#29 - Hospitality & Tech w/ JJ King

Arbitrage specifically in the vacation rental space is if you if you rent an apartment as a long term rental, you pay pay the landlord a monthly fee and then you re rent that property, you furnish it re rent it for short term use. So definitely a proven out model, but something that you should probably proceed with caution and because quite a few big companies in our space have gone out of business for this exact model 'cause their overhead gets too high and they can't pay their bills. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough. OK. So how did you go from you sold your lead generation company and then how did you end up You're like, you know what, I wanna start my own vacation rental company.

Like how did that go? Yeah, so actually a high school friend reached out, he knew that I had some, some background in the space and had, you know, kind of knew how to get a property listed on Airbnb, knew how to make websites that had all those kind of technical skills that he didn't have. And he's he had a investment property that was an 8 unit apartment complex. And he asked me, you know, just for some help getting, getting the property listed, making a website, doing a logo, all those kind of little things to get him started. And a few months down the road he's, he reached out again and said, Hey, you know, I've got a cleaner.

I've been messaging guests. Everything's going great. I actually, I kind of want to do this like full time, you know, I'm going to, I just quit my job. I'm making enough money doing this. I, I think we could take some clients on. And of course, I, I had done all of this in New York and was really burnt out on the whole idea of it. And I was like, no way. I I don't want anything to do with this. Thanks anyway. And then he kind of kept pestering me of like, come on, you know, I'll, I'll handle most of it. All you have to do is just like do the back end technology stuff.

And I'm like, all right, fine, let's let's do this. But I'm keeping my job. I'm not diving, diving in on this. This will just be a little side hustle thing. And yeah, honestly, I thought that it was going to be, you know, maybe signed a couple of clients here and there and it would just be a couple $100 a month extra of like good beer money essentially. And it, it turned out a lot more than that. He ended up signing we we were at 100 units in the first year and he was just a sales machine. And I think, you know, it's kind of the right time, right place, perfect market.

Everything just kind of came together to be this, you know, perfect storm of like, wow, this is a real business all of a sudden, so. Dude, that's crazy. All right, I gotta ask like so many questions on like the systems that you implemented cuz going from zero to 100 units in one year is insane. So I'm sure that like I've been at 1:00 to 2:00 Airbnb's at a time and I thought I had systems. And I remember someone asked me a question once they were like, if you 10X to your business right now, would it feel good or would it feel like you're on fire?

And I was like, oh, that would be awful. Like I couldn't, I couldn't do that. Like that wouldn't work. It would blow up. So how did you do that? How did you guys take on 100 properties in one year? Yeah. We, I mean, we've always had this kind of like technology first mindset and this I, I was fortunate to, I, I, like I said, I'd kind of done it before. So the, the previous company I'd taken from 15 to 150 units and we were super lean. You know, we had a couple of employees, but for the most part it was me managing a lot of the day-to-day. So I kind of had to rely on that like automation skill set, if you will.

So, you know, obviously like automated messages in your property management system, apps that will make your job easier, you know, like cleaning, scheduling and stuff like that. And then we've always had that kind of mindset of like as soon as it gets to be too much for one of us to handle that, we hire somebody else to do it. With that like growth in mind of knowing, yeah, it might not be super profitable right this second if we do have to hire somebody to handle this. But like we're looking ahead to the next, you know, next 50 units, next 100 units, where then it's going to make sense to have one person handling one specific task that is too much.

You know, so, and we, we utilize international talent a lot. And I think that's another kind of key thing that's helped us grow. So instead of hiring stateside for every single position, and we've taken some positions and hired internationally, which allows us to have multiple employees for the price of, you know, what one state side employee might be. Yeah, yeah, totally. Dude, that's so cool. I don't know, I'm I'm in awe of this. And then I so I've seen some of your stuff on LinkedIn where like you're doing a bunch of no code, like AI stuff for your business and maybe for your personal life too.

