taking on the furnishing upfront, um, for properties?

Lisa: That was right from the beginning because I realized I needed to do it for our properties. And there were a number of owners in the same complex that we had bought into that were like, we are in the same boat. We, there is, there are no furniture companies. There were no ikea’s or big furniture companies in Cyprus in 2005.

Lisa: So what do you do? I mean, do you, do you, so what I did was I decided I was gonna buy it all and ship it into Cyprus, which is exactly what I did. So I did all the buying in the UK project, managed all the buying, and then managed to arrange for it to be shipped in containers across the Cyprus. And then I would arrive in Cyprus and I would meet it through customs, and then I would bring a team together and we would literally go and project, manage the installation of everything down to your, you know, your smoke detectors, your fire extinguishers, you know, everything was to the point where you could get a photographer in, take the photographs and get it up, uh, to out there to, to get it marketed for rentals.

Lisa: So yeah, that’s where we started. Right at the beginning with my own properties. I was a bit of a Guinea pig, kind of, you know, beta testing the system really, if you like.

Gil : Yeah, so when we got into short term rentals, we wanted to invest into markets, um, that were kind of less common. Um, and we’re in California and there’s a couple property, a couple regions that we were thinking about. And we had a discussion kind of prior to the show of like, why I invest outside, mainly because the laws and regulations are a lot more friendly for, uh, short-term rentals.

Gil : But prior to purchasing even our first property, there was a couple markets that we were planning to go to, specifically in California. I remember there’s one called Arnold, Arnold, California. California. And it’s about two hours drive from San Francisco that we wanted to kind of get into maybe three. Um, but the challenge that we had going into that market was.

Gil : Really around the, what you mentioned, the infrastructure side of it. Um, when I, when we were doing our homework, one of the things that we heard repeatedly was that there’s only one or two different cleaners in the area. There’s no like, reliable handyman services. And so when you talk about like infrastructure, like that kind of like made me remember those days where when we’re thinking about going into market, like it’s not just about finding the right property, but is there staff and resources around the area that make it conducive?

Gil : Similar to kinda like what you mentioned, there’s no ikea. I think the closest Home Depot is actually rather far from it. Um, so even like the hardware stores is rather hard to get to get to. Um, and ultimately our portfolio, we were getting started in our first few properties. Like we didn’t want to set up whole new infrastructure, um, to do that.

Gil : And it’s kinda interesting that you, when you got into Cyprus. Um, you saw this big opportunity, uh, but also this big challenge and you decided to like tackle, tackle it head on.

Lisa: Absolutely. I mean, I think that, I think that was something that I really liked. I suppose in any startup business there’s, there’s this kind of exciting phase of like, you’re problem solving, you are finding a solution. You know, if somebody says it doesn’t exist, I’m like, well, why doesn’t it exist? Well, if it doesn’t exist in Cyprus, then I’ll bring it to Cyprus.

Lisa: You know? So that’s what I did. And if someone said, you know, you are never gonna get it through customers, I like, I’ll find a way of getting it through customs. So, you know, what I did was I started building relationships with a couple of, uh. Companies in Cyprus that I bought some furniture pieces, pieces from.

Lisa: And I said, well, who do you use for customers clearance at Lisel? Well, we use this company. Well, can you put me in touch with them? I need help to bring some consignments in. And that’s how I built these relationships. You know, who do you use for your electrical repairs? Who do you use for your plumbing?

Lisa: And so I started building my black book of local suppliers. And yes, some of them were good and some of them were not so good. But over the 18 years I had a really good black book of, you know, locksmiths and electricians and plumbers and so heating and pool maintainers. And they became my ecosystem for providing this service.

Lisa: And in terms of the cleaners, there was a big expatriate, uh, community in Cyprus. And yes, you know, there were people that wanted to work, but you know, not many of them really had any expertise in short-term rental hospitality. You know, support. So that was about, you know, building our own training program for our team so that we had a system and a process of how we would do it, our brand way of doing things.

Lisa: And what I learned was the earlier you get those foundations in place for your business, that the easier it is to scale it. If you try and fudge it and just kind of wing it, it just doesn’t work so well because you’ll end up with holes that will just cause you pain. So I came from a very corporate background, and so systems and processes were something I was very familiar with.

Lisa: So I set about, you know, standard operating procedures for our cleaning teams, for our maintenance teams, for how we took on a property, you know, so we, we were very methodical in the way we approached business. So every time we took somebody on, it wasn’t difficult. It wasn’t painful because we had a process for doing it.

Gil : Yeah. What was that ramp period like? If you remember the early days of getting into Cyrus? What were the early days of the, the properties that you took on, the amount of properties that you took on, and kinda like how quickly did a ramp and how does that kind of coincide with the infrastructure build that you’re doing?

Lisa: It was, it was, you know, like, you know that, that, that picture of, you know, the swan that’s seamless on the top of the water and lots of legs swimming underneath, it was very much like that because, you know, what I didn’t anticipate was how fast people, word of mouth would recommend us to help them once they knew somebody else was using our services.

Lisa: So they said, well, Lisa and her team have just on our property, you need to speak to her. So if I gave you an example in one month, sometimes we do 25 properties from empty to fully furnished in one month. That was a lot of work. I had to pull together a big team for that, and I was literally on the ground working flat out seven days a week.

Lisa: ’cause of course, these owners, these investor owners want their properties performing like they want them on, on the, you know, to be renting as fast possible. But of course the other thing is, as you mentioned with your own properties, is we were in an emerging unknown. Market. Yes, there were parts of Cypress that were very established for your traditional hotel holidays, but not the short term rental market.

Lisa: And we had properties that were in immature areas. So we had to create the market demand for these properties, which takes me back to my marketing, uh, experience, which told me that we needed to understand who we felt was going to be the guests that we were going to want to attract to these properties so that we knew how we had to interior design furnish and inventory them to make sure that they were going to be the right product for the people that we then needed to try and attract to come and stay and try these new parts of Cyprus.

Lisa: And we knew it was gonna take a couple of years to get a fully, you know, uh, established new market. But we made sure our investor owners understood that your business plan needs to be like n to three years as a minimum, really for us to get this market fully established. And they were pretty okay with that.

Gil : Did you end up because of that starting or influencing other local businesses around you? I’d, I’d imagine that because. This may happen over time, but because there’s, you’re bringing in new demand, you’re bringing in new travelers into the area, and you have a very concentrated ICP that the local businesses around you would also kind of react to that or, um, the things that may pop up may react to that as well too.

Gil : I don’t know if you have any examples or

Lisa: it’s interesting. I saw lots of other kind of so-called property managers popping up. What I didn’t see was a full service end-to-end ecosystem service that I had created that took an empty property and created a performing investment. Uh, we only worked with investor owners. We were very clear about who our ideal client was.

Lisa: We were very clear about the product we needed, and they were very hands off. So they were very much handed over to us. We took care of the whole ecosystem of their investment property. When I say that, I saw lots of other property managers pop up. They were like the next door neighbor saying, oh, I can look after your property, gimme your keys, or, but they weren’t really setting themselves of a proper, professional, limited company with all the, you know, service level agreements and, you know, performance guy.

Lisa: They, they were not those. So I am a great believer that we didn’t need to be that much better than most, and we were considerably better than most on the ground because they were very naive in their approach to property management at the time.

Gil : Yeah.

Lisa: That sounds a bit arrogant, but I was truly a great believer in be better than everybody else.

Lisa: And I’ve got a sign behind it that says, you know, make sure that you are better than everybody else. ’cause that’s how people will see you, you know,

Gil : Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what was the, the exit like? So you ended up ramping up to, was it 225 properties?

