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Creating Unforgettable Rental Experiences with Mike Whitfield's Expertise · Go Big with Gib Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Go Big with Gibb podcast, where we talk to professionals, business owners and entrepreneurs about their big wins.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: Welcome to this episode of Go Big with Gibb.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: Today I've got one of my very good friends, mike Whitfield, here on the podcast.
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: Mike, how are you today?
• 0:22
  Speaker 2: I'm feeling great, had a great Father's Day yesterday.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: I hope you did as well.
• 0:26
  Speaker 2: I think between the two of us we have 58 kids, so yeah, it's a lot of fun.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Mike, how many kids do you really have?
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: Six, ranging from 22 down to six years old.
• 0:40
  Speaker 2: So never a dull moment in our ecosystem over here.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I know you have a lot of kids and a lot going on and you're a very busy guy.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: I appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to come on with us today To start things out.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: I'd like for you just to tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of introduce yourself to the audience.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Sure.
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Well, as you said, my name is Mike Whitfield.
• 1:07
  Speaker 2: I am the principal of our company, WIN W-Y-N development, which stands for whatever you need, and we evolved out of a company that my mom started around 50 years ago and she got started by designing children's clinics and little children's hospital wings, dentistry offices.
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: And she came right out of the gate really focusing on how to create theme in a really elegant fashion.
• 1:38
  Speaker 2: And my father passed away when I was very young, so I grew up with my mom and so I was always on these projects with her 24-7, doctors' offices, hospitals, then eventually hotels, then people saying, oh, can you come do this for my kids' room.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: And it's really neat because I still have some of her original drawings of how she used to do presentations, where she would watercolor or sketch something on the back of a big piece of poster board and then layer 10, 15, 20 sheets of clear plastic where she would draw on a different layer to show here's this layer, here's the bedding, then here's the rugs, then here's the thing.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: And now we do all that on computers, you know, in the snap of a finger.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: And I look at some of these 45-year-old drawings and I just think it's just incredible how much talent you actually had to have to be in a space like this Not just the ability to execute it, but to help people visualize it.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: It's absolutely fascinating.
• 2:35
  Speaker 2: And so that evolved into doing model homes for builders all over the country, continuing to do hospitality projects, and I took over the business about 15-ish 20 years ago and started running it and as short-term rentals evolved into a bigger subset where it wasn't just someone's spare bedroom, but now you have people purchasing entire properties or two, three, four, 10 properties as secondary businesses and we come in and basically turn those into magical, memorable, experiential homes for people to rent in the rental house game.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: So people ask what do you do for a living?
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: I heard you're an interior designer or something like that and I guess you could say that, but I fancy myself more a short-term rental programmer, because anyone can make a house pretty, but it really takes an understanding of data and knowing what doesn't work to make something memorable.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: And I'm asked often how do you get good at this?
• 3:38
  Speaker 2: And I say by failing a lot, and that's why I don't think anyone will ever catch us in the marketplace, because we've done so many homes over so many years that we've had the opportunity to mess up more than anybody else and learn what does and doesn't work and how to get things done faster.
• 3:55
  Speaker 2: So what we can do in a matter of days with a rental house can take someone months coming out of the gate.
• 4:02
  Speaker 2: So that's kind of how we've evolved and 50 years later we're pretty much solely dedicated to short-term rental, design, marketing and programming.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: So, mike, you know, talk to me about some of the different markets that you've worked in.
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: I mean, I know you have worked with people in all all over the country I don't know maybe probably done some international stuff as well.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: But what different markets do you find yourself working in, mostly with this short-term rental niche that has become such a big giant, you know, money-making machine.
• 4:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so we have.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: We've done projects all over the world, but we do try to stay in the continental United States.
• 4:43
  Speaker 2: We've done some really interesting things in Alaska, um, the, the, the.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: The challenge on our end is just the amount of time that it takes to get out of the mainland or continental 48, um is really where it just becomes a bottleneck for us.