Like walk me through that. Like I I'm obsessed with this right now. Like what are you using? Like what are you making? Hit me. Yeah. Yeah, man, I it's, I've just been like encapsulated enthralled by this, like what's possible and you know, started out in our business using air table, which is, you know, more of more no code, not the like AI coding, but this was before AI before before AI coding for the most part, so. Before AI was cool. Yeah, right. But yeah, Air table is awesome because it's it's essentially a a spreadsheet on steroids. And so you can build out this back end of a spreadsheet.

And for us, we use it for, you know, task management knowledge base, like all of these different things in our business. But it's essentially the back end's a spreadsheet and then you can build a front end on top of it. So it's like you're building your own apps just with drag and drop tools. So that's how we kind of got started. And that's like the base of a lot of stuff in our business is on Airtable and then as. So like, wait, sorry, can you just give an example? Like what? What's an example of something you would build on Airtable? Well, so we use our, our task management is on Airtable.

So, you know, say a guest reports that we have a leaky faucet, right? The guest services team will put a ticket in through a form and then that form goes into a dashboard that we have our maintenance coordinator decide who's gonna handle that task right there. And they will assign that task out to somebody that somebody else will get a notification that says, Hey, you got to go fix this leaky faucet at this property. They complete the task on their phone and then it all it all sinks back into Airtable. Our billing, how much we bill for that task.

Everything is in there as well. So it's, you know, you can and that's just like very specific to our industry, but pretty much any process or or app that you can dream up, you could probably build an air table, which is why it was, you know, the solution that we went for first. Totally. And like did you have had you used air table before or you're just like, OK, I know we need a task management software. I'm just going to go figure. This out yeah. So I, while I was at Venturi, I was lucky enough that I had a lot of autonomy in the product department of basically like, hey, just think about, you know, think about an end goal, how are we going to get there?

And so I got to do a lot of prototyping before we handed it off to the developer development team. So I, I used Airtable for prototyping of like what's possible, you know, what could we do? And like, what's the database structure look like and stuff like that. And so, yeah, I got some experience there just kind of poking around. I didn't use it as extensively as I do now, but definitely just got kind of over that little learning curve and kind of understanding of like database structure, I guess is the bit. And it's so much easier to figure out how to build a database in Airtable when you can kind of see all the rows and it looks like a spreadsheet compared to, you know, trying to do like a SQL database and not having any idea what you're right like I don't.

There I don't know how to write SQL, but I have to go figure out this database thing. Yeah, exactly. But yeah. And so that kind of let us into the world of AI coding, you know, because it's, it's a, it's a logical progression of like, well, we already built our own internal app and you know, there's some limitations on your table on certain things that you got to go with their kind of customized formats. They have a couple of different interface boxes that you're allowed to pick, But it's like, what if you want to do something else? You know, what if you want to tie in an API to an outside source and all that kind of stuff.

So yeah, it's, it's only been maybe six months or so that we've been playing with the with the AI coding stuff, but it's, it's been so much fun. And yeah, what it sounds like you've been doing some of it as well. Yeah, dude, I, I'm equally as obsessed. It's like I, I, I don't have a coding background and so like all my software engineer friends look at me like, dude, you're just getting into this now. Like, yeah, this has been cool forever, but dude, it's, I'm just mind blown with how much you can do and like, yeah, like what, what, what are the tools that you're using and like, what's your tech stack and what have you built and all of it?

Yeah, so I had a friend that turned me on to lovable. It's lovable dot dev. And I mean, it's essentially imagine like the the ChatGPT interface of just a text box, right? And then you just tell it what you want to build. I mean, it's, it sounds crazy saying that, but that's basically it. You know, you say I want to build a calendar scheduling app, like Calendly, right? Yeah, type that in there, it'll build it. You know, it's like you don't have to go through you. You really don't have to prompt all that much for it to kind of get the gist of what you want.

And then afterwards you could say I, you know, I think I want the text box to be blue, OK, you know, or the button to be blue. And then I think I want, you know, I want to set up this rule where like you can only schedule events on certain days or all that kind of stuff. You can just kind of keep prompting after that initial thing is built. And it's just been so awesome to be able to like see real time like. Totally. And that I, I feel like that feedback loop that you get of like, oh, like I did something, it worked. I did something it worked is so it's almost addicting.

