**John Stokinger:** Good morning, Mateo. How are you?  

**Mateo Bradford-Vazquez:** Morning brother. I am good. How are you?  

**John Stokinger:** I’m great. We’re back. Hi. We had some changes. We had some things we had to go ahead and put in place. We had to establish some things. Number one, Derailed is done. It’s by the time we listen to this podcast, it’s out that we finished derailed. I’m really excited about that project. Yeah. If you haven’t listened to Derailed, go to derailedpodcast.com. Give it a listen, no BS productions which we’ll talk about in just a second. We put out this amazing fictional murder mystery podcast. It takes place in the short-term rental world with a lot of our friends in the industry starring roles with Casiola and so many others, but go to derailedpodcast.com for 13 episodes. It’s an amazing murder mystery with lots of your friends that work in the industry that lent their voice acting talents that we didn’t even realize we had voice acting talents or, I’m using air quotes talents for me as one of the starring roles Mateo and I are both stars in, in this. But you definitely wanna go ahead and check it out if you haven’t checked that out.  Also, we went ahead and we’re legit. Mateo and I are co-founders and partners in No BS Productions LLC now. So I’m excited. We went out on our own. So we’re doing things a little bit differently and we’re excited for a little bit different format, but focusing like a little more bespoke, a little more focused. But the same old us and still focused on inclusivity, still focused on hospitality and short-term rentals, and still focused on just culture. 

**Mateo Bradford-Vazquez:** It’s the beginning of a new path for us. We want to always bring new and creative ideas and energy to the space. And I think this is gonna be a platform for us to continue to do that. Continue to do what we’ve always wanted to do with No BS, which is to be an open and honest platform for conversation. To learn about people within our space, go deep in a real and authentic way. And to produce content and to produce projects that nobody’s thought of. To do new and fun things that will highlight our industry and those in it, and the businesses in it in a way that is uniquely our brand and our fingerprint and to do what we’ve always done. Shine light and, highlight others and, keep growing with this space in new fun and creative ways.  

**John Stokinger:** We love pushing the envelope. Love pushing the envelope. It’s, with that we have amazing guests. We’ve been wanting to get Adrian Johnson from SeaBreeze Vacation on for quite a while. And without further ado, joining us from Anna Maria Island is Adrian Johnson. Thanks so much for joining us today.  

**Adrian Johnson:** Thank you. Thanks for inviting me to the podcast. So I think I’ve listened to every one of your pods so far.  

**John Stokinger:** You’ve listened to every one of our pods?  

**Adrian Johnson:** I don’t think I’ve missed one. It was, I’ll be honest, it was the title at the start. The No BS is really the way we do business. So that really, like we’ve something, it’s. That’s the way we are. I’ve always worked that way and it’s always worked well. It’s like that honest approach and don’t cover it up. Say it the way. It’s, I think I’ve upset a few people during the years, but  

**John Stokinger:** I love it. 

**Adrian Johnson:** That’s the way it goes. 

**John Stokinger:** Adrian you quite honestly could be the only person that’s listened to every one of our podcasts.  

**Adrian Johnson:** You’re making me sound like a commander right now.  

**John Stokinger:** It’s that’s amazing. And thank you. We appreciate it. It’s and it was interesting, so I had an opportunity to meet with you in person. I was probably what, two years ago now? I was, yeah. Yeah. It is. At least, yeah. Close to two years ago we were, I was down in Annamaria and I had an opportunity to stop in and I saw your phone booth, your red very European, very British phone booth outside of your office. And had an opportunity to meet with you and it was fantastic. And we had a great time. Grab the bite to eat. But let’s talk about your story. You have an interesting story. You’ve been coming to Annamaria Island for 22 years now. 