• 4:57
  Speaker 2: So we really try to stay, stay coast to coast and I'd say, inside of those you obviously have your obvious markets right Beaches, lake houses, mountain cabins where you've got these glorious views, or down in a valley where you've got a nice stream or creek running by.
• 5:15
  Speaker 2: You have your sports towns where, however, a lot of short-term rentals are being made not allowable in a lot of these towns because there's so much hotel inventory that the cities, the major cities, are trying to protect and preserve.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: So you get out in the fringe where you see some really interesting opportunities.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: I would say that places that aren't often tapped into as much as they should or could be are your college towns, because a lot of time when you look at really big like Pac-10 or SEC or Big 12, you know where you have lots of fans that travel hard and come to these schools.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: These are oftentimes located in markets that aren't high end or really affluent.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: Like a beach house might cost $2 million and that same square footage in a college town is $450, right, and it's just because people don't necessarily value the real estate in the middle of nowhere USA college town that happens to have a 60,000 student population with 120,000 fans in the stands right.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: So college towns can be a phenomenal place for short-term rentals and you can do some really cool themes for things like that there as well, and I have found that to be kind of a hidden gem.
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: And the Bourbon Trail the Bourbon Trail in Kentucky.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: You have again places where you can get off the beaten track.
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: You don't have to be in Louisville, you can go out all through the bourbon trail where these major places are for brewing bourbon, and find all these incredible property buys out there that you can convert into really interesting like restoration hardware style experiences out on the trail.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: Those two areas I think are really hidden gems.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: Racetracks I mean like horse racing, also really interesting place where you look at racetracks around the country, because that's something that lasts five to six months in a season and sometimes people will book them out for months at a time.
• 7:18
  Speaker 2: Jockeys will come in and book them out for months at a time.
• 7:21
  Speaker 2: So those are three hidden gems I can give you outside of the mainstays that we see and really enjoy working with around the country.
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's phenomenal.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: So let's talk a little bit about the property that I have in Sevierville, tennessee.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: So you and I worked together on that project.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: It's now called Smoky Mountain Masterpiece.
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: It's gone through a couple different iterations in terms of the name and the branding, but we arrived at Smoky Mountain Masterpiece.
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: Tell me a little bit about what you did with that property and let's talk about you know, candidly, where it was at when you started working with me and where it was.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: You know when you finished the project.
• 8:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah well, smoky Mountain Masterpiece is a beautiful home, beautiful view, a Sevierville-Gatlinburg pigeon forge dynamic where you've got the ability to sleep 18 to 20 people, multiple floors.
• 8:20
  Speaker 2: Typically these are located on the side of a hill where the house will come in at top level and continue to drop down.
• 8:25
  Speaker 2: This one goes up and down Indoor pool, hot tub, game room, pool table, shuffleboard, tons of bedrooms.
• 8:34
  Speaker 2: We converted the theater or the garage, the carriage garage into a beautiful, one of the most beautiful movie theaters I've ever seen, honestly, in a residential property.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: It's so cool.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: When we got there originally, I would say that it's very.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: It was a quintessential short-term rental job and here's what I mean about that.
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: You're thinking more about making it a model home than a memorable home, and what I mean by that is a model home is just pretty to look at, right, you're not really taking into consideration data, the data of what is it that is going to attract someone via the marketing of when I'm promoting this via photographs back to my potential booking clients and the quality of the experience.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: For example, when we came into that house, the garage was just a garage.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: There was no real gathering place and you had this upstairs that had these two tiny little couches and a table, a dining table, and your house had a sleeping capacity of three times the seating capacity in a grand room that had the capacity for holding 20 or 30 people Right, a huge open floor plan entrance off the floor, floor plan entrance off the floor.