Lisa: that 2 25 and then I said, you know, we need to sift out those properties that are painful where landlords are not aligned with our brand values, where, you know, we are just not getting the right, uh, performance from a property. ’cause we’re not getting buy-in from a landlord. So we brought it back down to 1 7 5, really good quality.

Lisa: Uh, I wouldn’t say hyper luxury, but certainly at the higher end of the market. Coastal properties within three kilometers of a beach. That was our market. And we, we sort of settled at 175 when we sold in 2021.

Gil : Wow. Do you have any regret selling the business?

Lisa: No, when you’ve run it for 18 years, 24 7, 7 days a week, and you’ve used EasyJet flights to Cyprus, like a bus that, I mean until I, I mean, to be fine. Yeah. Like in the first five to seven years, I didn’t have the management structure in Cyprus on the ground that I, that I did have by the time I sold the company.

Lisa: That was really hard when everything, as you know, sits with you, every decision sits with you, you know, uh, Cyprus was an hour ahead of the UK most of the time, so, you know, my working day was very stretched, very long, and you’ll know what that feels like. Towards the end, when I had management structure in place on the ground, things were a lot easier.

Lisa: I could be way more strategic about what we were doing and, and work on the business rather than be needy in the operations every day, which was so much better. I could actually take holidays with the family and stuff, which was something I couldn’t do for the first sort of seven years really. And, um.

Lisa: Yeah, I think by the time we sold, we, we were pretty well established, you know, very respected brand on the island and we had very, very good, uh, longevity of relationships with our clients. They stayed with us, many, many, and still, I’m still friends with many of them now actually. And my hardest moment, to be honest, was not regret about selling the business, was telling my landlords that I was leaving the business was a really tough call.

Lisa: ’cause I felt like I was walking away from them, even though I knew it was the right thing to do and that I had another chapter of my career ahead of me. That, that, that, that moment to kind of communicate that I’m leaving you and wanting them to feel secure, that they were gonna be looked after in the way they’d been looked after all those years was really difficult.

Gil : Yeah. Do you, did the brand end up kind of staying the same after you you

Lisa: Yeah, so I, I, I laugh about it ’cause I, I did a, I did a session for Jen Boyles, his, uh, direct booking success Summit last year. And I did a, a, a topic on kind of, you know, um, preparing your business for exit, you know, making sure you’re building a brand that’s gonna be successfully, um, purchased by somebody else.

Lisa: And I talk about the Goldilocks and the three buyers because that was me. I had three buyers on the table and I needed to evaluate who was gonna be the best, you know, person to succeed in my business for me. And, um, and it wasn’t always about money. It was about making sure that the brand was gonna be looked after, our clients are gonna be looked after, that they were gonna continue doing things where we had done.

Lisa: And that’s how I chose who we sold to actually.

Gil : I, I’m not surprised, and I, I would pretty much almost do the same, same thing on our, on our side as well too. Like you dedicate 18 years of your life. It’s, it’s not just about. The cash flow that might bring in and the investment. And yes, that’s, that’s, that’s good and that’s necessary to run a business.

Gil : But as a business owner and a founder, there’s a lot of heart that you put into the company. And when things don’t go right, there’s this sense of you need to, you need to own it on yourself. So you carry a lot of burden as you’re building out that company. Um, and like you said, you build a lot of relationships.

Gil : I’m, so, I’m not surprised that it may not be the, the biggest offer that you might have, but you want something that you walk away with and you still feel happy that it’s in, it’s in good hands. You don’t want it to go away. Yeah,

Lisa: No. And I didn’t want people to come back to me and saying, they let me down. You know? They’re not like you. They’re not like you. Actually, the team went with it, to be fair. So, so people didn’t see a huge amount of difference because the team went, went with the business. So, you know, there were lots of co continuity of care, which was very good.

Lisa: Um, but you know, like, you know, you have to accept that. Once you’ve handed it over, once you’ve done your transitional consulting phase, that you do have to let go of this baby that you’ve invested all these years in. And that is also hard because then you’re like, well, well, that was my identity for all those years.

Lisa: What’s my identity now? Who am I now? Now I’m post-sale. What am I gonna do now?

Gil : yeah. That’s actually like where, where my head’s at as, as well too is like, after you left, what was, what was going through your head and maybe you, maybe there’s, there’s this consulting period there, but you’re kind of, the kinda weight is off your shoulder in terms of a responsibility perspective.

Gil : And you’re there as more of like, I’m here to make sure the transition goes well.

Lisa: yeah. Well, that was part of the agreement. Um, but of course we were also in the middle of pandemic. So I found myself in this really unusual position with a, a husband who was key personnel. So his, he was really busy, and suddenly I found myself in this enil position where I no longer had to be responsible.

Lisa: Everything, every day. But I couldn’t just take off and go traveling like most people would’ve done. You’re like, well, yay, the money’s in the bank. I can go traveling. ’cause I couldn’t go traveling. So I was like stuck at home thinking, well this is like a bit strange. ’cause now I’m without purpose. I’m without portfolio and without purpose.

Lisa: And I really don’t like that as an entrepreneur. I’ve always had a business. I’ve always been busy. Um, so what did I do? I went and rescued a, a dog.

Gil : I was gonna ask like what, what did you do with your time?

Lisa: I rescued a dog from Romania, which was very spontaneous. My husband still thinks, how on earth did this happen? And, um, and I, I kind of saved her and she saved me. I think it sounds a bit crass, but it’s true. You know, I didn’t have a purpose. She was a very lost little soul from Romania, a rescue dog, puppy.

Lisa: And um, and I invested in kind of making sure she was okay. And I felt really incredibly responsible for advocating for her to make sure she was okay. And we have a great bond and she’s done incredibly well. She’s five now. And I think that was a really good thing for me to do to kind of what it did was it, it stopped me from rushing straight into either getting a job or doing something else.

Lisa: You know? It gave me that kind of thinking time. And then what I then did eventually was I did some, I’m gonna say generic consultancy in the fem tech space in the uk, uh, helping, uh, female EmTech founders to raise private equity to, to grow their business. And I did some kind of active, uh, role. Yeah, I was active in a couple of those businesses in, in part of being part of their board, but I still felt like there was something missing.

Lisa: And that’s something was hospitality.

Gil : Hmm. Well, we’ll get into,

Lisa: anymore. Yeah. I, I, I missed the hospitality aspect of, of what I was doing. So the

Gil : I, I, I, I definitely wanna dive into to, to what led that into the consulting side of the business. But before we go there, you mentioned a very sharp word. I say sharp because it, it invokes feelings on my side or emotions on my side. Which was purpose. Um, how I, I kind of know the answer. I kind of have, I have a sense of kind of how you might react to it, but when I, when I hear that word and I hear like an entrepreneur, I feel like those words are quite synonymous to each other.

Gil : Where the founders and entrepreneurs that do really well are the ones with very, very clear purpose. Like, I didn’t start craft estates because I wanted to exit and sell the company for some, some, some amount. It was that I saw this kind of opportunity in the market, this hole in the market where there wasn’t a lot of good offerings.

Gil : And my background in eCommerce, my background in tech, my background in hospitality, like there’s like this good marriage there where I felt like I had strong purpose to do it. And I feel that when you’re starting a business, you need that. Purpose there, because the days are really long. The challenges are really hard when it comes, and especially if you’re bootstrapping it, you’re having to invest a lot of your time, your energy, your money into it.

Gil : Um, to me, almost like purpose is a necessity. I I would love to kind of hear your, your take on it and whether or not you agree or maybe you can get along, you can get by without necessarily purpose being, purpose built.