**Adrian Johnson:** 23, yeah. I first, yeah, it was early, early 2000 was the first time I ever come to Annamaria Island. I worked out here, so worked in the UK, lived in the UK, managed a project, and used to do electronic security in the UK. Managed a project out here. Ended up working in Sarasota. Sunday morning over here alone. Thought, let’s go for a drive round. Drove up Long Boat Key onto Anna Maria Island and just fell in love. It was like I’d arrived in paradise. The sun was shining. Back over in England. It was overcast and miserable it was. Really didn’t wanna leave. Cut. A long story short, we come out that year on vacation. Came out several times a year after that on vacation. We bought our first vacation rental in 2003. Fell in love with that short-term rental. There wasn’t too many around. We worked with property with a property manager. That worked quite well for a while. Then I decided I’d love to live on Anna Maria Island. Took me 10 years to convince the wife to move. She eventually gave in and we moved out here full-time in June 2011. Didn’t get into short-term rentals then. We moved parts of our business from the UK again. Like I said, in electronic security, used to manufacture surveillance cameras I’D wear and software. Okay. We sold that business in 2016 which gave us the opportunity to start thinking about what our next chapter was, what we’d be doing next. And I’d always said, all the years we’ve been working with property managers, I didn’t feel that I could do it better. I felt I could do it differently. And a lot of that was my frustration that I, and each property manager we worked with, I had different frustrations. Some was great at one thing, others were great at another. So over the years, in the back of my mind, I was thinking if I was a property manager, I’d do this. I’d do that. I’d do this differently. I was fortunate I thought I’d be able to do that when I retired in my sixties, I was fortunate to be able to in my forties. So SeaBreeze started in 2017. We bought our first property on in 2018. Now we manage around a hundred properties, and that’s where we wanna stay. We feel that’s a number that

 we can manage. That’s the service, the level of service we want to provide. We can do that well for a hundred properties. Any more than that, I think we would struggle without having to start staffing up. And then you’ve got the issues around that,  

**John Stokinger:** It comes back to what is your definition of scale and what is your definition of success? If a hundred properties for you and your family is success and you can manage it and you’re not overtaxed and you feel like you have a handle and a hold on what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to build, great.  

**Adrian Johnson:** I don’t believe that success is measured by the number of properties, and we definitely see that with our competitors. When we first started, literally as we started SeaBreeze Vacation, Island real estate had just sold out to Vacasa and I didn’t really know too much about Vacasa at that time. I was like an owner that was in the space, not a property manager in the space. So I’d heard of them, didn’t really know too much about them, and I was thinking, what’s gonna happen? But I thought, no let’s go for it. And to be honest, that was probably the best thing that could have happened. A lot of our first owners, Island Real Estate done a great job. They’ve provided that, that family type service, that like mom and pop shop the owners that were with them liked that they weren’t getting that with Vacasa. All of a sudden, instead of being Mr. Smith, they were property 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So we instantly were able to pick up our first few properties because of that transition. I was nervous about doing it at that time, but I couldn’t have chosen a better time to do it, to be honest. It was great. And nearly all those owners are still with us today. That’s crazy. 

**Mateo Bradford-Vazquez:** Wow. That is crazy. That’s loyalty. It’s the key that shows that you’re definitely doing something right if they’re sticking around. Because changing is especially with, the way that owners are, and being unhappy seems to be quite frequent. What was one of the things that when you first got into this business, especially coming from somewhere so different than property management, right? You were in a security space a very different industry. What was one of the biggest kind of, for lack of a better word, oh shit moments that you had when you first started that just caught you off guard? 

**Adrian Johnson:** I think the, probably the thing that wasn’t probably really in our shipment, the first thing I noticed, I went to the VRMA conference. It was in Orlando in 2016. And I was like, the only properties we managed were the two that we owned. I was very green very naive in the space. It was the friendliness of everyone. Steve Schwab was doing a presentation and I was looking at different property management systems and the Streamline booth was absolutely rammed and I was struggling to actually get any, everybody Streamline was talking to all their existing vendors. Me managing two properties wasn’t really getting any attention from anybody in the hall to start off with. Steve literally grabbed me by the arm, took me down to the streamline booth, introduced me, and I got like the full pitch and I was thinking, wow, I just wasn’t used to that level of like friendliness in the security space. Everybody was very. Secretive over what they were doing. You would never talk to your competitors. And then the more I got to talk to people there, the more networking I’ve done. I’ve come away from that with a bunch of email addresses. I’ve got sample owner agreements, I got sample postcards. I was having phone calls with other property managers, obviously not on the island, but within Florida, and just couldn’t believe that was like the first Oh wow. Moment that I come up with the, oh shit moments, I think was the changeover day. It was, we used to have a cleaner that used to clean our properties. It was the work that needs to be done between 10 and four. And not that it was a disaster at the start, we’d only got a few properties, so we was able to keep it under control. But that was like that was probably the biggest shock I had was the amount to work like the military operation you need to have between when the guest leaves at 10 and the next guest checks in at four and making sure that every I is dotted and every T is crossed in every home. So that was what really got our focus at the start was that change over day. 

**Mateo Bradford-Vazquez:** It’s a whole logistics play, it’s a whole, it really is on the spot operation that you have to be clockwork.  

**Adrian Johnson:** And every guest wants to get in early and every guest is giving you pressure during the day too, getting early. But you wanna deliver that guest a property that feels that it’s been prepared for them, not that they’ve taken over from the previous guest.