• 9:58
  Speaker 2: So we came in and added a I think the linear footage of the big U-shaped sectional in there is now somewhere around 15, 15, it's about, I'd say, almost 40 linear feet of sectional that now seats the entire occupancy of the house in the living room, and then you have the entire occupancy of the house and dining.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: And then we were able to create a secondary living room and game room downstairs for the house, cause it kind of splits off, where you have two completely separate experiences on the top and bottom, and we were able to theme each room with what we call the stars of the show, and every town has a star.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: If you're in Orlando, it might be Disney or Universal and all of the different things that have the bears that are everywhere.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: And so what you really want to realize is that when people are looking at a short-term rental, they've already decided that they want to come to your town.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: So now the question is can we feed that back to them enough that when they see the imagery of my property, they go oh my gosh, it's like I'm there even when I'm not there.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: It's a fully immersive thing.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: And you start thinking Johnny will love this room, suzy will love this room, my husband will love this room, grandparents will love this room, and now you start to see and visualize yourself there.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: That's what your property was missing was the ability to really promote the experience.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: And after we were able to come in there, we were able to give it the right amount of seating, the right amount of entertainment and the right amount of experiential marketing so that we could then turn around and promote it.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: And from what I understand, that house at top shelf dollars literally stays booked endlessly.
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we saw a huge uptick in rentals, you know, in terms of occupancy, after doing the renovations that we did.
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: And you know, one thing I'd say about it is the house was a very nice house from the beginning.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: You know I bought it brand new construction, beautiful home house from the beginning.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: You know I bought it brand new construction, a beautiful home.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: But it was kind of like the thought process that we had in originally decorating it was to make it like a home.
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: Talk to me a little bit about what you did with the artwork.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: I mean, we had some really amazing pieces that came in and I'd love to hear about that.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: So the artwork is the key and this is the limiting factor for most people's decor.
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: That is what makes a house a boring.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: Model home Is that everybody is either buying what they can find on Etsy or eBay or Amazon, or they're going shopping at their local home goods, an at-home store maybe a Hobby Lobby or Kirkland's and that's all you get.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: Maybe you find something off the shelf at a Target or a Walmart just by chance, or you find something in an antique store or something neat that's got history to the property.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: The reality is it's very hard to find the right pieces and most pieces are very small in scale.
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: Most people are thinking of it as a second home and then when you ask them, like what do you want this house's vibe to be, it's a very common answer I want it to be a home away from home, because I don't want to stay in my home away from home.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: I want something different and better and unique.
• 13:29
  Speaker 2: Very few people are going to have your style.
• 13:32
  Speaker 2: If you think in terms of what is trending, what is high.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: It's just like if you were to make a social media post and want to get the most amount of viewers.
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: You would put a music behind it that is currently trending, not your favorite music from 1986.
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: Now everything that we think about, we're thinking in terms of how am I going to photograph this and put this online?
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: So at the end of the day, when someone says, hey Mike, what is the most comfortable sofa to put in a short-term rental, my answer is the one that looks the most comfortable.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: You kind of want to find that, that that range of of tough versus soft, but then you put tons of pillows and blankets and you, you soften it up and you and you, you give them the karate chops and the down feather inserts and you really make it look soft and inviting.
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: And so what anchors those decisions is the artwork.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: When we do artwork it is mammoth, like we take up whole walls.
• 14:26
  Speaker 2: Sometimes we use multiple panels to create, you know, 15, 20 foot wide by eight foot tall pieces.
• 14:32
  Speaker 2: So it's like this fully immersive dynamic.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: Even when we did your project with this, we've evolved even more from having just like singular pieces over beds to now having pieces that are flanking the sides, mounting wall sconces on them, so that it makes kind of this entire piece all the way around the bed.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: So when that's being photographed, it literally looks like you're sleeping in the mountains.
• 14:56
  Speaker 2: Creating those types of dynamics create excitement and energy, and they give the house a soul that can then be promoted and marketed as this thoughtful, articulate narrative that carries throughout the house it really is a totally different thing than the second home mentality.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: How do you build out that world-class experience that only Mike Whitfield can do?
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: I'm just so impressed with the way that you put these things together.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: How do you do that?
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: What's the thought process behind?
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: I'm going to deliver this experience.
