[00:00:57] John: Good morning, Mateo. How are you?

[00:00:59] Mateo: What’s up, brother? I’m fantastic as usual. How are you, man?

[00:01:03] John: I’m great. It is the end of the year. It is the holidays.

[00:01:08] Mateo: love the holidays, man.

[00:01:09] John: I do too. And the house is all decorated. We got the tree up early this year. It’s been pretty awesome to, to actually enjoy it instead of running around like crazy, trying to go ahead and get it all done last minute.

[00:01:21] John: We even have some lights in the outside of the house. We’re all in. We’re all in this year.

[00:01:26] Mateo: we don’t do any of that. None of that. I love it, and I can appreciate it, but yeah, we don’t do that.

[00:01:32] John: Yeah,

[00:01:33] Mateo: The inside, yeah, the trees, but we’re like Clark Griswold, man.

[00:01:37] John: No I we don’t go that far. A little bit here and there, just for me, it’s a, hey, it’s done, checked off. Actually, the kids did it this year. The kids went out and they wanted to do it and they went and decorated it outside. I was like, whatever, that’s cool. This is episode 116.

[00:01:55] John: This will actually be our 31st episode of the season. We’re down this year from last year, but by design. It’s been a crazy year. This is our episode recap our 2023 in review.

[00:02:07] Mateo: Yep.

[00:02:08] John: Let’s start off with what did we see this year as far as Themes like what were the themes that we saw,

[00:02:15] Mateo: I think

[00:02:16] Mateo: Business is adjusting in a lot of markets. I think you’re seeing people focus on. New. There’s a lot of desire to find new revenue streams, to find new channels, to, differentiate yourself in this new market and, you’re, we’re seeing it, people are focusing on direct bookings.

[00:02:35] Mateo: They’re building out their websites, investing in marketing. They’re really paying attention to their SEO and really being diligent about being able to reach, the guests

[00:02:45] John: But why this year, right? These things you just said is focused on direct bookings and these are all things that have been, key themes for many years what’s different in 2023 compared to previous years,

[00:02:57] Mateo: It’s essential to your business to be around these are the things that you have to focus on to survive in changing markets and our markets are changing, and, the traveling is changing, and the data is showing look but I also think Our, we’ve been talking for years and years.

[00:03:12] Mateo: We’re having more professional, managers and operators and, regardless of the size of your business, people are looking at their business in a more professional way. So to focus on profitability, data does matter, right? And, the tools that you use and how you operate your business determines your success in this space still, right?

[00:03:32] Mateo: So I think that’s been core to focus. And then, listening to the guests, cause I, at the end of the day, I always say this, man, the only thing that matters is how many heads of bed that come back, right? And so

[00:03:43] John: Return guests. Yep.

[00:03:45] Mateo: a hospitality standpoint are you giving them a experience that they want to repeat?

[00:03:51] John: A hundred percent. Looking back at the 30 episodes we did with other people and, the key themes are exactly what you’re talking about. It’s based on data. It’s based on trust. It’s based on, is this profitable, right?

[00:04:03] John: So there’s a huge focus on profitability and, with that, there’s a huge focus on sustainability in doing this ethically, morally, and environmentally correct, right? But the thing that brings all these things together is the need to differentiate and to diversify because there is so much inventory that is just stagnant that’s watering down everything else.

[00:04:31] John: So this, there’s so much inventory and it’s a sea of cookie cutter bullshit. And how do you make your inventory, your company, your brand stand out in this sea of nothingness? And nothingness is the wrong word. The sea of just beige, right? Though the beige inventory isn’t moving the needles for this is not, beige inventory is not making it profitable for you.

[00:04:59] John: And, beige inventory is not getting the bookings. And these, these key features or these key themes that we’re seeing, the PMCs that are, focusing on profitability and are focusing on raw data and focusing on building trust with their guests and their homeowners.

[00:05:21] John: are the ones that are winning in 2023.

[00:05:24] Mateo: Trust and safety is huge. Diligence to your inventory, right? Like again, like it’s a different Look, you have to be, it’s, this is what I love about this time and space, because it’s gonna, you see the creativity that’s coming out with it, right? People are, they’re changing, people are flipping to tree houses now.

[00:05:47] Mateo: Like the glamping, the RVs there’s so much diversity budding through our space right now. Like we’re seeing a lot of creativity that’s tech enabled, that is, focusing on making a better, glamorous, more enjoyable experience, right? Cause to be honest, the shit’s got to be Instagrammable, right?

[00:06:06] Mateo: Hey, in this day and age right now there’s some markets where, any inventory will fly, but those are far and few between. So it’s like, what is your guest experience like? What are the opportunities, what are you offering them? Who’s in your market and how do you get those people into your market that you don’t have already?

[00:06:25] Mateo: And keep them. So like, when you’re looking at that you look at storytelling and building brand, right? The whole goal is to build something that becomes, a repeat experience.

[00:06:36] Mateo: You want people to keep coming back.

[00:06:39] John: and

[00:06:39] Mateo: right?