**John Stokinger:** It’s managing that turn. And I don’t think enough attention is brought to that as far as when the attention is brought and it is put in the forefront of, the property manager and it’s a priority, that’s when look at the reviews. These are huge things. These aren’t small things, this attention to detail, this is first-impression stuff. This is the stuff, Hey I open that door and it smells clean. It looks clean, it’s neat. It’s tidy. Nothing bothers me, my wife more going into a beach destination sand.  

**Adrian Johnson:** That’s two grains of sand and that guest is complaining about everything all week. The fuck. This should be clean. And now I’m in, I kicked my flops off. I’m walking barefoot. And then I got that sand. I’m like, oh son. Oh my God.  

**Mateo Bradford-Vazquez:** It’s interesting you said your Oh wow Moment you and I share that. Oh wow. Moment. ’cause I came from finance and it very not open. Very not collegial. Very not the Oh hey, we’re competitors. He’s a great guy though. And you should definitely go talk and learn from him. I, that was actually something that struck me too with that, that Orlando was that my first conference as well. I didn’t know where the hell I was. It was super is this real, like a little surreal? But it was great. It’s actually one of the things that I, that really made this industry grab me. Because it is, it made me realize this hospitality has to do with people and relationships and. I really enjoyed that. I guess my question to you is do we still have that?  

**Adrian Johnson:** Do you think, oh, I think it’s actually got better if I’m honest, over the last few years, I think post Covid I think it’s got better. So I’ve got vendors that will call me now that some of the software we use, they’ve got other people looking at it. I’ll spend as much time on the phone with them, like repaying that favor that I was given. And I think the more people that you do that to, the more people that are prepared to pass that on. And I’m definitely seeing the conferences. I don’t think it’s fact, I know more people now that’s making me feel like that, but everybody just wants to help. If you’ve got a problem, there’s somebody that’s had that problem before and they’ll work with you. Never frightened to pick up the phone and discuss anything with anybody even locally on the island, say there’s, they occasionally I’ll have lunch with one of like our competitors and we’ll just talk business talk. What’s happening on the island? What’s the market like for. I would never have done that in my previous life. Insecurity. It was, this is what we’re working on. These are my secrets. I’m not telling you what we’re doing. It’s just, yeah,  

**John Stokinger:** I tend to agree with that as well. Even more recently, in my role as a director of sales, I’m still chatting with, key people our competitors, and talking to them they’re colleagues, they’re friends of mine, and we’re not sharing like, talk, n D A shit, but we’re talking industry stuff and we’re sharing ideas and we’re talking about and maybe there’s two or three of us in this software that’s Hey, what are we gonna do about what they’re doing over there? But it’s all friendly in a way that I never saw before. I came in, at the same time as Mateo. And I didn’t make much money and nothing gets my first role. It what, like the money isn’t the reason I stayed in the industry. It was the people and, I’ve worked my way up and things have turned for the much better. But it definitely wasn’t the money to getting into it. It was the people.  

**Adrian Johnson:** I’ve never had the thought, why we’re doing this. But we’ve never had, and what I would classify as a normal year, because we had, I think it was 2018 you may be aware we get red tide occasionally. Yeah. We literally had red tide for six months. So we were having guests canceling. It was, and it was nasty. Every time you went outside, you were coughing. It was, your eyes were running it, it was nasty. So we red tide in. 2018, 2019, we then had the fear of red tide because guests were not booking until last minute. They were driving down, literally. And they was calling us and saying, what’s the red tide? Okay, no red tide, we’re gonna come. And they were literally making a decision.

**John Stokinger:** Wasn’t that the same year that like this couple went swimming and like this weird brain thing happened and then they were getting like flesh-eating like skin up.  

**Adrian Johnson:** And then we got the fear of red tides. Then obviously we all know about 2020 that we all try to forget. Then 2021 was crazy. 2022 was crazy. And for us locally, our market year in 2023 as we’re outperforming where we were, same time last year, way over 20% against 2022. So this year has been insane as well. I really feel for the Fort Myers, Sanibel Captiva that could so easily, and that was, that storm was coming for us. I know fortunately for us, but very unfortunately for them it turned. But I think, not that it would’ve made any difference because you couldn’t do any preparation to really prepare the [properties to that level, to withstand that level of storm. But because everybody was saying it was coming for us, they weren’t doing the level of preparation that we were and then last minute it turned. So it really took them by surprise. Quite a bit of business. Like really like from Siesta Key North, we’ve picked up the business of where people reservations were canceled. So I think that has helped us this year as well. So it’s, it really has been a rollercoaster. There’s been so many highs and lows.

