From 32 to 70 Airbnb homes in 9 Months: What Actually Broke (and What Worked) | Dave Menapace

Michael Sjogren (0:00)

You started the year at 32, now you're up to 70 as of today. I'd love to hear kind of, one, some learning lessons of what that growth felt like, and then we can kind of put a bow on everything with some of the AI tools that you've been having some fun with the last few weeks.

Dave Menapace (0:14)

The important piece that I didn't even really think about at the time is you're not just bringing in homes and tactical things like revenue management and runners and cleaners, you're bringing in a lot of different personalities too. I had everyone doing the same things that I had my first two VAs doing. I essentially just put more people at the same problems. I didn't restructure how people would focus their time. And that daily checklist that the VAs would do is up to like 50 things. And I'm like, man, this job sucks.

These poor people.

And what I learned right was when we start this business, we might have nobody working for us. About a month or so ago, I showed up to a house. I saw the trash was overflowing. I grabbed a pair of gloves and a bag and I helped empty it and figure it out. And there was maggots all over that trash. And I'm the CEO of this company that's making over a million dollars this year, but like no one thing is below me. And when my team saw that, they were like, well, I better not bitch about trash again. And when I saw Cortex for the first time on one of our secrets calls, I was like, holy shit, this only take me like two weeks to get a director of operations up and running. In Cortex, from a sales perspective and integrating the UI method, and tying that into our Go High level, which we had implemented, and seeing what your whole pipeline looks like, and then feeding that into your project plans for your property launches because it's like pulling in Notion and tasks in Notion and all sorts of stuff. But on the operation side too, you can even, we're about to start tracking all of our maintenance in there and all that crap. It was actually today's Cortex call, we integrated all of our ring cameras. So it takes my team like three hours a day across 70 homes to go into every single house multiple times a day to watch the ring cameras. And all of that is like in one monitoring interface within Cortex, you can do revenue management right out of Cortex, which is really freaking cool, by the way, and the listing optimizer. But the way I use it is I use the revenue management tool in Cortex to gauge how well my revenue manager is doing. It at least gives me a framework to understand what they're doing, and if I agree with what they're doing, or if it's an opportunity to have a conversation about something.

Michael Sjogren (2:40)

Menapace, how are we doing, buddy?

Dave Menapace (2:43)

Glad to have you back. Doing awesome.

Michael Sjogren (2:45)

Yeah, you're not looking quite as tan. I think it's your lighting in the office right now. But you were looking like a full Cape Summer over the last month.

Dave Menapace (2:57)

Yeah. Yeah, I felt it too. And it was great.

It's great what this business affords us the opportunities to do, like spend a summer in Cape Cod with the family. And that was our third year of doing that.

Michael Sjogren (3:09)

So I remember, it had to have been four years now, but I remember that was your goal. And I was like, dude, you totally do that. You just got to get the right systems in place. And I think you've gone longer each year. Maybe not as much this year, because I know the kids had some camps and stuff, but like you were there for, what, three months?

Dave Menapace (3:27)

Yeah, yeah, more or less. And it might have been less this year, but I kind of still spent my time, even when I was back home as if I was in summer. And it's just kind of like working out, right? Like you can't work out the same muscles every single day and expect to see material improvement. And it's sort of like, you can't, for me, I've found it taking a little bit of a break from the business and looking at it from another lens and seeing when I'm pulled in and what got accomplished without me being pulled in gives me an opportunity to make material improvements the other eight to 10 months of the year. And that's what the summer does. That's at least what the summer does for me. And that's how I've structured the business to be able to allow me and the family to do that.