• 15:28
  Speaker 2: So it comes from layers and first it takes understanding how it's going to be photographed.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: So let's take your background, for example of what we see when I look at where you're sitting, what's behind you, the entire setup.
• 15:44
  Speaker 2: So you've got Go Big right behind your head and a three-panel art set behind you.
• 15:50
  Speaker 2: How big would you say the total length and width of all three of those panels is, of that three-piece set that's glowing blue behind you?
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: I'd say probably six foot, maybe maybe six to eight foot, something like that, because the wall itself is 14 foot wide and so it's placed on a 14 foot wide, you know, wall.
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: And how big would you say the go big in the in the middle of that is probably about 24 inches square.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, yeah, I think that's accurate, yeah, sure.
• 16:21
  Speaker 2: So if we look at that in scale right now, we're a little zoomed out so that we're capturing you in the foreground and that's pretty far behind you.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: That's not just sitting right behind your head, that's across a room where you've got to come in and walk around.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: So imagine the same idea of I'm taking a picture and I'm standing across the room.
• 16:39
  Speaker 2: Look how huge that piece of art has to be behind you to show up at what looks like an appropriate scale to you in the foreground.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: So if you think of this in terms of where you are being like the bed or a couch or those chairs that are right behind you, with a piece of art on the wall behind you most people's entire thing down where, even to go big, everything proportionately shrunk into a 24 by 30 or a 30 by 40, you wouldn't even hardly see it behind your body in the image.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: And if you then create that vibe over and over and over again, where every room has its own unique, I could see myself wanting to be there.
• 17:34
  Speaker 2: All of your competition has that tiny little thing in the background one lamp over here, no plants, no wall washes, boring but pretty but boring, right.
• 17:47
  Speaker 2: And you've got the massively scaled ambient light everywhere, rgbs Then you photograph it with what we call lifestyle photography, where you show the glass of wine or you show the sweating glass of iced tea that's been sitting on the front porch or out by the pool, and all of those create an emotion that makes you want to be a part of it.
• 18:09
  Speaker 2: So the way that we to come back to your question how do we get to that narrative?
• 18:15
  Speaker 2: It's basically by thinking of the house as a story, and that's what a short-term rental should do.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: That's what each area or chapter of the house should do.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: It should seek to tell a different story element where you're popping that artist, the anchor, pulling the color from it, as your pops of color throw a reference pillow or something in there that ties the theme together.
• 18:36
  Speaker 2: But you use color to weave the narrative, the art to tell the story, and the title of the house to govern the thinking of all of those individual chapters throughout the house and then, when it all comes together to one listing, every room is telling a story of the area, the star of the location, popping beautiful color waves and then photographing it from angles where everything is proportionately scaled and that you're giving the lifestyle application of it.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: It's a lot to take in, and that's where a company like us comes in handy, because we understand how to walk you through all of those things and make all of these decisions in a layer of the onion kind of algorithmic process.
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: Yeah, this episode of Go Big with Gibb is brought to you by Irons Equity.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: At Irons Equity, we specialize in helping investors like you create long-term generational wealth and save money on taxes through recession-resistant real estate investments that create passive income for you and your family.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: If you want to secure your financial future, go to investwithgibbcom to schedule a 30-minute introductory meeting with me.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: Gibb Irons Again, that's investwithgibbcom to schedule a 30-minute introductory meeting with me.
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: Gibb Irons Again, that's investwithgibbcom.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so, mike, I want to ask you two important questions.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: Well, the first question is you know, who do you work with?
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: And then also, what's it like working with you Meaning?
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Like, what all do you do?
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: Working with you is like going to my favorite suit store where they, like you know, give me a custom tailored suit and it fits my body.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: Today, you know.
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: And I love that.
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: I've never used that before, but I'm going to from now on.
• 20:13
  Speaker 2: That's great.
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a very white glove service and it's a very customized service depending on the client that you're working with, and I know that because I've known you for a long time.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: Two great questions.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: So the group that we spend the most amount of our time with is called Vodacy.