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** How do you prepare for the future with all of the climate mess and everything you hear about what’s going on down that way? Insurers leaving the state, everyone’s in fear of the next crazy hurricane season, right?

**Adrian Johnson:** Insurance is probably the biggest problem. I don’t think there’s really much you can do to prepare for the next storm. It’s obvious, as soon as you hear that there’s a potential hurricane building, you’re watching it, you’re tracking it. We have it on the TV in the office. We’re constantly getting updates from the state and from the county on what we need to be doing. We’ve got a hurricane preparation plan that we’ve got. And then when we know that there’s a storm, and if we think there’s probably even if it’s like less than 50% chance that it’s coming for us, we sit down as a group and write, this is the preparation plan. This is when we’re gonna put that plan in place and we’re out there and we are preparing.

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** Are your owners on board? Do you find a lot of pushback? Do they get input in the plan? I think this is something a lot of businesses in that area don’t talk about.

**Adrian Johnson:** Most of our owners are on board. We have called a few owners this year that really didn’t fit with our mindset. So we let those, we cut those owners loose and we let them go. And the one owner that we let go owned two nice properties but wasn’t on board with our hurricane preparation plan. She felt that we went over the top and the amount that we charged that it was really insignificant for doing that. She wasn’t really happy to pay, so we cut that owner loose. So we want owners that will work with us and we’re really are like a, your typical mom and pop shop. So it’s myself, my wife, my daughter, and my son. Obviously, we’ve got a big team around us, but we really treat our owners and we want our owners to feel like they’re part of the family. So I know that every property manager will say, we treat your owners as if it’s our own. We really think of our owners as part of our family. When they’re on the island, they’ll always stop in the office and just to say hi, just to catch up. They wanna work with us as much as we wanna work with them. So if they don’t wanna be on board with what we are doing, we can obviously discuss it. But we’ve got lots of competitors on the island. There’s probably another property manager that will be a better fit for them. And we are happy to let them go. We’ve got one owner that currently wants to do the Vrbo thing. She thinks she can do it herself. So she’s transitioning away from us. The only other times we’ve lost the property is when the property’s been sold. We’ve never had an owner that’s called me up and say, Adrian, you’re not doing what you said you would do. We move into x, y, z property.

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** That’s outstanding.

**Adrian Johnson:** We’ve cut owners loose and we’ve lost owners when the property’s been sold, but we’ve never had that conversation. I love that. And

**John Stokinger:** When I visited, I got a sense of family, literally family there. When you say your wife and your daughter and your son are there it was welcoming. It was warm, it was wonderful. And I think that’s a huge differentiator. We’ve talked about it with other good friends of ours with the Madewells’ they’re a family-run business. You could tell and feel with Auntie Belham’s up in Sevier County, what they’re doing there. It’s family and there’s a different feel. It’s a different vibe. And homeowners and guests alike wanna work and wanna stay with property management companies that, where they feel at home, where they feel wanted and welcomed and you guys are doing an exemplary job with that.

**Adrian Johnson:** Thank you. That’s what we try to do. We try, we treat our staff like really as an extension to the family. We are not corporate and when we’re interviewing for somebody, we stress. If you want anything that’s slightly corporate, you might as well leave now because you’re not gonna get corporate. Like I said at the start, we are no BS. Our language probably is not very corporate in the office. Sometimes if there’s a problem, it’s, we’ll tell people that there’s a problem, we deal with it. But if you want corporate, it’s not us. If you want a relaxed working environment where you know what you’ve got to do and you go on and do it, we try not to put any pressure on any member of staff. Then SaeBreeze is the place for you. But if you want anything that’s corporate America we’re not that company.

**John Stokinger:** That’s awesome. In visiting there and seeing what you guys are, do you guys are exploding as far as keeping things in-house. You had just added laundry when I visited and it was pretty phenomenal. You expanded into a new building, correct? Yeah. Or no. You rehabbed that building.