Like you, you're doing stuff and it's like you see the real world inputs and you're like, whoa, like that's wild. So what? What kind of stuff have you built? Yeah. So I started out doing just a couple of like personal apps just to see, hey, is this stuff? Is this real 'cause I tried it probably a year ago, maybe a year and a half ago. And I thought it was a scam, honestly, because it was one of those things where it was like, you know, I tried to prompt it, it built something that looked kind of cool, but it didn't work at all. And like nothing worked.

And I, and then I started saying, oh, this button doesn't work. This doesn't work. And then it's like, boom, you need more credits. And I'm like, right, come on, You know, it's like just putting in these, all these tokens to this thing and it's intentionally introducing bugs so that you have to buy more tokens. So I, I totally thought it was a scam, but one of my friends showed me something, something they built and I was like, oh, this thing OK, it might be ready now. So I went back and started building some things. So I went, I think, let's see the first thing I did was a photo sharing app where you know, if instead of like Google Drive, where everybody has to be able to log in to, to connect their Google account and then upload it to the drive.

What if you could just send a link and then people choose their pictures and it's all there and then you can just download a folder. So that was one thing because I had a friend reach out and say, you know, they were collecting a bunch of pictures and it's a pain in the butt when somebody wants to like, they text them all the pictures and they have to save the pictures, put in an album, all that stuff. So I was like, that's good, good use case for like the first thing to build. And you know, I built it and like two hours, you know, and I was like, wow, this is, this is awesome.

So I started just kind of playing around doing it with, with a couple of other things. And so the, the first thing I built for our company with it was a pro forma generator. And essentially if you, if you're not, you know, if you're outside of the industry or, or don't know the, the first thing normally as a vacation rental manager, the first thing people ask is how much is my property going to generate? Right? Everybody always wants to know how much the property is going to generate. And so we, we used to have a spreadsheet essentially that we would go to other places, other data sources, type in the address, figure out like comparable properties, try and come up with like what, how much it's going to generate based off the comparable properties.

Take that that information, put it back into the spreadsheet. And then I had the spreadsheet connected to another thing that generated APDF that made the spreadsheet look a little bit nicer. And it was just this like pain in the butt. It was always breaking. It took the team probably like 1520 minutes each time we had to do that. Like I said, it's every single time you have a lead, you have to make one pretty much, right? Right. So it was just kind of bogging us down. So I was like, well, what if I just feed in all this information that I have from this old spreadsheet?

I already know what I want it to look like essentially, but I want it to look a little prettier. So I gave it all the information. I said make this look better and make it easier to use basically right. And it it did a really good job just on the first run. And I just kind of kept prompting, prompting it kept tweaking it First version, I didn't connect any data or anything to it. I just still kept it a manual fill out and I showed it to a couple of friends in the industry and people were like, this is really cool. And so it gave me, you know, a little bit more desire to like keep building on it.

You know, again, going back to that like positive reinforcement of like, I built this thing in a couple of days. People like it. This is, this is really fun saving our team time already our our performance look better. So all these things. So I connected a data source to it and now it's you basically go in, you put a put an address in and then it'll pull in like actual Airbnb scrape data to say how much the property could generate. And then it spits it out in this like nice PDF format that you can just send off to a homeowner. And so that was the first thing that I built for our company and it's been so great and it's, it's so cool because it's cheap to build this stuff.

So like I'm, I built it out and I'm just offering it to people in the industry now for free. Just like hey, use, use this tool. Tell me what you think, Should I add anything you know, 'cause it's like it doesn't cost me anything really at the end of the day, so. Yeah, that's amazing. And I think I saw like you had pretty significant like people are using it. Yeah, people are using it. There's already like 100 users on it, which is just, again, so cool that like you're able to build something and it's like, that's not, I'm not focusing on that full time.