• 20:30
  Speaker 2: It's basically the word odyssey with a V in front of it.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: It was started by a guy named Sean Moore, who is absolutely incredible.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: They're based out of Utah Wonderful, incredible people.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: Sean and I met back in the teens, pre-covid, and I was doing Hilton projects and a couple of different big hospitality things at the time and sprinkling in short-term rentals and different models and things.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: All in the process we developed based on coming out of a origin story, as I said earlier, of creating these highly thematic things but done in a classy and commercially viable way.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: We took that level of thinking into model homes and we've done thousands of them all over the United States.
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: I say all the time I'm not the company that you would bring in for your personal home, because we're not going to sit on 50,000 sofas to pick the one that you're going to look at, touch, feel and be in love with for the next 10, 15 years of your life.
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: Okay, we are looking at the data, the space how many butts need to get seats and then fitting that in in the right color scheme combinations this, that and the other.
• 21:49
  Speaker 2: No one's going to come sit on your couch and decide if they're going to come book your place.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: They're going to look at pictures and those pictures have to be right, okay.
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: So what we love about Vodacy is their entire organization.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: Created by Sean, is designed to teach people every single in and out of purchasing a short-term rental house, which then leads into the second part of your question of how we do this and what those components look like.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: And before I get off of Vodacy, I would highly recommend to anyone, anyone who's contemplating getting into the short-term rental game.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: I'm not paid by Vodacy.
• 22:25
  Speaker 2: I don't work for Vodacy.
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: I don't get an endorsement for promoting them.
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: I can literally tell you that the leadership of the organization loves and cares for its members like nothing I've ever seen and supports them hard.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: But, more importantly, the accessibility to understanding what you're doing, the data behind it, the numbers behind it, learning how to think correctly on every single level, from acquisition to um, financing to tax, to design, to marketing and promoting and listing.
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: It's all there and done with the team Like I've never seen before.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: It's the best in the business.
• 23:00
  Speaker 2: So highly recommend that you research Vodacy.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: So I mean I, I've got to echo the same thing there.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: You know Sean um is a very genuine guy.
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: You're right.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: Like I, I came into Vodacy through one of the funnels that he's created.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: You know he's got advertising all over the place, like you're on Facebook.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: If you've ever thought about a short-term rental before, then Sean Moore is going to pop up and Vodacy is going to pop up in your feed, right, and that's how I got connected with them.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: And you're absolutely right that the connections that you get through Vodacy if you want to be in the short-term rental game, that is the best place to start by far.
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: And then having the connections with guys like you and being able to work with you, you know, is a huge advantage.
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: You know, you go into vodacy, you get the information like this is the realtor you need to work with, this is the lender you need to contact, this is the guy that can help you design the, the dream experience, you know.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: You know this is mike whitfield and you can work with.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: You can only work with mike if you're in vodacy and and so you know all of those connections make it so easy that if you do what you're told to do.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: It's very difficult to fail.
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, you can fail absolutely, but if you're doing everything that is suggested, the odds of you feeling are much less than if you go out and try to do it on your own, because they're going to help you pick a market and then, and then put your team together and um, anyway, yeah, so I didn't want to interrupt you, but um, I, I had a, have had a wonderful experience with vodacy, and um can't say enough good things about it I couldn't agree more and I kind of liken um the failure potential to the yellow brick road to Oz, as Vodacy is the gold standard of the yellow brick road.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: That takes you right from your right, from the, the, the house that fell out of the sky, to the, the the wizard.
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: And if you deviate off the path, it doesn't mean that you don't get back on it Right.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: Every time I see someone from Vodacy deviate off the path, it doesn't mean that you don't get back on it right.
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: Every time I see someone from Vodacy deviate from the algorithm in any level, from acquisition to marketing, they come back and go.
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: Oh man, it didn't work.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: I thought I could make that shortcut and it's like, yeah, we all did.
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: You learned through failure.