**Adrian Johnson:** We completely rehabbed the building. We just got under contract. We went under contract for the property just as Covid kicked off in March 2020. So going back to your question earlier, Mateo was like, the one thing was like the oh shit moment was do we do this? How long is this going on for? Do I want to be investing substantial money into a building and into a facility that we might be closed down for the foreseeable future, but we decided to, let’s do it. We need to do it. So we’ve completely remodeled the building. It was three separate units. We split it into two. The one half is our office, the second half is our commercial laundry. Before that, we bought in 2019, in late 2018, sorry. We bought the laundromat on the island because we had two and two dryers in the back of our old office. And that was just insane. Once we got up to 10 properties, you were sat there on the phone and you’ve got the washer and binging into the table to finish. We got girls working in the back folding laundry. It really was like a sweatshop. So we decided to buy the laundromat on the island. That worked at the start, but when we got to about 50 properties, we quickly outgrew the laundromat because we were having cleaners that were working on the island, bringing their laundry in to use the coin-operating machines. And our staff were trying to do our laundry in there. We realized that we needed our own dedicated commercial laundry. So yeah, that was a big investment, but it was the best decision we made. ‘Cause some people think I’m a control freak and I probably am, but if I own that business or if I control that business or employ that person direct, I can control what they’re doing and as much as I can control and manage the guest and the owner’s experience. So if I need to pull somebody off from doing something and then put them back onto something else to give that guest or that owner a better experience, we can do that. The last thing that we started was we bought all of our pool service in-house. Because when we look back at the complaints that we were getting, it was guests that were checking in. And the pool was dirty. Not that the pool was green, that there were leaves and there was debris on the bottom. So the challenge you have is the island is crazy. Over the weekend. We always describe, it’s a bit like if you go on a cruise and everybody’s trying to get off the cruise in the morning, then everybody’s trying to get back on in an afternoon. Our island’s like that. It’s only seven miles long. It’s less than half a mile wide at its widest point. And we’ve got two, two-lane bridges that everybody needs to come on and off. So it’s chaotic. So trying to get a pool guy out on a Saturday to vacuum a pool that he has already done on the Thursday, and then we’ve had a storm on the Friday was impossible. So end of last year we decided if we’re gonna do pools, we’re gonna do it properly. We bought a guy on staff, we put him through the training so he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s now certified as a pool technician, and he’s out there literally five days a week. And we do all, we service all of our pools in the week, and all he does on a Saturday is making sure that every pool where we’ve got a guest checking in, he is vacuumed and he’s clean. Then if we have a guest that calls any day of the week, now we can just send them out to vacuum that pool to give them the, again, the best experience they can possibly get. And we felt the only way to do that was to bring pool service in-house.

**John Stokinger:** Love it. It’s so smart. So you’ve added laundry, you’ve added pools, you’ve added golf carts, you’ve added construction. Tell us about SeaBreeze Construction. What is that, just, is this purpose-built stuff, or is this…?

**Adrian Johnson:** This can be anything. It can be from remodeling a kitchen to a complete custom-built home. We’ve actually got two homes; one is about to get torn down for a complete rebuild. And the other one, the foundations just got in, just starting to be blocked. And they’re custom vacation rental homes that, when they come on board, SeaBreeze Vacations will be managing them. And it’s been able to provide that complete turnkey end-to-end solution. We started doing interior design, so we had an owner that would want to change. Have the place painted. Change the blinds, change the curtains, do new flooring. We started bringing that in-house probably two years ago. Then we started to get asked for bigger projects where we needed to replace the kitchen, replace the bathroom. We needed to pull permits. I’d got a relationship with the local contractor. He actually built my house. He built for our old business, he built our office building there. He wasn’t looking to slow down, but he felt that he wanted to do something different. So we reached an agreement and we merged with… so he’s like the general contractor. I don’t really get involved too much. I probably spend probably two hours a week on that company. But it means that we can offer that complete solution to the owner. So whether you’ve got a lot of land or you’ve got a condo that you wanna update, we can do that for you.

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** I think it’s impressive. One of the things that stands out in my mind and I wanna talk to you about your strategy in a second, it seems like these things are very thought out and very thought through. But for me, it seems like your strategy around building these things internally along with your idea for scale for your business, seem to make these things work really well. Because I’ve seen other businesses try and do these things while trying to scale endlessly. Yeah. And fail miserably because they’re trying to do too much. They have the right concept in mind, but they don’t have the right idea around how to make that work for their business in a way that it’s gonna be successful and gain the ROI that makes bringing a pool house guy in-house makes sense. That makes bringing commercial laundry in-house makes sense because these things make sense if they work for your business. But they could also be very costly and That’s right. Do them correctly with profitability in mind. They could be, money pits as well. They could also sink the ship and force a lot of businesses to have to do things that aren’t good for the business long term. Talk to me about your process. Like how do you do that? How do you do that strategically?