Lisa: I, I think if you don’t have a reason why you’re doing something well, what would motivate you to put, as you say, that amount of effort, time, financial commitment, risk into doing something but un underlying That has to be a kind of, for me, um, there are people there that I can help and I know I can help them, and it’s about bringing something that is gonna fix something for somebody else.

Lisa: As you said, the reason why you’re creating your websites is ’cause you recognize being a host yourself, that there was this need that the, these, this service didn’t exist in the market. It’s exactly the same for me. When I started my business to site this, the services did not exist and therefore I was gonna, I was gonna, I was gonna provide the service that was needed and didn’t exist when it comes to consultancy.

Lisa: Um, I so wish when I had started my business that there were mentors and coaches that could have helped me and I would’ve been less lonely. Unless on your own making some of those decisions at various stages of growing your business ’cause they just didn’t exist then, you know, the networking that’s available didn’t exist.

Lisa: A lot of the things that we have available to us now in our sector didn’t exist then. And I wish they had. So going into coaching and consulting for me was about, it’s kind of paying it forward. You know, I’ve got all this experience, both, you know, generic business experience, commercial experience, marketing experience.

Lisa: Like why would I waste that when I could actually help people? So that was kind of why it was a natural next step to come back into the SDR space. And initially I didn’t niche down into exclusively working with women as I do now. Um, but, but then I decided about a year or 18 months ago, having been to a lot of events, I felt there were a lot of women out there that would really benefit from some support either in a community or one-to-one.

Lisa: And so that’s why I decided to niche down and exclusively support women property managers in our sector.

Gil : So talk to me a little bit more about the services we, we touched on a little bit on it when you, you gave your initial intro there. Who are the types, besides being a woman, kind of in the short term rental space, what are the types of problems that you typically help folks with? Who’s your ideal kind of, who’s your ideal customer?

Gil : Um, if you wanna say, um,

Lisa: okay, so ideal client for me would be somebody who’s probably been in business sort of five to seven years, probably most of them. They’ve probably got to about, I dunno, 35, 50 properties. Um, they’re not bad at business, but they don’t really know how to scale and they’re feeling a bit overwhelmed with these decisions about how best to scale.

Lisa: Equally, most of them have started their businesses with a distribution channel of the OTAs, and they haven’t really thought about their direct booking brand. And they now realize that without a brand identity, what is it that’s actually building any value in their business? If they wanna sell it at some point in the future, what is their business?

Lisa: You know, what does this thing actually look like that is adding any value? Because I think if I, I’m quite ruthless about this. If your business is solely built on OTAs and solely built on the model where you only own commission on bookings and you contract everything out, where is the value in your business? You know, and this is what a lot of people don’t realize, and they’ve built this business on this kind of, well, this is easier because I’m not having to manage the properties. I’m not having to manage the clean. But actually, you know, what do you think you’re gonna sell at the end of the day? You know, like, what are you selling?

Lisa: So I work with women to say, what is your business model now? And is that business model really working for you? Is it profitable? Is it sustainable? Are you gonna grow? Have you niched? What’s your brand? So it’s all of those things and they’re all connected, obviously. And can I, I start with a very holistic view of their business and say, where are you today?

Lisa: What does your business like, how, where have you, how have you got to here and where do you want to go with it? And is that diversifying into other territories, other countries, you know, what do we need to think about? And so strategically, I think as a partner, I’m like a sounding board for them. Kind of what they’re thinking about their vision for their businesses and how are they going to get there.

Lisa: And having somebody with you to help you have, have that conversation where you, your own team members are not necessarily the best place people to have those conversations with.

Gil : Yeah, and it feels like that’s a lot more hands-on where what you’re not doing is running them through a steps, a series of steps that maybe you have gone through or that you’ve learned along the way, but actually starting off and ending with kind of where they are in the business, their specific challenges and where they’re going.

Gil : Because not everybody’s goals are going to be the same. Some may want to exit, some may want to expand, some may even want to collapse and get better margin, even.

Lisa: yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, and, and I’ve got clients at the moment. I’m helping them to sell their business. At the moment, I’m, I’m helping to find a buyer for their business and helping them to go through that process. ’cause it’s a fairly daunting process if you’ve never sold a business before. Uh, other clients, I’m helping them to kind of just restructure their business and make sure that their teams are performing.

Lisa: You know, you can build a team, but you get so busy you don’t necessarily understand who’s doing what and why they’re doing it, and whether they’re being accountable for what they’re supposed to be doing and whether that’s actually contributing to the bottom line. Um, you know, and equally a number of women I’m working with, you know, just the sheer overwhelm and that, that time management piece we spoke earlier about, you know, that that parent guilt not being available to your family for holidays and spending time with your kids.

Lisa: And it, it’s a real thing, you know? And, and, and sometimes I say, well, you know, are you spreading yourself too thin? The best decision I ever made in my business was when I got my ops manager in somebody that could be my wing woman in the business or wing person who could take some of that stuff off my plate so that I could actually have some breathing time to think.

Lisa: And when I did that, the business then grew a huge amount of that. But I, if I hadn’t made that financial commitment to bring an ops manager on. My business could have stagnated and it would’ve been, you know, it would’ve stopped where it was because I was almost limiting its growth. And then I took another manager on in another area and another manager.

Lisa: And so we had another tier of management, which took a whole heap of pain off my shoulders. Um, they then managed all the day-to-day stuff and I just managed the sort of the, the big picture stuff really after that. But yeah, a lot of women don’t know when to make that decision. You know, how am I gonna finance the decision?

Lisa: How am I gonna bankroll this business if I grow my team? It’s a big, it’s a big commitment as you know yourself with your business. So yeah, it’s all of those things that get a bit overwhelming and can sometimes, um, imposter syndrome can get in the way and suddenly you go, I’m not doing as well as everybody else.

Lisa: I’m not as big as everybody else. My business isn’t as well known as everybody else. Uh, you know, I’m failing. And you’re like, but you’re not really failing. You’re just probably not got your visibility strategy quite right. You haven’t got your growth strategy quite right, but you’re not failing.

Gil : Mm-hmm. As you kind of think back at all the clients that you worked with over the last few years, um, what’s one of the, what’s one of the proud moments that you had of working with the client and kind of seeing the progress there?

Lisa: Um, there’s a few clients I’ve worked with. I mean, I’ve seen women go from, you know, being relatively unknown and quite invisible and they’re just doing the stuff behind the scenes and they don’t really want their face out there and they don’t really wanna tell anybody who they are to being on stage speaking at Keynote, you know, large events, SER events, telling their story.

Lisa: That makes me incredibly proud that I’ve got them from being, you know, I don’t really wanna be anywhere where anybody sees me to. I’m now standing on stage telling my story and sharing my experience. That’s really good. Equally, I’ve got clients where I’ve started working with them and I’ve looked at their portfolio and I’ve looked at the profitability of their portfolio.

Lisa: Unlike this could do so much better if you just out some of these properties and you focused it on this. So I’ve got a client down in Sussex who when I started working with her, I could see instantly that her portfolio was so mixed, it was not helping the performance of the portfolio because they were not clear who they were.

Lisa: Working with, and when I looked at it, I realized that the properties that were best performing were period and character properties in West Sussex. So I said to him, why are you not focusing on those? Like get rid of these underperforming small studios in Brighton and let’s just focus you on period and character properties be better known for being the expert for period and character properties, really big properties in West Sussex. to that advice and helping them to, to change the structure of the business, that business is doing so much better now than it was 18 months ago.

Gil : Yeah, and that. This is a, a topic that I hear every so often on, especially on this show. Um, and even on some of our clients, they may start off in property management where they have a pretty wide portfolio. They may be in different markets. They may tailor to different ICPs or different guest profiles.