I built it in a couple of days and. Right, Right. Yeah. Do you like, is there a party that like sees this as a potential offshoot, another business? Maybe not for that. I, I think you know that like if anything, someday, if it's like my, the data source gets expensive and people are making all these API calls, I might start charging for it. But right now it's like it's not that expensive for me to foot the cost for for some other industry friends to to use it And so right, right. I'll keep it. I'll keep it free for as long as I can. But yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I've. I always had that kind of like entrepreneurial business mindset. So I'm not necessarily like ignoring that I could be making money from it. But I also think it's one of those things where, OK, maybe I'll get, you know, 10 people paying 20 bucks a month for it. Like it's not it's not significant enough for me to like focus on that full time. It's more just just do something good for the industry. It's one of those kind of like mindsets of like, you know, the abundance mindset, I guess where there's plenty of opportunity out there and I'll just kind of like put put some good stuff out there and hopefully good stuff will come back my way.

For sure you just try to add value wherever you can. Yeah. Man, that's super cool. I love that. So yeah, as a tech, I'm a I'm a novice at this stuff. So you can. When you said you connected it to a data source, what does that mean? Yeah, so there there are pretty much any, any data source that you could think of like if you're like, hey, I want to make a app that helps me with my fantasy Football League and like tells me if somebody's injured, right? Or like, I don't know, it's a random example I just pulled, pulled off the top of my head. I'm sure there's an API out there that will tell you the all the injuries for NFL players, right?

Like there's basically people will put together these massive databases that you can then send out calls to to get the data from it. So you don't have to go out there and compile all the data and try and figure out like, hey, you know, NFL players, how do I know if an NFL player's hurt? There's probably a database that says it already and you can just access that data. Sometimes it's free, sometimes you have to pay for it. It just depends on like what the data is and what the value of that data is. But so, you know, taking that concept, you could do it for anything.

You know, you could do it for property data you want to find like the owner of a property instead of going to, you know, your county's website and like typing in their name. There's probably a database. Well, I know there's a database that you can plug in the address and then it'll send back all the information for the owner contact information and all that stuff. So, so that's, that's essentially what I'm saying with with the data sources that there's somebody else has gone through the hard work of compiling all of that data and put it into one place.

And then all you have to do is send over an API call and it sends back the information so you don't have to go collect it all. You get charged every time there's an API call. Is that how that works? Yeah, exactly. OK, exactly. So Like for my pro forma app, for instance, any time somebody generates a pro forma and puts in and says that they want market data, it charges me. But like I said, it's it's a small amount. So it's not enough to where it's like breaking the bank for me. But that's why I said someday if it gets to be crazy, I might have to start charging for it.

But for now, it's. Clicking Refresh, you're like stop, stop. Yeah. Dude, that's super cool. I love that. So as you think about the future, like, dude, it sounds like you got a lot going on, like you're you're, you're crushing it in the VR space. You're like, are you an investor yourself as well in real estate? Not, not really. My partner is, I've unfortunately like when we, when we started the business, interest rates were low, but I didn't have a lot of cash. So I, I didn't like jump on it. And now we're, I'm a little bit more ready to start looking at some investment properties and stuff.

It's like, oh, that's maybe not the best time to invest right now given interest rates and stuff. So I'm definitely ready for it. It's just one of those things we got to kind of wait for the market to be right, wait to find a good deal, but I am invested in my business, so there we go. Yeah, dude, I feel like we kind of had opposite paths. Like I started in real estate and now I'm like learning more and more about business investing and just like business operations. And I guess it's kind of the same because real estate is a business. But I feel like businesses have a much better.

Like everyone gets into real estate for cash flow the majority of the time, but the secret is that there is not a lot of cash flow when you first start in real estate and so the cash flow is in businesses. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, I, I was just, I was just having that conversation actually where I was like from my, from my opinion, investing in like long term rentals especially is a great vehicle for long term wealth creation. Totally. However, for cash flow, it really hurts because it's like, yeah, oh, we got to get a new AC unit for this unit or this unit's, you know, the got to do some, some improvements here.

And it's like every month, even if you're making a couple hundred a month cash flow, eventually that's going to get like taken back down. Yeah. So, yeah, I, I totally agree. Whereas, yeah, if especially business creation is great for cash flow because you didn't have to put any money into it necessarily. And if you can bootstrap your way to, you know, cash flowing business, then all of the expenses the business pays for. Yeah, yeah, dude, that's amazing. That's amazing. Is so is that the goal with with beachside? Is it, is it to grow to a point and then sell?