**Adrian Johnson:** I think it really comes down to quality versus quantity. You obviously need to have enough. I couldn’t afford you to have done the in-house laundry if I’ve got 25 properties. But at a hundred properties and yes, and we do in turns in season it’s every Saturday, but out of season we’ll let people check in and out like any day of the week where we can do three, four-night stays in two of the three cities and keep that flow. Yes, I have some ideas and some days I’m not quite sure, I’ve managed to stay married for nearly 30 years because when I sit down with Kathy and I say I’ve got this idea. You see her eyes roll into the back of her head. And then we talk it through, and then we come up with, yes financially, what’s it gonna cost? What do we need to do? And I’ve had ideas that haven’t paid off. Haven’t paid off is the wrong thing to say is that we haven’t actually put into place because it wasn’t quite right either. The timing wasn’t right. The idea really wasn’t gonna deliver the results that we wanted. So it, I think it’s all about not literally shooting from the hip and like making fast decisions. It’s sitting down, thought about, think about it, look at the business plan, look at the financials, look at how that will impact our business. We’re working on a couple of other things now that will be different from what anybody else is doing on the island. And we are open to getting them in place by the end of the year. But we had the idea and we’ve been working on it all year. It’s not yeah, we wanna do this, we wanna roll this out next week. We wanna roll this out when the time is right when the marketing’s in place and everything else. So it’s about timing and we were exactly the same in our security business. We were like a, in the scale of things, like a tiny little manufacturer. But we were doing, even in the UK and in the US we were doing all of the big jobs. We were really punching well above our weight, but it was more about if we were to do this to the product, what market can we attack? And then we’d attack that market before we’d finished developing the product, and then have that product ready. So it’s really like just employing that same mentality to the vacation rental space as what we were doing with the manufacturing side. You’re just thinking.

**John Stokinger:** I always say I don’t think outside the box. I live outside the box. If somebody’s doing something, I don’t wanna do the same as them. I wanna look at, I can do that differently and potentially better.

**Adrian Johnson:** That’s why we get along so well, Adrian, you can… Can you share with us one of those ideas that you decided to not go with that you still think you don’t have to, but is there one of those ideas that you decided, eh, this may not be financially viable?

**Adrian Johnson:** The one that we haven’t gone with yet is real estate. We’ve actually got on the outside of our building, we’ve got Sea Breeze vacation rentals, and then there’s something that’s covered up, and the word that’s covered up is real estate.

**John Stokinger:** That’s crazy. I love that.

**Adrian Johnson:** At the moment that’s gonna take too much of our time. So that’s why we are not doing real estate. We do real estate for our owners and I’ve, got to have a licensed real estate agent, but we license under somebody else, but we’re not like a SeaBreeze isn’t like a full real estate broker. And that will come in the future, but that’s not coming immediately. And that side has been covered up nearly for two years. So that’s one of the things that’s there. It’s on the back burner, but now isn’t the time. Things that we need to be doing before we do.

**John Stokinger:** We’re excited to find out whatever this thing you’re working on for the end of the year. So you’ll have to clue us in when we come and crash your house party.

**Adrian Johnson:** That sounds good. I like that plan.

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** Do not let John gangster his way into your house in your piece. You married for how long? They’re very friendly. Yeah, no.

**Adrian Johnson:** John, we are honest. Believe me, if we don’t like you, you would know we don’t like you.

**John Stokinger:** That’s awesome. Love where you’re going. I love how you’ve gotten here. It’s impressive to think that this started from a vacation, or not a vacation, from a work trip that turned into six annual vacations a year to convincing the Mrs. to actually move here.

**Adrian Johnson:** That was the toughest thing I’ve ever done, I think was convincing Kathy to move as the kids got older, as Ben and Lucy were growing up they would also wanna move here and they would say, “Mom, you are the only one that’s stopping us moving.” And it wasn’t until a good friend come over with us. He arrived, he’d come to the house, he walked out back, he stood by the pool and he said, “Kathy, why the fuck do you keep going back to England?” And it was that sentence that convinced her to think about it. Then she sent me the challenge to sell the house and the business. That was like challenge accepted.**They send out. He said to talk to people like you. He said to talk to everybody or to find out what their frustrations are. And I’ll be honest, I forgot that his name was Marcus.We used to refer to him as The Warrior. The Warrior, ’cause that was the way he introduced himself.

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** *With the great hair! 