Gil : Um, and I found that the hosts that and the property managers that do really well, specifically on the direct booking side, are the ones that almost curate their portfolio and they try to pull out properties that don’t follow that mix. Do you, do you follow that or, or do you think that there’s actually a counter to it as well too?

Lisa: Well, I think if you are a smaller business means you’ve got limited resource, limited marketing budget, limited time, you are, well, you are better to, to to, to focus what you do have and be niche and well known in a niche than the scatter gun approach and dilute everything so, so thinly that you are not known to be an expert in anything.

Lisa: And then you are competing with all the other, you know, big players that are gen, you know, who can afford to be more general because they’ve got bigger teams, bigger budgets, you know, bigger exposure. So I think if you are, I’d rather be small and personal and well known for that than just be a generalist.

Lisa: I mean, you know, there’s a place in the market for, for all of those things I think. But if I was looking for a specific type of property, so say I was an owner of a very, very valuable asset, a very, you know, an old. You know, really old, you know, property in West Sussex. Would I go to a property manager that just has a very mixed portfolio of everything?

Lisa: Or would I go to someone who’s an expert in period and character properties who understands that an old listed building needs someone who knows about old listed buildings to look after it properly because they are very unique in the type of property that they are. I think I would go to an expert who is good at managing period listed buildings.

Lisa: So I think that’s why it does them better, to be more focused and more niche than to be a generalist. Uh, I’m not saying that, you know, bigger companies, I think it depends on their model. ’cause a lot of the big companies in the UK, they’re more rental agencies than property managers because they back off the property management aspect of it.

Lisa: But if you’re gonna manage the whole ecosystem, as we did, was we managed every aspect of the property management from key holding, cleaning, maintenance, proactive maintenance, pool maintenance, got, we did everything. It was all in house. That’s where our value in our business came from. ’cause we held onto all of those services and we made revenue on all of those services.

Lisa: We didn’t back anything off.

Gil : Yeah. And, and I think you, you, you bring up a good point and a lot of times it comes in from the guest point of view. Um, people are building out their direct booking website and they bring in their portfolio and they’re trying to say, we we’re walking through an exercise of like, who your ICP is. What do you wanna show on there?

Gil : And they have a really hard time really showcasing what is that one thing that you wanna put on that, that hero image, because they, they kind of tailor to a pretty wide audience and. Like one of the, one of the exercises is really to figure out like, can you niche down to a part and do you see your portfolio growing into this, into a smaller niche down, down the road, either by getting rid of or by introducing more properties that kind of align with what you want.

Gil : But what I got out of kind of your responses, yes, from a guest perspective, you want to have continuity so that someone can come to you and be trusted that you’re gonna take care of them for that particular stay. But also from a property management, homeowner acquisition side of it, knowing that you’re giving a property that is tailored towards your type of stay, you would have much more confidence on it.

Gil : But also on the team side as well too, your management team, the SOPs that you put in place, um, the, the structure, the services that you provide, it kind of all comes together where kind of the holy grail of it is really, if you’re able to niche down. Really concentrate your services. These things start to almost compound each other where it almost becomes a part of your foundation where if you know this is the type of product that you want to sell, that you want to offer, that you’ll attract the right homes that fit in that portfolio.

Gil : But it also becomes much more attractive when you start thinking about your direct booking strategy as well too.

Lisa: Absolutely. I mean, and, and that’s the thing, you know, I think if you, you know, one. There’s nothing wrong in scaling and growing and perhaps, you know, expanding from, from this niche and, and creating, say, categories of properties at some point. But I think in the early days it, it doesn’t make sense to, to, to, to do that.

Lisa: I think it would be, it would slow down your progress. You’re not as visible. It’s a scatter gun approach. How do you, as you say, how do you build out your marketing strategy if you’ve just got, you know, um, a very modern, you know, architectural design property here and over here, you’ve got this castle, you know, they’re, they’re at two ends of the type of property, two different types of client, you know, and it’s very difficult to, to spread your budget and get, you know, good visibility.

Lisa: Even with a direct booking site. It’s for your brand. I think it’s better to be clear about who it is and curate your property portfolio for those guests because then they come to you and you are gonna fulfill what they’re looking for. ’cause they’re coming to you because they’re looking for that type of property.

Lisa: Whether it’s sleeps large groups of people or whether it’s a corporate stay or whether it’s a, you know, a family stay, it’s so much easier for business to build out their brand messaging on a very defined niched portfolio than it is when you’ve got multiple types of, as you say, ICP or types of property in all sorts of locations,

Gil : Yeah. When you’re, when you’re working with some of your clients, they’re typically, you mentioned they’ve been in business for five to seven years. They may have anywhere from 35 to to 50 properties there. Maybe they got down to niching down to a specific type of category. As you’re helping them be independent outside of the OTAs, what’s one of the biggest challenges that you’ve seen with people really ramping up that direct booking engine?

Gil : What’s, what are some of the common things that you have seen?

Lisa: is that they think that having a logo is having a brand. It’s not, and they haven’t really got a clear brand identity. So outside of the OTAs, which they’ve relied on for their distribution channels, is that they don’t really know that. They haven’t really proudly shouted about who they are, why people should come to them.

Lisa: Where’s the trust policy? Where’s the trust in their brand? None of that really exists, and that has to be created. You know, you can’t just go and create a website and go, well, I’ve got a website now. You should just come up with me. It just doesn’t work like that. And they go, but I’ve got a website. And I’m like, yes, but why should someone book with you when they don’t know you?

Lisa: You know, where’s the social, you know, the social evidence about people working with you? Where’s the, the credentials, the ac, the accreditation, the trust? Where’s all of that? It doesn’t exist. So we have to help build that out first. And I think. Being clear on your messaging, like, you know, and being like for what you wanna be known for, what, what do you authentically want to be known for?

Lisa: Is it that you offer this very personal service? Is it that you specialize in castles and fairytale properly? What is it? But I think behind that, you know, be proud of your team. Like we had team photographs, we made sure everybody knew who our team was, that everybody in our team had a role and that we trained our team and we are very proud of that.

Lisa: And we had a charter, a client charter, you know, a landlord charter and a guest charter. All of these things start to build that trust with people booking with you direct and that, you know, if that doesn’t exist, just having a direct booking website, I’m afraid isn’t gonna necessarily make somebody book with you.

Lisa: It’s gonna be a vehicle to help people come and book with you, but you still need all of that, that brand building piece to go with it.

Gil : And do you, do you find that challenging to kind of guide folks through that process of identifying what their brand is? Yep.

Lisa: Not challenging. It’s, it is, it is quite a long piece of work. I think people think it’s much quicker to do than it really is because we can all go onto chatt PT and say, here’s my logo. Tell me what my brand is. But that doesn’t really get under the skin of the business. And I’m like, you know, it needs to be authentically who you are, what you do, why you do it in a certain way, what makes you different, special, interesting, trustworthy, and, and I think when you are busy, it’s quite difficult for a business owner to take that step back and find the, or invest the time to really think about those things.

Lisa: ’cause I, you’re saying you don’t wanna build a website more than, you know, once really for a while, you are gonna keep updating it, but you don’t. It’s a whole heap of work. People just go, I just need my website out. Then I’m like, yes, I know, but let’s just make sure we do this piece of work right first.

Lisa: Because you don’t wanna launch something that’s really not right for your business. ’cause you won’t be doing yourself any favors if you do that.

Gil : Yeah, I, I agree with you. I, I see too often we make it very easy for folks to spin up a, a really beautiful website that’s deeply connected with their PM. And at times, I, and we try to make it where as you’re onboarding, we have a checklist of things that we want you to go through. We want you to add your FAQ, we want you to add your social links, we want you to add your contact information, your management pages if you, if you need one.

