How to Set Goals for your Airbnb Management Business (and Why They’re CRUCIAL)

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Hey there, everyone. My name is James and in today's video, I want to talk to you about how to build a strong foundation for your Airbnb management business.

So in today's training, and I know I know, I know what a lot of you guys are thinking is like, when are we going to get to the meat and potatoes of things because I know that a lot of people are really interested in what's going to come tomorrow.

And the day after here, I'm going to be releasing videos coming out here that are going to talk about exactly how to do client attraction, how to actually convert clients and get them into meetings with us and then how to get those properties on our management. Those are the sort of sexy topics that people love to talk about.

But it's really important that before you start building any business, you build it on a strong foundation. I always like to remind people that you know, client attraction client conversion, optimizing the performance of your properties, you know, automating the day to day operations of the business.

That's very much if you envision it that's very much like the the actual framework of a house and putting the walls on the house and then putting some home automation Software inside the house. So you've got your smart lights and everything else right? Now, if you go and build that if you start building a frame to your house, you put the walls on, you put the roof on, you put it on a smart home automation, but you neglected to build the foundation for the house, then all of that's going to be for nothing.

Because all of that is going to come crashing down the first time a storm hits, you know, the the things are going to start to shift and move. And within a couple of years, your whole house is going to be falling apart. There's just no strong foundation tying everything together.

And so building a business is much like building a house in that way. If you go and you strap on all these things to optimize your performance to really ramp up your client conversion, you know, to automate the day to day operations of the business but you haven't built it on a strong foundation, then your business is slowly going to become more and more difficult to operate. It's going to start falling apart. And before you know it, you're going to have a massive business on your hands.

So the most important thing that you need to do to just lay out that strong solid foundation. There's really Two things and follow with that. Number one is to just make sure that you have clear goals in mind, I'm going to tell you a story about exactly why this is so important and how to do this effectively. And number two is to have the right mental frameworks and mindset instead of just sort of frameworks overall around your business so that you're constantly improving on every area of the business.

And you get sort of a flywheel effect where the more you grow your business, the better it gets. So to start off with, I want to talk about goal setting. And I know this is a bit of a cliche topic, and a lot of you probably think about this and you just think about you hear the words coming out of my mouth and you already think okay, I already know what that is. I know how to set goals.

Why don't you to watch a video on setting goals. And I'm telling you right now, if you can't take a few minutes, set aside a few minutes to really learn about the difference that it makes to set goals effectively and why you need to and just try on that hey, maybe you don't know this yet. I guarantee you you will not be able to be successful with your business.

So if you want to learn about how to actually grow a successful Airbnb management business You're going to want to satisfy these couple minutes is all it's going to take to really learn this effectively.

And so I'll tell you about when I started my Airbnb management business, and I had these really loose kind of goals, I thought, well, I want to get to 10 properties, maybe 20, I want to earn some good income from it. And I started growing the business. And sure enough, you know, I had the right strategies, I developed the right strategies, I should say, around client traction around client conversion, I started to grow the business and I got some momentum.

And you can certainly do that with some pretty ambiguous goals. But where it becomes an issue is I started praying, I started to come across different opportunities. Like for example, I met this one woman who I started managing one of her properties and I started managing another of her properties. And then all of a sudden, she came to me with an opportunity to buy this 30 unit property with her and just kind of start managing it sort of like a motel type of thing. And at face value, it looked like a really intriguing opportunity.

And I have this other property owner that I was meeting with that wasn't really a great fit, but I thought, well, maybe I can diversify. And I can kind of start managing for someone who's got like a vacation property outside of the city, even though primarily I focus on real estate investors inside of the city, maybe that'll work out, I'm going to give it a shot because it's an opportunity.

And isn't that so true of so many businesses that when we start going, we start picking up some early momentum, we start uncovering all these little opportunities everywhere, right? Because the more active you get, the more momentum you build up in your business. It's not uncommon at all, for you to start building up momentum, building up some referrals and start getting some opportunities coming across your desk.

And then coming to find out if you kind of fast forward that timeline by about six months, I realized that even taking this time, I didn't even end up bringing any of those 30 properties on or managing those 30 listings and that sort of motel motel style type listing. But I realized that I've been investing hours and hours every week in trying to get this thing to come to fruition, trying to work out the logistics of it.

Because in reality having that type of a property management system is very, very different from managing properties for a real estate investor and a standalone properties. And it's not that I couldn't have made money, it's that it would have distracted a lot. And it was already distracting a lot from my core focus. And so my business growth, otherwise In the meantime, had slowed down almost to a halt. I'd stopped growing.

And then you know, this property that was outside of the city, I did take that one on under management. And wouldn't you know, that I was having a whole bunch of issues with it, because the property owner just wasn't really a good fit. It wasn't really in alignment.

And so the things that they needed from us were just different from what we were doing for other property owners and so we were constantly having issues constantly having the property owner be upset constantly having us be upset, and so it was kind of turning out to be a lose lose more than it was a win win.

And so that's why I always say that step number two it after right after building your niche, what after figuring out exactly who you want to serve and how you want to serve them is to set clear goals. Enough set really clear goals. For exactly how many properties you want to have it, imagine what types of criteria you have for your clients.

Because again, this isn't the type of business that we want to grow by the same, we're going to be everything to everyone and I want to come and take whatever I can get. The reality is we're going to start building momentum. And we're going to have an influx of clients coming to us if we use the right systems.