Do you want to stay in it for a while? Like, what are your thoughts on like what do you want to do in the future? Yeah, yeah, I mean, right now it's, you know, options are open. It's a it's such an interesting time in the vacation rental market. There's a lot of consolidation happening. So it's, you know, definitely something that we're looking at something that's interesting. We might be, you know, we might be looking at buying some other companies, we might be looking at partnering with some, some outside capital. You know, it's just like definitely lots of options on what, what's possible right now and it's super exciting.

Yeah, Yeah, that's super cool. Are are you seeing like are like when the roll ups that you're seeing happening, are those like bigger PE companies coming in buying up management companies or are they like larger management companies buying up smaller? Like how does that who's? Buying, yeah, I think, I think PE take this like that's definitely the reason for all of the consolidation, but it's a mix. So there's larger management companies buying smaller companies in their market or in other markets with the ultimate goal to sell to private equity or there's private equity companies that are buying other companies with the goal to sell to a bigger private equity company.

But like, at the end of the day, it's all private equity. Fair enough, fair enough. OK. But yeah, it's, I mean, I guess like it is funny. I've never really kind of like put it in that mindset. But yeah, at the end of the day, everybody's trying to sell something, right? Right, Yeah, fair enough. It's funny, I feel like there's that quote or I don't know what the quote is, but it's like you're, you have like this high cash flowing business and then you sell it and you get this lump sum of money and you're like, well, shoot, now I don't have any income.

Yeah. Now I need a cash. Now I need to buy a cash flowing business with the money that I just got. Right, right. So it's a it's 6 of 1/2 a dozen of the other type of thing. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I mean that's another thing we've talked about. I think our our mindset changes probably by the month of you know, hey, could just keep growing this thing and just cash flow it and that's it. You know, that is the extra. Strategy. Right. So who knows, who knows where we'll end up, but right now it's it's a fun ride. And have the growth that you guys have experienced that's all been through sales and like just getting more clients it hasn't?

Been, Yeah, it's all been organic. We had one luck, well I guess one or two lucky breaks where they were just kind of like big deals that came through. One of them was a the resort that we managed at the on site manager just went out of business, went bankrupt and essentially was like, hey, can you just take over where we left off? So it was like it's kind of an acquisition. So that one, that one was super lucky. And then one where it was just a a large client kind of just chose us, you know. So that was a mix of of luck in in right time, right place kind of kind of thing.

But yeah, otherwise it's been all, you know, organic, organic traffic, organic referrals and just kind of grinding. Yeah. Yeah, that's super cool, man. That's super cool. What is? I'm just always curious, like you're obviously a high performer. You're doing a lot of stuff. Like do you have a a typical day in the life? Like do you have a daily routine or like, OK, Wednesdays I do this. Tuesdays are my meeting day. Like what does a typical day in the life look like for you? So I think, I think this is going to like blow, blow your mind in a lot of people's minds.

I actually work four days a week. So I work Monday through Thursday. And the reason for it is like I, I honestly think I'm more productive when I have that time to reset and kind of like take, take some time back on on the weekends and not think about work. And then I come to work and I'm just so much more productive because I'm like, got my stuff laid out. I'd run through my tasks and you know, I'm fortunate enough to now I'm not in the day-to-day, like I'm not the one answering phones for an upset guest, calling it right or all of that kind of stuff.

So a lot of my work is more task and goal driven and, and less kind of daily operations driven. And so I'm able to not necessarily work the normal, normal times. And I mean, in our industry, there is no normal time, right? It's, it's all the time. But yeah. So I, I think, you know, the normal day-to-day is, you know, sometimes 8 hours, sometimes 10 hours, sometimes 12 hours. Like it, it depends on what's going on. But I think the important part is, is the rest part. And I think especially in the kind of entrepreneurial business start up circles that's not talked about a lot and you see people that are like working 12 hour days, seven days a week and it's just not sustainable.