Gil : We kind of go through it all. Um, and mainly because when we found that through time that when we were building out these websites, folks didn’t know what to put in there. So we gave you a, basically, almost a checklist of things that you should be considering. Your privacy policy pages, the consent managers, we take, we take care of a lot of those things.

Gil : And then when we build these templates, we have placeholders in them that allow you to kind of replace the hero images and, and really have a good structure to, because I, I, good direct booking sites follow a very logical structure to bring them towards the checkout pages. And we’ve done. A lot of work on trying to figure out like how do we optimize those templates?

Gil : But a lot of times I find that folks will do the hero picture replacements, but they don’t spend the time and effort to kind of go through each section and figure out like, how do they want to, we, we, like, for instance, a lot of our templates have a value prop section of like, why do you wanna choose me over other services?

Gil : And a lot of times we, we have the boilerplate kind of generic language in there and they just leave it in there. And I think the, the, the folks that do fairly well are the ones that actually, before they even touching the canvas, they think through kind of their branding and how they wanna position themselves and their niche.

Gil : And uh, a lot of them are really hands on and sometimes even the design process, like you mentioned, of identifying with their ICP, what amenities they want their properties, how they want the property showcase. And those are, I think, the ones that do better. On our platform than than others because we can kind of, because we build as a platform, we have a, a pretty wide base.

Gil : We can see kind of how people are performing across the board.

Lisa: But I think there’s a bit of naivety in marketing in, in, in a lot of STR businesses where they think it’s the properties that are doing the selling. But if on a direct booking situation, it’s, you know, they, you know what, if you look at a lot of, uh, companies, websites, so few of them have any images of the owner, the owner’s backstory, the team, you know, how they got started, why they’re even doing this, what their why and their purpose is there’s none of that.

Lisa: And you’re like, but you are just faceless and you’re just thinking that someone’s just gonna book it because they found a property they really like. But, but I think that’s, you know, they, they, they’re, they’re missing the point that people want to buy from people they trust. People buy from people they trust.

Lisa: People buy from people they know, like, and trust. And you have to build that know, like, and trust before somebody’s gonna book your property. Because if, if your property’s available on any of the channels. They’re gonna go and book it through there because there’s less risk. So I think that’s a piece of work.

Lisa: And certainly in my accelerator program over the six months that I take people through my accelerator program, we, there is not an element of your business that we don’t go through, right? From where are you today? Let’s look at your brand, let’s do a SWOT analysis of your brand versus your competitors who are, and it’s interesting, even STR businesses don’t realize when you say to them who are your competitors, they’ll go and pick another STR business and they completely overlook the fact there’s hotels.

Lisa: You know, the hotel market is also your competitor. You know, there’s lots of other competitors that are not that obvious to them ’cause they don’t consider them to be a competitor. And um, and I find that quite interesting. So yeah, through the six months we work on absolutely every element of a business, financials, business model, marketing, brand building, you know, all of it.

Lisa: And we come out the other end going, now we know who your business is and where you are really going with it.

Gil : Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, was there, we’ve covered a lot on, on direct bookings and the brand strategy and kind of the work that you do. Is there anything else that you want to share specifically on the direct booking side and um, some of the areas where you think people are under investing?

Lisa: I think people are still, um, I, I see this a lot in a lot of forums. You know, I, I still see a lot of this question going, have you got a direct booking website? I’m thinking about having a direct booking website. What, what do, what do I need? And you’re like, you don’t know what you don’t know. So I would say before you go do anything, you know, don’t just go out there and say, I just need a website and think that that’s going to solve the problem.

Lisa: ’cause it isn’t. Um, I think any company that’s helping somebody build a website as you are, you understand the importance of that brand, that trust policy, those terms, all that. Having somebody who understands that is really helpful because it means you’re not gonna make a mistake having a website that’s never going to do the job you need it to do.

Lisa: Um, I think that, you know, professional photography, professional video, professional interior design, and even the interior design of your properties needs to be aligned with the clients that you want to attract. And again, I see a lot of owners get that piece wrong. So I would take on properties and I’m like, and I really didn’t like taking on properties where the owners had gone and started it themselves necessarily.

Lisa: ’cause what we found is we were not getting a product that was right for our ideal client. We were getting a product that the owners liked, but may have missed the mark completely in terms of how a potential guest might want that property to look. Um, and I think working with a proper interior design team is also worth its weight in gold in terms of getting the property designed right, photographed professionally, video professionally, flaw layouts, all that kind of thing.

Lisa: Don’t underestimate why all of that is really important as part of your direct booking strategy. ’cause they really are important parts of it.

Gil : Yeah. And, uh, I’m glad you raised up the, the photography and I, I’ve given this example a few times on, on this podcast, but. A lot of times, yes, you want a really professional photographer and we definitely encourage folks to use photographers that are niched down to our space that knows how to capture the property as a guest may want to see it because it’s not the same thing that a typical like real estate photographer may want to look at things.

Gil : It’s very, very different. But I think like on, on, on top of that, you may already do this in, in, in your portfolio, your previous portfolio, but one of the things that we do is that we actually have a set of photos that we specifically want our photographers to take on top of all the other, other photos.

Gil : And specifically for our, our stay. And it could be different for every everybody else, but like our stay is our family friendly stays. So we explicitly tell all of our photographers in the different markets that we’re in that we want you to. Open the pack and play. We want you to put it right next to the king size bed in, in the main living in, in the main bedroom.

Gil : We want you to take out the high chair and put it in the dining room and, and put and stage it with the kids’ utensils and the bowls and all

Lisa: a storyboard, isn’t it? It’s a storyboard,

Gil : it is, and we found that, that’s been really helpful because a lot of folks, whether or not they’re on the OTAs or on your direct site, they’re looking at the pictures, they’re browsing through and they’re trying to imagine themselves in this, in this space.

Gil : And what we want to do is for, and we target specifically the mothers, because mothers are usually the ones that we found are, are booking our

Lisa: making the buying decision.

Gil : Making the bite and even doing the homework in the first place too. Um, and so we found that the mothers are looking for certain things. And even though we may have pack and play and highchair as a checklist, amenity on the bottom, and we put it in our description.

Gil : A lot of times it’s looking at the photos and imagine your space yourself in this space. And when we put the pack and play in there, it immediately triggers kinda this feeling of they got me, they understand me, and they, we, we have it taken care of.

Lisa: Well, we, we used to work with, um, a company called Kids Travel Light. So understanding who our target market, primarily families, we, we used to make life easier for them and say, you know, you don’t need to try and lug all of your baby equipment and your child equipment with you on that plane where you are limited to wait allowance.

Lisa: We would put together complete packages where it would be installed and assembled safely for them, for their arrival, including packs of toys appropriate to children and stuff. But you’re absolutely right. I think for me, um, your photography and I, I was, um, my marketing takes me back to this in terms of if you prepare, if you, um, interior designer property, um, think about, you know.

Lisa: How it’s going to look when it’s on a screen and you’re gonna walk somebody through from the time they arrive and look at your property to walking through the door and you set your property photos in an order that allows people to walk through the experience. And as you say that, it then makes them feel like, this is where I need to be.

Lisa: This is either aspirational or it’s absolutely what we need. You know, there are, you know, even down to, you know, we’ve got safety stickers on the doors. We’ve got child protective locks on the thing. The swimming pool is safety fence, so children are gonna be safe. All those things, you know, which are important to parents, they need to be able to see that those things are there.