• 25:18
  Speaker 2: So congratulations.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: You failed at thinking you outsmarted the system.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: Now get back on the yellow brick road and go see the wizard.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: And it doesn't mean that the occasional flying monkey doesn't cross that yellow brick road and try to carry are very slim if you follow a path, and I am a firm believer that if I'm engaging in something that I don't already have a full and diabolical understanding of, I got to go to experts to help me get it done and I don't think that anybody is better than Vodacy and we're honored to be the design firm for them and to have grown with them.
• 26:04
  Speaker 2: We were the first professional group to come into Vodacy as a professional expert group other than Mike Pine in the accounting side.
• 26:14
  Speaker 2: So when the dynamic of us getting involved, we started by just doing consultations with um, a deeper mastermind group called the inner circle that's not really a thing anymore with Odyssey Now it's, it's uh, everyone's kind of got an equal membership at this point.
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: Um, but the uh.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: We started doing consults and then from the consults we moved into um, taking, you know, orders and then and drop shipping them to people.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: And then we started taking the crews that we had out on projects and reassigning them to now going and installing things.
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: And then, as we saw that we were giving away tons and tons of mattresses and everyone was going I need to find a mattress.
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: Which one do I get?
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: Well, try Bear, try here, try Casper, try Purple, try Tuft Needle, try Avocado, try Mint, and it's like all these different brands that had the right specs, that were on sale at any given time, and then people would come back and say, oh, we just don't know which one to get.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: So we created our own mattress system for short-term rentals, called the Vodacy Sleep System.
• 27:18
  Speaker 2: That basically gives you a couple of choices.
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: That basically gives you a couple of choices, but it's like the perfect rental mattress that's going to last your entire time that you've got people on it.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: It's literally built for STRs and creates an ancillary revenue stream for the short-term rental house owner if someone were to buy one of those mattresses by scanning a QR code while in the property.
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: So it's a cool program.
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: Same.
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: Thing with the art.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: We were telling everyone to go big and to get huge art and we were sending them off into the world.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: And then people would come back and go geez, mike, like a four by eight sheets like $1,200 to get printed, whereas we can do that same thing for $430.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: And if you think in terms of of doing a family photo and getting it blown up to four feet by eight feet for under 500 bucks in perfect commercial grade print quality, you would never think it was possible, um and so, for us, um, to be able to create things like what's behind you for cents on the dollar of what you would pay to have this done anywhere else, for cents on the dollar of what you would pay to have this done anywhere else.
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: It makes doing these huge, large format art pieces affordable.
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: We save people tens and tens and tens of thousands of dollars.
• 28:30
  Speaker 2: The piece that we put in your house just that sectional, that 40 plus feet of sectional.
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: If you recall when we looked that up for restoration hardware in the finished leather it was like an $80,000 piece of furniture from our age Right that I think my cost on that piece from the exact same hands, exact same manufacturer was like $12,000, which is still an expensive piece of furniture, but not for a 14 or 40-foot long down-filled level five finish hand oil rubbed leather sectional.
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: That's an insane price, but that one piece of furniture had a $60,000 Delta off of retail.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: And when you think in terms of huge houses, oftentimes that Delta just repeats over and over again.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: So nowadays when people come to us inside of the Vodacy algorithm, we do a consultation service where we help everybody to understand the themes, what their chapters are, what their title is, how to combine the color algorithm and make it work.
• 29:36
  Speaker 2: Then we do what's called a virtual site visit where we utilize a Matterport scanning technology, which is a technology that's used by realtors to show properties off, kind of like Google Earth, but inside a property, moving from pad to pad to look around at an area.
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: Well, that technology with Matterport is advanced so much that we can use it for what we call a planning scan, where we can then scan it and convert it into blueprints, take vertical and horizontal measurements of any wall and fully plan out a house as if we were there walking through it.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: So if you have a rental property that's hundreds or a thousand miles away from where you are, you can use the Matterport technology to basically go in the house anytime you want to virtually and look at measurements and scan walls and make things work.
• 30:22
  Speaker 2: So that's very, very cool tech that allows us to get anywhere.