**Adrian Johnson:** When I learned that he got the hundred 75 million. I thought if I was a PMS company or somebody in this space, I’ll be a bit nervous on what he is actually planning from what he’s learned.He sat there for probably 20, 30 minutes and just listened to what we’ve gotta say. And then later that night, I saw him sat down with somebody else, probably asking them the same questions, picking their brain as well. So I think he’s actually spent a few years. From the market what people really need and to have somebody back him for that amount of money. He’s got some compelling story. He is got some compelling plan I’m just interested to see what that, that will be. And I think it will take somebody like that, or somebody else to pull some of these companies that are not part of one of the two big groups together and work closer with them to be able to provide that, that not one-stop shop, but that one platform. You just need one user interface for the guy that’s answering the phone. There’s having to click off into 20 different things to do simple tasks.* 

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** It’s gonna be super interesting because and we should take bets on how this is gonna work. Number one, is it ever gonna happen? Number two, is it gonna happen by one company? I actually think there’s gonna be some sort of third-party solution that’s gonna be the bridge that Yeah. People can log in, and keep their secrets. The bridge will translate the common API that pushes everything out..

**John Stokinger:** There already are some.

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** That are more accessible? I think that will become the norm, right?

**John Stokinger:** I’m talking to one this week.

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** I feel like that will be the adoption because honestly, the reason I think that is because it takes away that ownership part. It gives people the ability to keep what they feel is their proprietary technology and their. And it [also will allow them the space to, and allow the end user like you, Adrian, to actually get what you’re looking for and not really give a shit about the other side that these companies are trying to figure out, protect or do whatever. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, you don’t care other than the fact that you want your things to work seamlessly. That these things need to make your life easier, make your staff easier, make your training easier, make your experience easier so you can do your job better, right? So you can focus on the things that you need to focus on. And to throw a caveat in there, I think AI is gonna fuck it all up too. I think AI is gonna change the way that a lot of this shit works. And a lot of these,

**John Stokinger:** It already is, man. It’s so interesting. I forgot to mention Guesty and everything they’re doing, and they’re another powerhouse.So let’s not forget the Guesty, the Inhabit the TravelNet, and then let’s not, and Hoataway Marcus and that whole team from what I heard, and again, hearsay there was five or six, seven different companies that were, so there’s a bidding war to go ahead and to get that valuation. I’m curious to know who owns majority at Hostaway. It’s my understanding, and I’ll just say that the prior leadership no longer owns majority. If I’m wrong, please correct me, Marcus, if you’re listening, please correct me. I would like to go ahead and make it correct. But what does that mean, right? TravelNet the majority ownership is no longer TravelNet. It’s Blue Star, right? And inhabit, all these individual companies, part of Inhabit the majority ownership is not these individual companies anymore. It’s inhabit. And then, with Guesty, they raised a ton of money and they’ve acquired Kigo, so they’re a big player, but they threw a ton of money of their raise, what were they at? If I remember correctly, 110 million. I heard they threw almost half of that towards their Guesty Pay. This is separating, not, making it easier, I don’t know. There’s so much. So much.

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** Talking about technology Adrian, I think your voice is more important than John and ours. We just get to sit back and look at it. You have to be elbows deep in using these things day to day. So as these systems change, as these systems consolidate and technology becomes, more integrated and your PMS becomes more robust, right? And can do more things, right? That’s always been the ask, right? We need the PMS. That can be the one-stop shop, the one portal, right? However, that happens to help you run your business. It’s going to be interesting to see as this space condenses, what rises to the top and at the end of the day, you know it’s gonna be you. At the end of the day, Adrian, that is going to be the determining factor. It doesn’t matter what the fuck, John. And I think unless we’re managing no BS housing somewhere or no BS vacations, but I don’t think anyone’s gonna have to worry about anytime soon. But Adrian, do you, it’s interesting ’cause you hear that input in, I can hear that experience that you had with Marcus was a great guy and that approach. Do you you feel that, from the other, technology providers in this space,

**Adrian Johnson:** What I see from the technology providers is, you need to do it their way. There’s some software that we would potentially like to change out, but you talk to the vendor and it’s we operate in this way. No, we don’t operate in that way. No, we don’t have that feature. We don’t have this. We signed up with two different vendors two years ago at VRMA International in San Antonio, and they promised us features that they would add two years on. We’re still not seeing those features. We’ve invested substantial money with these two vendors and we’re still not seeing, we’ve got some of the features, but we haven’t got all of the features that they promised to deliver in the contract. It’s like their way or the highway. And I don’t think as a pm every PM business, even on the island, nobody else runs their business like us. There’s no way that even down in Siesta Key, there’s probably the next location where there’s a good number of property managers. It’s a completely different market. Their mon, their businesses will be running a different way. A PM can’t run their business the way the software has been designed. And a lot of these software companies, software engineers that are making these decisions, not property managers