Lisa: E equally. For example, I now have a dog and I take my dog on a lot of hol uh, trips away, and we book a lot of short-term rental properties. I need to know that this property is not just dog tolerant, but dog friendly. What does that mean? It means I don’t want to arrive and find that the first thing I get presented with is a bunch of rules that you hadn’t disclosed to me before I booked it, which says my dog can’t go upstairs. know, like I, so this is, these are really important small details, but they’re really big details when someone’s trying to make a decision about whether to book your property or not. So transparency of making sure that it’s absolutely visually clear that this property is right for them is the first barrier you need to overcome for them to go to the next stage of, okay, let’s look at your policies.

Lisa: Let’s look at whether it’s available. Let’s look at if it’s gonna be within my budget, or whatever that next step is.

Gil : Yeah, and imagine like if, if you’re shopping around and you see that the dogs are staged on the bed, that gives you the confidence like, oh, actually this place is very dog friendly, where I don’t have to worry about those rules of like, no dogs on furniture or not allowed

Lisa: They’ve got a secure fence, the garden securely fence. I don’t have to worry about my dog getting out. Um, or it’s, you know, it’s remote. I don’t have to worry about my dog reacting to other things or whatever it is. Um, and it’s interesting because I actually booked a cottage in Wales on the back of a social media post that I saw because this lady had put dogs in all the pictures and made it very clear that this was absolutely dog friendly and all the photographs.

Lisa: And I, I wasn’t even looking to book anywhere. And before I knew I was booking it and saying to some friends, do you wanna come and spend a week in this lovely cottage in Wales? We can take our dogs. You know, and it was because of the photography was so very clear, even to the point that she put little labels saying, you know.

Lisa: Your dogs can come and be in this space. Your dogs are welcome here. And I just thought that I didn’t need know anything else. And then the fact that her communication, postin inquiry was so good meant I, I booked within like a few hours, like that is a, a quick conversion rate from not having any idea of going on holiday to booking something because someone had given me all the trust signals I needed that I knew that that place was right for us.

Gil : Yeah, I wanna double click on that one for a second there. Um, we have a customer that has a portfolio with multiple properties kind of in different areas, and all of them are dog friendly and she has a couple photos of dogs on her furniture and she has a dog of her own and she loves it. Like she, she really wants to tailor it.

Gil : But when she was working with us to build out her site, she was hesitant of leaning in on the dogs because she felt like, oh, my properties also have the ability to sleep larger, larger stays. And my guidance to her was, if you have the ability and you should have the ability to niche down to a very particular stay niche down on a double down on it, and make sure that it’s loud and clear that this is what it’s for.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gil : And she did an amazing job where she’s creating. Pages on all the dog parks that are nearby the properties. Um, she has landing pages on the things that she offers inside her cabin. And like the slogan on her headline, is it the dog? Your dog has a better stay than you. And that’s like her promise.

Lisa: and I, I was just, I was writing a blog yesterday because of us, we had an experience in France taking our dog poppy to like seven or eight different short-term rentals. You know, welcome my dog and you welcome my entire family. Because people like their dogs are such an important part of their family, that if, if I’m worried about staying somewhere because I’m worried about my dog, it will make, it’ll undermine the whole stay experience.

Lisa: ’cause I’m forever worrying about my dog. And people spend so much money on their dog. So the clients that I’ve worked with who specialize focus on dog friendly holidays, the upsells that they can offer are incredible. ’cause people will spend money on their dogs. You know, can, can I get my dog groom while I’m staying?

Lisa: Can someone come and walk my dog while I’m staying? Can you, can I buy a, a dog welcome pack? Yeah, of course you can. There’s so many things that you can offer that dog friendly families are delighted to pay for that. Why wouldn’t you focus on that? Is that a market that you could, and also lots of large groups, you know, groups of families, so many families.

Lisa: I don’t know if the, the data in the UK about the number of families that got a dog during the pandemic, it’s something like 67% of families in the UK now own a dog. So it’s huge. It’s a huge market. And if you exclude them, well, where are they gonna go? They’re gonna go somewhere that. That allows them, and I don’t want a dog tolerant property.

Lisa: I want a dog friendly property. I want somebody who embraces my dog like we do.

Gil : Yeah, and I think that that kinda, I think dog is like a, kinda like dog friendly stays is a very sharp example of how you can really take it and stretch it and make sure that you’re conveying that. But I think the same. Idea of like how do you make this stay so special that you don’t choose anything else like that.

Gil : That applies to other niches as well. It applies to corpus stays that people might be traveling for work. It applies to families with kids between the ages of six and 10 or six and 12. Like if you think about like all the different challenges and think about what the guest has to go through, the things that they’re juggling, the things that they’re trying to plan around,

Lisa: Yep.

Gil : you can really start to tailor your experience.

Gil : Like we’re, right now, we’re planning our trip to Japan and we’re thinking about where to stay, what to visit, what do we need to bring, can we do laundry there? Like there’s a lot of things that we have to do when we’re planning for our trip and the better that you can really tailor really your offering to that specific niche, the more confident that you’re, you’re able to attract the right folks into it.

Lisa: Absolutely. Well, I mean, I organize a, an all girls, uh, annual reunion from school every year. Of course, we all need twin beds or single beds or double, we need enough space for 13 of us to have. And I book it every year and I go through the pain of trying to find the right property for us every year. And they go, you’re so good at this.

Lisa: And I’m like, well, I know what I’m looking for now, aren’t I? You know, but, but equally, you know, it isn’t always that clear, you know, from the photographs that, you know, ’cause they, not everybody puts all their photographs up so you can go, oh, it’s definitely got it. And because I think clarity of what you’re actually providing and, and help people to understand this property is perfect for that reunion weekend away with friends or groups of friends coming away.

Lisa: And you can bring your dog, be really clear about what your property is perfect for, you know, sell the idea whether it’s, you know, come away with friends and, you know, have private dining at home. Whatever it is, you know. Take a break from doing the cooking ’cause you know, we can organize all of that for you.

Lisa: Just be really clear and make it easy for people to, to make that book, that booking decision with you.

Gil : Yeah. And I think one last point I wanna make is a lot of folks are now going to chat GPT. They’re using Claude and they’re using those types of tools to do the initial planning of their, of

Lisa: I do.

Gil : Uh, I I, I did

Lisa: last 12 months. Yeah.

Gil : Yeah. And I think that what I’ve ob starting to observe and really start to dissect into how LLMs or AI is surfacing the right type of information, is that there’s content that are, they’re very, very tailored towards very specific key terms.

Gil : We call them like long tail keywords, however you wanna say it, but it. You’re no longer chat. GPT isn’t searching for the best properties in Gatlinburg. They’re not searching for those. They’re, they know a lot of context about what you’re looking for and when they’re doing searches, they’re very detailed searches.

Gil : Um, it could be niched down very, very concretely so that if you understand the type of persona that you’re going after, and then when you’re thinking about building out your website, yes, you wanna make sure that you have your headlines and material regimens and all that stuff. But if you also invest into creating landing pages or guides or blog articles specifically about how you tailor towards this type of stay, that’s great content that you can use for your newsletters, but it’s also really, really high impact content that you’re able to feed into the LLMs.

Gil : Um, I don’t know how much you dive into that, but like

Lisa: well, I, I do, I mean, I, I talk about this a lot with my clients, with their websites. And I say particularly if you wanna go down the direct booking route, because you know, already, you know, those clients that may have had their websites built in the last year or two, you know, already slightly out, uh, behind the curve when it comes to AI and LLM searching, because as I said, for the last 12 months, I’ve done all of my travel itineraries using chat GPT.