[00:06:40] John: How do you do this efficiently as well because we are leaner and another theme that we’re not talking about that came up over and over again and to me, I’m getting it in my LinkedIn feed, it’s like I’m getting beaten with a dead horse, but it’s AI. We didn’t really talk much. about AI, but it’s, it continues to be, and it will always be, at least for the foreseeable future, a huge theme, and those

[00:07:07] Mateo: machine learning is in everything. It’s touching every aspect of the business, right?

[00:07:12] John: Yeah, it’s touching everything and it’s imperative to understand how to use it to the best of your ability without taking away from like creativity and what makes you actually like a human in, there’s a fine line between relying solely on AI.

[00:07:29] John: As your voice, compared to actually, using AI as a tool to better your voice. Big difference there.

[00:07:37] John: A huge year for us. Some big things changed. We took two months off. June 1 to August, we just said, you know what, fuck it. We’re not going to go ahead and record anything.

[00:07:47] John: And those that didn’t really know at that time we hit a hard reset. Basically we decided to take NoBS in a different direction. We rebranded to the NoBSPodcast. co as opposed to the NoBS Short Term Rental Podcast. We’re doing everything on our own.

[00:08:02] John: Using some AI tools to help us do this, but really, up to our tech and and focused on just a little deeper, a little more focused podcast. And, we’re excited about where, our last 20 plus episodes went this year. More of the same to continue in 2024 with a bunch of little surprises we got coming on too.

[00:08:24] John: Hey, man, we can’t forget our huge project Derailed. If you haven’t listened to Derailed, this is a huge endeavor months in the making. There’s multiple podcasts talking about it, but Derailed, a fictional murder mystery, That takes place in the short term rental world, went live this year in 2023.

[00:08:47] John: And it was a huge success. Like

[00:08:49] Mateo: Huge thank you, yeah, to all our sponsors, Dennis, Casiola everyone that sponsored that and made that possible talking about creativity, right? We’re talking about new and exciting things. That was fun. And I think that was definitely good for the industry to, see how to mix it up.

[00:09:07] Mateo: That’s, there’s so much potential for so many new and exciting things. And while we’re seeing a lot of new and exciting things, this is just the tip of the iceberg, man. This is the ability to mix it up and not do the same stale thing again and again. There’s just so much opportunity out here.

[00:09:22] Mateo: I’m

[00:09:22] John: shout out to Nealey for just being our creative lead, writing an amazing mystery and shout out to every one of our

[00:09:32] Mateo: Limited, but it’s a

[00:09:33] John: that volunteered their time on the weekly lots of them to put out a quality product. That touches like all our brands in the industry and touches, it wasn’t about if you haven’t listened to you have to listen to It’s it was very well produced, shout out to Mike for Producing it and in doing what he did It’s whoever minutes.

[00:10:00] John: It’s 12 episodes 13 episodes. It’s a great listen. It’s a, it takes you on this wild adventure. You get to hear, myself as a lead. You can hear, Matea was one of the lead characters. Shout out to Jason Gann. Shout out to so many of you. It’s, it was,

[00:10:19] Mateo: It was a family affair.

[00:10:21] John: yeah, absolutely.

[00:10:22] Mateo: Yeah. It was fun. Thank you to everyone that participated. We’ll definitely continue on that road at some point again.

[00:10:29] John: Yeah, I’d say at some point. We’re putting a little pin in it right now, but it’s holding up. I actually listened to it About a month ago. I listened to it again You know, it had been a while since I’d listened to it and you know As a project that you do, you’re a little critical of it, but at the same time, you know what, I’m really proud of what we built there and and shout out to

[00:10:51] Mateo: Kudos to the team. Yeah, no, I was gonna say kudos to the team and everyone that was involved. Will pat everyone? Thank you. That was fun.

[00:10:59] John: is super fun and damn, man, we learned a lot like of all the lessons of this year, personally, as far as am I over, am I putting out more energy than I can go? There’s, it wasn’t easy.

[00:11:12] Mateo: Nah

[00:11:13] John: this was far from an easy task and I, again, I’m gonna go back one more time to shout out to Nealey this was taxing in so many ways, but the end result is beautiful.

[00:11:25] Mateo: we learned a lot.

[00:11:26] John: Learned a lot, dude.

[00:11:28] John: Two huge episodes dropped this year. I definitely want to shout out for both of these episodes. Before that we hit a hundred episodes.

[00:11:35] John: That was huge for us, right? It was a big, we hit the century mark of episodes. And so shout out to Matt Landau for jumping on that with us back in April. Big, exciting episode for us and, shit dude, we did it. Who would have thought?

[00:11:51] Mateo: it’s been so much fun. Like it’s that’s what I’m looking forward to too. I’m looking forward to next year, looking forward to 2024. Continuing these conversations, there’s a lot of good energy coming out of this industry right now. A lot of good things happening. Yeah. I’m looking forward to continuing these conversations.

[00:12:08] John: We vow to keep pushing the envelope with who we’re having on as a guest. it’s not going to be the expected, it’s going to be the, A, it’s either, if it’s going to be the expected, it’s going to be the guest that you didn’t think we could get. Just saying.

