VRS685 - From Reservation Data to Dashboard in 15 Minutes

Heather Bayer (0:01)

For years, I've been talking about the lack of really good vacation rental education. Well, I'm pleased to say that Simon Lehmann has launched his STR Academy, and I'm one of its founding ambassadors. I'll tell you what it is and who it's for in the middle of today's episode. So make sure you stay with me.

This is the Vacation Rental Success podcast, keeping you up to date with news, views, information and resources on this rapidly changing short-term rental business. I'm your host, Heather Bayer, and with 25 years of experience in this industry, I'm making sure you know what's hot, what's not, what's new, and what will help make your business a success.

Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Vacation Rental Success podcast. This is your host, Heather Bayer, and as ever, I'm super excited to be back with you once again. This is a fun episode today because I'm talking to a fellow builder. If you've been listening to me for any length of time, you'll know that makes me really excited.

Maria Lancaster spent much of her career in high-tech with companies like Oracle until, as she puts it, her home was an airplane. She bought a beach house on Tybee Island, took a job at Tybee Vacation Rentals, and discovered that everything she knew about technology had a real home in our industry. So after VTrips acquired Tybee, she went out on her own and she now runs MJ Creative Business Solutions, helping companies with revenue management, business intelligence, and marketing. Recently, Maria took part in the Wheelhouse Hackathon. It was three days to build something using Wheelhouse's data. She built a dashboard called Helm and pages that once took her weeks of programming came together in about 15 minutes of plain English. See, I've been telling you this all along. So in this episode, we talk about how a small property manager could start building their own tools this month. We talk about where she got stuck and her very firm view on when you should build and when you should just buy. And I'll own up. I didn't enter that hackathon and I'm still kicking myself. Here's Maria.

I am so happy to have with me today Maria Lancaster. And Maria has been in this business for a long time, but she has done so many other things. And we are going to talk about those. Plus, we're going to talk about app building because that's all I seem to be doing these days. And I found myself a fellow app builder. But now I'm so excited. So welcome Maria. Thank you so much for joining me.

Maria Lancaster (3:07)

Thank you for inviting me.

Heather Bayer (3:09)

Could you give the audience just a little bit of a background on how you got into this industry and what you do in it now? Because it's the first question I ask everybody coming onto the show. What got you into this?

Maria Lancaster (3:21)

I spent a lot of my career in the high-tech industry. So working for companies like Oracle and a few startup companies, and got to the point where my home was an airplane.

So rather than that, I decided I wanted to actually buy a beach house and really start living life in a different way. But anyway, how I got into it is I moved to Tybee Island, I met two women, Amy Gaster and Carrie Eford, and eventually ended up applying for a position they had, again, for that quality of life, and not realizing how much technology vacation rental companies, and in particular, Tybee Vacation Rentals, used and continued to just enhance their use of it. So I was pretty excited that I could marry up all of that high-tech knowledge and experience into the industry, and so that's how I got into it. Amy and Carrie, I love it.

Heather Bayer (4:22)

Love them both.

Maria Lancaster (4:23)

Yeah, me too, I miss them.

Heather Bayer (4:26)

But you're not with them now, right?

Maria Lancaster (4:28)

I'm not. Yeah, VTrips acquired Tybee Vacation Rentals, and so after a couple of years of that, I decided to go out on my own, and had a couple of people who were interested in enlisting my help, and so that's what I've done. I've started my own MJ Creative Business Solutions, sounds very broad and that's purposeful, because I wanted to do revenue management, business intelligence, and marketing, but you never know where the future is taking you, so leaving a broad brush on what your company does is useful.

Heather Bayer (5:07)

I think that's really wise. Mine is still called Vacation Rental Formula Business School, which really as I talk through, it's narrowing down.