Lisa: Um, and, you know, and, and I always give the example, you know. I would like an itinerary from the Twas in the UK for myself, my husband and my dog. I want you to help me try travel down to the channel tunnel, you know, book the channel tunnel. I need somewhere to stop on the way. And then I would like an itinerary over three weeks with dog friendly accommodation with walking parks nearby and dog friendly restaurants because you know, it’s a pain, you know, not everybody accepts dogs and not every restaurant accepts dogs and it, it’s still not quite there, but it takes the backbone out of a lot of that hard work when you are busy.

Lisa: You know, it gives you a starting point and gives you some very good starts, but it’s gonna get better and it’s gonna get better fairly quickly. I think now I think people are gonna cotton onto this and there’s an opportunity for bus for, for hosts to cotton onto this and get their direct booking websites ready for those searches.

Lisa: For sure.

Gil : Yeah, and I think one of the challenges that I think up to this date, WordPress is still the predominant kind of platform that a lot of agencies have used in the past to build websites. And what that means is that. You’ll have to ha like a developer has to go into, or an agency head member has to go into your website and make an update for it.

Gil : Um, so you need to make sure that whatever agency has built your website, that they’re auditing what’s happening right now and making changes almost on a monthly, if not quarterly basis on that, uh, quarterly

Lisa: can’t build, you

Gil : bit too conservative.

Lisa: yeah, you can’t build it and leave it. And I mean, like we talked about at the very beginning of our conversation where, you know, you said that, um, in terms of, uh, an AI enabled website, you know, I, and I’m saying to them, or we are talking about websites being, um, the templated websites that many property managers have with their PMS, you know.

Lisa: They’re, they’re good to a point, but, but you don’t own them. You can’t change them very much. They’re very limited. And I’m not convinced that, you know, you are really gonna be that AI or LM and, you know, search enabled through those websites. So really there’s a, there’s a very big business case argument for having your own direct booking website.

Lisa: And this is what I keep saying to the clients I’m working with. You know, I think it might be time to migrate away from what’s given to you and actually have something that’s really gonna work for your business.

Gil : Yeah, I even in Q4 of last year, we, aircraft to stay is we made a big, big investment in just the data that we have on our websites. So we have like, we have all of our websites and you can, you can browse properties, you can read blogs and all that stuff, but, and a user can kind of go through the entire flow.

Gil : But what people don’t, are probably less aware of is that there’s a lot of content. Within kind of behind the scenes, it’s not shown to the user. You can’t click on it. There’s no button.

Lisa: yeah, yeah, yeah,

Gil : It’s all the metadata that we store on the website so that when crawlers go onto your website, they’re able to pick up certain information.

Gil : That’s how the icon on the browser has. The image that it has or the title on the, on the browser, it has what it has. Or when you share the link on social, it has all this information there. It’s because there’s a lot of information kind of baked in behind the scenes. So we had to do a big exercise on what’s changing in LLMs and what information are they extracting at it.

Gil : And we basically had to figure out what are the types of what we call schemas behind the scenes that we need to package and present to these LLMs. And we did a big push in November of last year. Now everybody that’s on our platform. All of their properties are all following those best practices. And it’s, for us, we built it as a platform, but, so it’s very easy for us to do a rolling change and hundreds and hundreds of property managers now get to benefit from that.

Gil : So it, I think all in all, like if you are hiring an agency, if you’ve worked with an agency and they built your website, just make sure that they’re going in there and making regular, regular changes, uh, on it. Because at least on our side, we’re making changes probably on a, every other week now at this

Lisa: Uh, and I think that’s where unfortunately, you know, an STR business owner is, is, is, you know, busy with their STR business. They’re not experts on websites, they’re not experts on branding, they’re not experts on a lot of this stuff. And when they go to market and they say, oh, I’m gonna go and reach out to a website developer to build me a new website, I’m like, hold your horses.

Lisa: Do they understand our industry? You know, are they up to speed with where things are going with LMM and AI search? Because if they’re not, you know, SEO search o of what we knew in the past is becoming a bit legacy and we now need it to be, you need to step up the game a bit more. My own website was a, for a very basic WordPress website, but I’ve already, you know, I’ve got a new website in development at the moment, which will be AI enabled and all the rest of it, which is considerably better than what I had.

Lisa: I was never happy with my WordPress website. I hated it, but it just kind of was that, that I got something. I’ve got something. And. You know that it’s not static. You can’t make it and forget it. It has to be part of your, kind of, your business plan to keep developing it. And as you say, the people who are working with you need to keep developing it because otherwise it’ll get very outta date very quickly.

Gil : I think the, the, the shelf on the, the shelf life of a website has gone down dramatically. Um, yeah, it’s, it, it is challenging for folks and, and I completely agree with you. If you’re, even if you’re hiring an agency, make sure that they are particular in short-term rentals. There’s a lot of people that build websites and they, and I see it, they, they build it as a business website and they have all these additional pages that talk about their property management services, and that’s kind of where they lean on.

Gil : And it just, it just falls apart from a conversion standpoint.

Lisa: I’ve got a client I’m working with now and she spent a lot of money paying someone who said, I can build your website. You know, I look at this website, I’m like, it does not reflect their black brand at all. It’s like something from the National Trust, which does not reflect the business at all.

Lisa: They have no understanding of the business brand whatsoever. But then neither did the business owners to be fair. And, and it functional. It just function is clunky and it’s outdated and it looks out of date. And I feel so sad for them because they’ve just spent six and a half thousand pounds having this website built.

Lisa: And already I’m saying to them, I just don’t think this is worth keeping. I think we need to think about something else. ’cause I don’t think this is gonna do any favors. I really don’t. So it, it’s a, it’s a shame, but I think it’s about, you know, doing your homework. Don’t rush into the first person that says, I can build you a website.

Lisa: Or don’t say, I can build my own website. I’ll just get onto Wix or WordPress and I’ll build a website and that’ll be fine, won’t it? And I’m like, no, not really. Not in the current market. It’s just not gonna do the job you need it to do.

Gil : Yeah, I agree with you. Awesome. Lisa, we covered a lot of topics. I

Lisa: We have,

Gil : with three questions. Um, first question, what’s a good book recommendation for me?

Lisa: so I, I have got a big pile of books I think I said to you, but I’ve got a book on my shelf, which I suggest to all my clients when they’re thinking about their ideal client avatar. It’s called Surrounded by the Idiots. I dunno if you’ve read it by

Gil : No, I have not.

Lisa: Well, it sounds like a really funny book, but it’s a really good book to help you to profile people’s personality types, and even with your teams.

Lisa: Like if you’ve got a team, like the hardest thing about managing a team is the fact you’re gonna manage lots of different personalities of people and yourself. You know, knowing who you are and what drives you. It’s a really good book because it helps you to understand things from somebody else’s perspective.

Lisa: So rather than building things, because it’s how you respond to something or how you would deal with something, understand it from the perspective of your client, your guests, or your team member, and you’ll get so much more out the relationship. It’s a really good book.

Gil : I like that. I like that. Very applicable in, in, in my space where I, like, we try to make our product very easy to use and I get to see people click around, but there’s a lot of assumptions that we make of like, okay, if we put this button here, or we

Lisa: yeah, yeah,

Gil : here, that it’s easily understood, but understandable.

Gil : But it’s, it’s oftentimes like you have to go through many, many durations until you find out like, okay, now it really does make sense.

Lisa: yeah, yeah. You know, and I think, you know, it’s a simple level, you know, blue, green, yellow, red, people, we’re, we’re, we’re all actually a bit of a blend of everything, but it’s what’s your primary driver under normal circumstances and what’s your driver under stressful conditions?