And then we want to be selective about picking the clients that are the best fit for us, so that we can have a streamlined business and accomplish our goals with the least amount of effort possible. We don't want to have a business that manages 40 properties just for the sake of managing, you know, 40 properties, we want to serve a clear goal that we have.

Whether that's $5,000 a month in income, whether that's $10,000 a month in income, where that's the amount of hours that you want to work in a week, you want to clearly define that goal and then take the path of least resistance to get there trying to reach that goal through the path of least resistance when you don't even have a clear idea of what the goal is, is like saying that you want to get to Italy and then saying okay, well what's the issue? Easiest way to get there.

But then you subtract out the you know, you want to get to Italy. Now, I know I want to get somewhere, well, do you go by plane? Do you go by boat? Do you go by car, and you don't even know that you want to get to Italy. As soon as you give that destination a name, as soon as you clarify exactly where it is, you realize really quickly that hey, getting there, right boats gonna take a long time, I can't possibly get there by car, I need to take an airplane to get there.

But if you don't have an idea of where you actually want to go, then figuring out the right vehicle to get you there as quickly and as seamlessly as possible. It's gonna be really challenging to do. And then the other thing that you really want to work on the second thing that I mentioned, is your mental framework, your mindset around things.

Again, moving into the topics, the sexy ones that we're going to talk about in a minute here on the channel. In the next couple of videos I'm going to be releasing, are you talking about client conversion client attraction, and I always like to remind people that that's a game of numbers. You are going to be getting people saying no, you know, you're going to reach out to people who aren't interested in meeting with you.

You're going to Sit down and meet with people who are interested having you manage their property. And the reality is if you have the right system in place, then you can be converting 50 to 80% of the clients that you meet with, you can be meeting with the right people and have a streamlined process for setting up more appointments with them.

So that you're bringing on, you know, five, eight properties for every 10 properties that you meet with. But the only way to do that is to have what I call constant, never ending innovation. You have to have a flywheel built so that you're constantly taking feedback from everything that you're every meeting, you're getting every interaction you have with every property owner.

And so what this looks like in a nutshell, you have to have the right mental frameworks, you have to have the right habits, the right mindset built up so that every single time that someone says no, you take that feedback and you learn from it, and that's a lot easier said than done. I know that seems like a really simple concept. But that's just one example of where that exists.

And then there's every single other area of your business. For example, if you have operations, you just look at operations. On any business in general, what happens when you add more clients to the mix? You know, typically you have more clients and that creates more headache, you know, your average property management business, they are limited in their growth because as they bring on more properties under management, it creates more headaches, it creates more work to do.

And that makes the service diminish overall, your service gets worse and worse, the more clients you bring on, because you have less time to dedicate to those clients. And so what you'll find if you're ever on the customer side of things, if you're the property owner, and you start working with someone having the manager property, when you're the first or second or third property they manage, things might be really good. But then as they start to grow their business, and now suddenly they've got 1015 or 20 properties under management, then things start to fall apart, you start to get a worse service.

And so you start to get really dissatisfied. And that's why a lot of property management companies tend to have a growth and then they start kind of plateauing and even declining. Because Even though they're growing and bring on new property owners, their current property owners, their old property owners are starting to leave them because they're dissatisfied, the service isn't as good as it used to be.

And so you have to have systems in place. So that the opposite of that happens in your business. You have to have the right systems and strategies in place set up so that things aren't reliant on your time so that you have the right frameworks built and the right systems with your team with all of your processes, so that the more clients you get on, your business actually improves and gets better and your clients experience even better service offering.

Because the reality is if you really think about if you really kind of zoom out and look at it from a bird's eye view, as you get more clients, you're also getting more practice. You're getting more feedback on what works and what doesn't. You're getting a lot more experience with your clients, you're just managing their problems solving their problems, and you can start figuring out other little problems that you can help them to solve and charge even more and offer an even more valuable service for that.

You're getting all the right ingredients coming in to make your service even more appealing to the printers that you work with. The reality is though, most businesses just aren't set up to actually capitalize on that additional information. And so the opposite happens where the business shrinks or starts to plateau over time.

And so there's some really core interesting strategies you can implement in any business, especially in your Airbnb management business, that will help you to actually take all those ingredients that are coming in that should help you improve and actually leverage them to level up your business and provide an even higher level of value to your customers and be able to charge more for your services.

So again, if you want to learn more about all those different frameworks, how you can apply them to every area of the business, whether it's cleaning, whether it's guest communication, whether it's pricing, that's a huge one. And that's a way that you can earn way more money without even charging your clients more because you're earning a percentage, you know, how do you actually use all that data that you're getting to increase your pricing strategy, improve it, build upon it.

If you want to learn more about this step by step strategies that we have for each area of the business, how to make sure you create that flywheel so that the more your business grows, the better it gets. And you want to figure out, you know what the right frameworks are to build that foundation for your business, then check out the link in the description below.

That's gonna link you to our free training, again, totally free. And we're gonna walk through step by step, how we set those things up, how we set up that framework, that foundation, so your business is constantly improving on itself. And so you're providing an even better service to your clients, the more that you grow the business.

So again, if you want to go in depth on that, you want to really learn the step by step systems do it, then check out that link in the description below. Until then, I'll see you in the next video.