**John Stokinger:** What’s interesting about that, I came on with Direct, five months ago, six months ago now, I spent my first two months just working on, gap analysis where Direct is compared to the other software, what do we need to go ahead and add What features do property managers, want and need that, that we are not delivering on?To be able to compete and offer a property management solution that works for everybody, not just a certain mindset. So I tried to come in with a different approach. Built an advisory board where we flew advisors from different software that are sick of their software. And met with them, and we had investors and current Direct users and really sat down to understand their wants and needs and their frustrations with their current solution. Showed them our roadmap, where we’re going, and to pick their brains and say, Hey, if you were to build this, how would you build it? And can we deliver on that tomorrow? No. Can we deliver it on it by the end of the year? Most of it it’s pretty exciting where we’re going. So I think it’s a comparable approach to what Marcus is doing or was doing. And he is sitting down and he’s listening. We give a shit. I think that when you’re small and you’re lean and you have the ability to pivot and you’re not. Owned by a ton of money that came in an investment group that is, forcing your hand no, you gotta do this ’cause I need to go ahead. We need to see some sort of return by here. Then you can actually make decisions that can move the needle for property managers, not just for software. And I think that’s what’s gonna drive and potentially change the industry for the better. We’ll see we’re trying really freaking hard to do it.

**Adrian Johnson:** Yep. And I think that’s what the industry needs. I think it needs, again, software companies that think outside the box. Like at VRMA, you walk down the aisle and it’s like same shit, different booth and everybody is telling you that they’re better than the guy down the street. It’s like websites drive me crazy In the VM space A custom site, as they call it, but it’s not a custom site, it’s just a modified template. So everybody’s website looks, feels the same. I’ve got some frustrations around the websites in the VM space. And I think people are just providing the system or the software that they think that people need. And I think because the VM space, everybody is so relatively new, and I was like this at the start, you see something shiny, you run off in that direction. And the ones that are running in that direction, everybody else is like a sheep and they just follow. So you have a vendor that’s doing a good job with marketing and getting the attention that gets the shiny people and then the sheep follow and then all of a sudden everybody’s using that same system, that same solution. That’s not necessarily the best, but they’ve done the best job at marketing and they’ve attracted the people. And I definitely see that. I’m more interested in talking to the vendors where they haven’t got 50 people stood around the booth. I wanna see what they’re doing. That’s different.

**John Stokinger:** Hey, to be fair though, that booth that had 50 people around it that’s when Schwabe went ahead and grabbed you and pulled you in.

**Adrian Johnson:** and that’s when I said I was like that shiny person at the start. That was me then. And our PMS, I’m very happy with it. And it would take a lot for me to move. It would, yeah. For me to move would be, that would be. I’ll be honest, I would be nervous sitting down with the team here to say, I’ve had this idea, I wanted to change the PMS they’d probably start throwing things at me. To be honest.*

**John Stokinger:** It’s that other, conversation with your wife that you’re really nervous about. Yeah. Yep. Yep. It probably be harder to convince her to switch software than it would be to convince her to move from the uk. 

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** Honestly, I want John to just try because I wanna see you throw things at him. That would be super enjoyable for me. we can’t highlight enough. One of the things that you said in terms of the listening aspect of hearing what’s going on, I think there is a lot of, FOMO culture in our space. Like the look at the bright shiny objects, not look at necessarily what’s right for you specifically and for your business and. I think our challenge to the other side too is to the vendor side that we all come from is listen, right? Listen to your customers, your potential customer base. Like we understand there’s guide rails and things that you have to follow, but businesses who, have to force their customers into doing it business their way. You know how that works historically, as soon as they’re able to break free and somebody provides a different option like there’s no reason to stay. Right? There’s no stickiness, there’s no loyalty. Especially if you have to tell somebody it’s our way or the highway.* 

**John Stokinger:** Peace out. 

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** No, it’s like an abusive relationship, right? Like at that point it becomes an abusive relationship and you’re like, how do I get out of this? How do I get outta here? And as soon as that door opens and you can run to freedom 

**Adrian Johnson:** you go 

**John Stokinger:** Adrian, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate you joining us. 

**Adrian Johnson:** *hank you. I’ve enjoyed it.

**John Stokinger:** It is been a lot of fun. And please send my love to your family. And excited to see you at your vacation rental in Orlando. We’ll bring lots of people and 

**Adrian Johnson:** That’s the idea. 

**John Stokinger:** You’ve been fantastic and excited for you to be able to join the pod. 

**Adrian Johnson:** Yeah, no, thank you for inviting me. We’ve been trying to do it for a while. I’m able to make our schedules work. 

**Mater Bradford-Vazquez:** We’ll be watching you go from here. And I know this is not the last time we’ll connect,