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: And then virtual site visits transition to specifications and procurements, where we then can specify all of that art, specify all of those pieces, rugs then we can actually procure it for you and have it all drop shipped to a receiver in your location, or we can even arrange for managing that and install all of that as well and make it what we call a signature installation and even give you photography when it's done.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: So our services have the ability to be full turnkey, where you just say, mike, we just got a house, it's all yours.
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: We do a consult, we understand what it is that you are hoping to get out of it, because we want you to love it.
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: What is the themes that you wanted this to be?
• 31:06
  Speaker 2: What was your vision?
• 31:07
  Speaker 2: And then, gabe, you come from a law background.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: I like to say there's two types of lawyers.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: Lawyer A is the kind that you say here's what I want to do, and they just say, no, we're going to do this.
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: And then lawyer B, I say this is what I want to do, and they just say, no, we're going to do this.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: And then lawyer B, I say this is what I'm trying to do.
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: And they go okay, let me figure out a way to do that legally, right.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: And so lawyer A tells you what you can and can't do, and they're just fully sticking with the norm, fully sticking in the box, and that is the 85% of all listings.
• 31:42
  Speaker 2: Lawyer B says I hear what you want, now let me tell you how to do it correctly.
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: It might not be how you envisioned it, but it'll be correct, and I'm not going to just tell you what you can't do.
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: I'm going to jump outside the box with you and figure out how to bring it to fruition.
• 31:58
  Speaker 2: And to me that's the best kind of lawyer, because, um and some would argue that that's not the best lawyer, right, Because, oh, that's a lawyer that can be way too risky and can get outside the box of model.
• 32:11
  Speaker 2: And then you just look like everybody else, as opposed to standing out with that top 15% and getting booked more than all of your competitors.
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: So all of those things are available and, at the end of the day, our price structure works to the point that, by the time you have paid for every design fee, every installation fee, every piece of furniture, every piece of art, you've still spent about 5% to 10% less than had you just gone to a furniture store and bought everything, but still had to go do all of that.
• 32:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, no, you saved me a ton of money and we made so much better decisions in terms of we got huge value.
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: We have pieces that really fit the space you know, like that massive sectional.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: So you saved me a tremendous amount of money and the finished product was 100 times better than I could have ever done on my own ever done on my own.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: Mike, look for people that have listened to the podcast, that want to take their short-term rental and take it from wherever it is right now with low occupancy or struggling with any type of thing, and want to take it to number one in the market.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: What's the best way for them to reach out to you?
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Basically it's one of two ways.
• 33:41
  Speaker 2: You either join Vodacy I mean we have hours and hours I mean probably 150 hours of training that you can literally sit down and watch.
• 33:48
  Speaker 2: That's open to all members between our weekly calls and six dedicated hours of training.
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: We do consults with non-Vodacy members and give them access to resources and stuff.
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: If they come to us through something like this, someone would send us an email, Mike at winddevelopmentcom, and say hey, I saw you on the Go Big with Give podcast, heard everything you're doing.
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: I'm either getting into an STR or I have one.
• 34:13
  Speaker 2: Here's the link to my listing.
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: We're looking to elevate it to that next level.
• 34:16
  Speaker 2: If you reach out saying where you are, what you're doing, that you heard about us from this podcast, We'll reach back out to you and see how we can work together.
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: Fantastic, mike.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Look for anybody listening.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: If you want to do the short-term rental thing, you really do need to get in touch with Vodacy.
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: You need to get in touch with Mike.
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: I've worked with you personally, mike, and the experience was top-notch.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: It was like buying a custom-tailored suit.
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: Everything was customized to my liking and, of course, we got along great and, you know, became really good friends through that process, and so it's always great to catch up with you.
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on today.
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: It's been my pleasure and listen.
• 34:58
  Speaker 2: Hope we can help some of your listeners make some improvements that really impact their life.
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: Absolutely.
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: Thank you, mike, absolutely.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to this episode of Go Big with Gibb.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: If you haven't already, go follow us on social media at Gibb Irons.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: We'll see you next time.