Lisa: You know, we all, we all respond to things differently. So I think, you know, it’s a, it’s a very good book and I recommend it to all the people I work with to have a look at it, especially if they’ve got a team that, that they’ve got a team working with them.

Gil : I I thought when you were, were teeing it up, it was gonna be like an, uh, unreasonable hosp hospitality or something like

Lisa: No, no, no. I’ve got lots of books. I mean, I’ve got tech enabled hospitality, I’ve got this strategy, I’ve got all sorts of books on the lemonade plan. I’ve, I’ve got all sorts of books on my shelf, but that book is one I recommend to a lot of clients because I think it’s very helpful both from a profiling and understand.

Lisa: So say you’ve got a difficult conversation with a landlord and you don’t quite get where they’re coming from and you are, you are kind of butting heads a bit. It’s really good to put yourself, have a bit of a better understanding of what’s driving them. You know, are they a blue analytical, are they a red where it’s just, I just want a solution.

Lisa: You know, what are they understand their drivers, and then you can tailor your conversation on your own behavior to get the best outta that

Gil : Yeah, that makes sense. I can see some applicability in, in the home life as well

Lisa: conversation. Yes, pick your battles.

Gil : Yeah, exactly. Uh, awesome. Second question, what’s one piece of mindset advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new?

Lisa: would say be open-minded. Be willing to learn. You know, maybe you think you know something, but be willing to learn and go and take, go and seek advice and support from people who’ve been in the industry a bit longer than you have. So don’t go and make mistakes because you don’t know, and you think you’re just gonna muddle your way through it.

Lisa: Save yourself a lot of pain, time and money by going and speaking to people who are perhaps a little bit further ahead of you in their journey that can share some of that knowledge with you and save you a lot of pain.

Gil : Yeah. And I would, uh, gonna add to that of continuing to really stretch that muscle. I felt like I did a really good job at reaching out to my network when we started craft this days, and really to kind of give me somewhat of a, a compass of where we, where we should point things and the things that we should be investing into.

Gil : And then we went into just. Really focusing internally on the business and supporting our customers. And then we grew to a point where like, okay, our processes are now matured for what we had and we need to think about the next stage of our life. So we, like, I’m actually finding now that like I’m taking a step back from the business and really evaluating.

Gil : We’ve grown Forex last year. We’ve serviced so many customers. There’s, we’re starting to track this larger segment of property managers, um, because the maturity of our platform and now we have a new set of things that we need to think about and processes and like how we think about serving our customers.

Gil : And I’m now going back and talking to some of the previous mentors or someone that I hadn’t previously talked to because it didn’t really make sense in the very early days. Um, so like that’s something that’s almost like a muscle that you almost consistently have to check yourself as you kind of go through the different milestones within your business.

Lisa: I think the honesty is we don’t grow alone. You don’t, you don’t grow a business on your own. You know, it, it, it’s very painful doing it all on your own.

Gil : Yeah. I, I’ve had to learn that quite the hard way.

Lisa: Well, you know, we’re all a bit independent as entrepreneurs, aren’t we? But I think it’s a lot easier if you share the load, share, share, you know, share what’s going on. And you know, and actually I’m a great believer in some of the advice I give my clients is not Einstein thinking. It’s pretty just practical, kind.

Lisa: But sometimes you’re a bit too close to it to realize that there’s some very simple things you could do that makes your life a lot easier and it gets a bit complicated ’cause you’re just too close to it sometimes.

Gil : Yeah. What I’ve also seen is that as entrepreneurs, we always feel like we need to like really show up 110% and we have all our ducks in a row, but I have actually found that. Yeah, some of the peers that I surround, like I’m surrounded by that I have really high respect. Maybe they’re a couple of steps ahead of me.

Gil : And there’s oftentimes where we have really vulnerable conversations about like where we are in our business. And I realize actually they’re still learning too. They’re still having their own challenges. They’re having their good and their bad days, and that will never go away. And it kind of normalizes when you have those types of conversations.

Gil : It normalizes that. No, not everybody has it figured out. Even though in social media they’re showing how much they’ve grown and how much they’ve done. We’re all like, we all have very similar challenges and we may have different stages of them, but no one’s perfect and has it all figured out. And I think social media, a lot of times they kind of puts this really, it, it’s, it gets sugarcoated quite a bit.

Lisa: Smoke and mirrors. I call it smoke and mirrors. You know, we can all portray this perfect life, but behind the scenes, I guarantee you, you know, this desk, I sit at this desk, I’ve sat at this desk for like 20 years. This desk has seen a lot of challenges and a lot of bad days, and a lot, a lot of good days, but also some really awful days where I’ve sat there thinking, oh my gosh, what on earth am I gonna do now?

Lisa: You know, half my team has, you know, gone sick or something, whatever it is. But, you know, and, and the, the way I’ve got through those is I’ve pulled on my network of support to say, I’ve got this situation. I’m just not sure how to best deal with it. You know, and through that network of support every single time, we’ve managed to overcome some, a lot of those challenges.

Lisa: But doing it on your own is just hard.

Gil : Yeah.

Lisa: Lean on, lean on your network, lean on those people that you know have got your back. Lean on those relationships that you’ve built because they will absolutely back you up and help you out.

Gil : I agree with that. Yeah. Awesome, Lisa. Last question. We talked a lot about direct bookings, brand building. We talked about photography, we talked about your ICP. What’s one tactical takeaway for our listeners that they can put into practice today if they’re looking to either get started in direct bookings or amplify the direct bookings?

Lisa: Tactical, I mean, first and foremost, really think about. Who it is you want, to invite to stay and make sure that your product, when I talk about your product, whether it’s one property, two properties, whatever, are absolutely right for those people. ’cause I think if you go and start promoting something that’s not right and your messaging is not clear, you are never going to attract the people that you want to come and stay.

Lisa: So tactically I’d say get that piece right before you advertise it anywhere. It doesn’t matter where you advertise it, whether it’s your direct booking website or, or anywhere else. If that piece is not right, you are not going to track the right guests. You’re gonna end up with the wrong guests, paying the wrong price, you know, staying in the wrong, you know, in the wrong property.

Lisa: So I think tactically that’s really important.

Gil : I love that. I love that, Lisa. I. I’m so thrilled to have you on the show. Um, before we end and before we part ways for, for this episode, um, is there anything that you want to have a call to action if anyone is needing help in this particular area that you think that you can help them with? Um, anything that you wanna share, uh, on anything that you’re working with and the folks that you want to kind of bring into your world.

Lisa: Well, there are two things I, I would particularly like to, to mention. One is my Passion project, which is the Women in Short-Term Rentals community. This is my paying it forward into our community, you know, utilizing my network and supporting women in our sector to be more visible and more successful in 2026.

Lisa: So if you are not a, if you’re a woman in short term rentals, whether you are a service provider to it, you’re a host, you’re a property manager, you are very welcome to come and join our community on Facebook or on LinkedIn. And then if there’s a property manager out there who is perhaps a bit unsure about what their next steps are, they’re unsure what their growth plan is, they’re unsure whether they want to sell at some point.

Lisa: Um, and they’d like a chat. They are very welcome to reach out to me on any of my social media links or through LinkedIn, and I’m very happy to have a chat with them.

Gil : Awesome. Lisa, I’m so thrilled that we had to get a, a chance to, to meet and also

Lisa: Yes. Thank you.

Gil : our conversation here today. I’m, I’m very blessed to have you on the show.

Lisa: I’m very grateful to be your guest. It’s been great meeting you and spending time with you, and I wish you a very, very successful continued growth in 2026, Gil.

Gil : Thank you. I appreciate that. So next time. Bye, Lisa.

Lisa: Bye.