It really isn't. And so I don't know, you know, I, I kind of flip it on its head and it's like, what if I work less and get more done in instead of trying to just keep going and keep grinding through this log, you know? Did something like how did you learn that? You know, it was actually my partner. So my partner's he he's a freak that does work seven days a week, but it's different because he likes it like he he genuinely would prefer working like he gets stressed out when he doesn't work. And so, but he, you know, it was, I don't know, maybe a year ago at this point, 8 and six months to a year ago, he's like, dude, you're so, you're so angry, you know, why are you so upset?

And I was like, it's just, I feel like I'm working too much, blah, blah, blah. And he's like, why don't you just stop, Just don't work so much. I'm like, oh, all right, we'll see what happens. So it started off as kind of like a, an experiment to see like, would my mindset shift? Would I be in a better mood if I didn't work Fridays? And that experiment turned out to to be true. So yeah, that it was. It was really my partner kind of like pushing me to do it. Have you ever tried to go to three days? I have not. I have not. But you know, maybe, yeah, maybe what?

Maybe in the spring if you're moving, I'll go golfing some more. Yeah, why not? Yeah, it's, it's definitely, I mean, who knows, right? Like get it down to the four hour workweek. Tim Ferriss had something going on there, so yeah. Yeah. But might follow follow in his footsteps. Dog good, perfect segue. That was actually my next question is like, do you read? Do you like consume content? Are you a podcast listener? Are you a book reader? Like what's your? What's your go to? Yeah, I love reading books, probably should read more than I do, but definitely, definitely enjoy it.

I got, I can't remember the name of the app now. I think it's called Impact. Maybe it's either Blinkist or Impact there. There's two that are kind of the same thing, but it's like a micro learning. Yeah. Apps where you can books. Yeah. So I've been doing some of those as well. Just like I got rid of all the social media on my phone. So it's like if I ever have the impulse to scroll instead of scrolling, now I'm using using that app to just kind of like click through and and read some some books real quick. But I, you know, I'll read those and then if I enjoy that, then I'll actually go buy the book and, and read the full book.

OK, but yeah, outside of that, I, I definitely a big learner. Like I'm always, I'm just such a naturally curious person on like how things work and that sort of thing. So I, I end up watching a lot of YouTube on the, you know, how, how to certain things work or just trying to figure stuff out myself. Like, you know, with the, with the AI coding for instance, it's just trial by action, you know, trial by fire. So. Yeah. So what's what's like the most recent book you've listened to or like that you've really enjoyed? Most recent book so I, I got a lot of books on my plate right now.

Actually, I, my wife is expecting and so I've been reading a lot of parenting and baby books and stuff like that. Thank you, thank you. What do you guys do, June? Nice dude. OK, We had our first born. He was born June 15th. Oh wow, I June 13th, I think is our is our expected date. So he. Smokes, yeah, that's amazing, man. You know, so boy or girl, it's a boy, yeah. Very cool. Very cool. So you're reading like, all the parenting books? Like, Yeah. Parenting books what what to expect and. Expecting better? I, I haven't read that one yet. Oh, I think it's actually, I think it's on my on my bookshelf.

I have like, like I said, I have a stack of them, but right now there's I have two that are like the weekly for the the trimesters and like the what what you should be doing as a father during those weeks and that kind of stuff. So that's been most of my reading time as of recent. But yeah, I haven't, I haven't been doing too many business books. That's probably for it. Sounds like you're a very wise person. You work four days a week and you transition to to parenting books when you're having a baby. This is probably a wise decision all around.

That's super cool, man. Well dude, where can people find out more about you? And if they want to get in touch and learn more, what's the best place to do that? Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is JJ King on LinkedIn, or you can shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is jj@beachsidevr.com. Awesome. And if like what are you looking for right now? Like if people have obviously a vacation rental in, in Florida, that would be good. Sure, yeah. What else are you looking for that people can reach out to if if they're looking to help you out? Yeah, I, I just love sharing ideas.

I love networking in the industry. So you know, anybody in the hospitality, short term rental, vacation rental industry, happy to connect. And then if you're, you know, if you're outside of the industry and just want to shoot, shoot the shit with the being an entrepreneur, anything like that, always, always happy to connect as well. Love it. I love it, love it. Well dude, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate you and I appreciate your time and looking forward to keeping the conversations going. Yeah. Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Alright, bye everybody.