[00:12:24] John: We’re gonna, we’re keeping on. 100th episode with Matt Landau, that one to go ahead and bring attention to this. A huge episode we did this year. Ruffled Some Feathers, great episode. The man behind one of the biggest movements in SDR. It crushed early records for us, and then we crushed that as well a few months later.

[00:12:43] John: But Bill Faith. Great episode with Bill,

[00:12:47] Mateo: Shout out to Bill

[00:12:48] John: yeah, shout out to Bill. I’m glad he could come on and share his his wisdom and his background with us. And if you haven’t listened to that episode, make sure you go and listen to it. It’s an interesting listen. And if you haven’t listened, I encourage you to do

[00:13:00] John: And our biggest episode to date ever is, bringing vacations home with the CEO of Vacasa, Rob Graber.

[00:13:09] Mateo: Rob. Yeah.

[00:13:10] John: Yeah. Shout out to Rob. Shout out to the whole Vacasa team for making that happen. And shout out to our interviewers. We we did that format a little bit different.

[00:13:18] John: We had a bunch of our colleagues. Jump in and ask Rob questions directly and it, it crushed. It was a great episode and every week it shows up as a highly downloaded episode. So it continues to do very well for

[00:13:32] Mateo: yeah. Thanks to everyone that contributed to that. That was fun. Do more of that. Yeah.

[00:13:38] John: looking at the future other than we’re bringing some new things? What are you most excited about for 2024?

[00:13:44] Mateo: Oh man. There’s just so much coming on. I’m excited to. The future conversations that we’re going to have with the people that we’re going to be talking to, I’m excited about our projects that we’re going to have coming up our partnerships that we’re going to have coming up. We’re here.

[00:13:58] Mateo: I’m excited for what this industry is going to do this year. There’s so many people doing so many amazing things. Their success lifts us all. That’s that’s what I’m excited to see. I’m excited to see, it’s, this year’s a bit of a question mark for a lot of people, right?

[00:14:11] Mateo: A lot of crazy things going on, election year. So we’ll see we’ll see what the industry does. We’ll see what these numbers do. We’ll see how these guests are feeling. And, it’s going to be beautiful to see us rise to the challenge and to continue to cement our place in in this hospitality family.

[00:14:28] Mateo: That’s what I’m looking forward to.

[00:14:29] John: Me too. Me too, man. We have some fantastic partnerships that I want to bring attention to as well. I’m really excited about some of these brands that are getting behind the NoBS brand. Right now, obviously, our host GPO fantastic partnership with them.

[00:14:45] John: We have a brand new partnership that comes out in January. We’re really excited about it’s an upcoming episode, so we’re there’s a lot of great things. For me, The best thing about the podcast in general is the friendships and the relationships that are built that I would never have expected, that would come out of this the way they has, the main reason we started doing this , years ago now, holy shit, years ago was, to build these relationships to, to talk about the industry in a way that at that time no one was really talking about.

[00:15:18] John: I still don’t think anyone’s doing exactly the way we are. So I love that. But I’m looking at, one of my favorite people in the industry, Adrian Johnson, made great friendships with himself and his family and when we’re when we’re in their neck of the woods, we always get together and.

[00:15:35] John: They were on our podcast this year and it was a great episode. They were actually our first podcast in our new format. And thinking about these relationships these are the relationships that are built. There’s just really good people and everyone we interview are just great people. And it’s real. It’s not a show, right? That’s what I love about our industry.

[00:15:53] Mateo: When we were interviewing it was in the middle of Maui, right? Like when Maui was happening and, real

[00:15:57] John: Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah.

[00:15:59] Mateo: But that’s, and it goes into the theme of environmental impacts to travel, right? And, that’s not a mystery and why that’s a huge, big deal, right?

[00:16:07] John: Last thing, you just mentioned environmental. I know we’re going to wrap this up. This is a quick recap episode, but

[00:16:12] Mateo: some trees, man.

[00:16:13] John: we’re going to plant some trees, we’re going to go ahead and clean the ocean, and we’re going to scrub some coral.

[00:16:18] Mateo: yeah, we’re definitely doing that.

[00:16:20] John: It’s pretty stinking cool what we’re doing with our, the eco positive changes we’re doing.

[00:16:25] John: Shout out to Matt. And the whole team at the Global Investment Group every hundred episodes that are downloaded, we are contributing and, and guess what? They’re matching our contribution as well. That’s the partnership we built out there. So

[00:16:42] Mateo: you see it out there,

[00:16:44] John: Global Investment Group

[00:16:45] Mateo: for that. We do want that, yeah, we definitely want that support. We’re gonna be planting, trees, so you guys can help. So it’s gonna be a great thing. Yeah.

[00:16:54] John: next year,

[00:16:55] Mateo: Yeah, brother.

[00:16:56] John: happy holidays, everybody.

[00:16:58] Mateo: Holidays, everyone. Love. Peace. New Year.