IAM295- Entrepreneur Revolutionizing the Vacation Rental Industry

Dubbed the vacation rental gurus, Wendy Schultz and her husband Scott, are revolutionizing the vacation rental industry (Airbnb)! After leaving a high-stress corporate job in healthcare over 5 years ago to pursue her dream of owning a business, Wendy has developed a company that incorporates her love for vacations and real estate known as The Simple Life Hospitality. Her team teaches investors how to get started in vacation rentals and offers consultation from property selection to remodeling/furnishing to ongoing property management.

• CEO Hack: Entrepreneur lifestyle where I'm location and time independent
• CEO Nugget: Be open to opportunities, go with the flow and enjoy the journey
• CEO Defined: Visionary of the company, creator and leader

Website: http://thesimplelifehospitality.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheSimpleLifeHospitality/
Instagram: @vacationrentalgurus

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Intro 0:02

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 0:30

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresham from the I AM CEO Podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Wendy Schultz of The Simple Life Hospitality. Wendy, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Wendy Schultz 0:40

Oh, thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Gresham Harkless 0:42

No problem. Super excited to have you on and what I wanted to do, which is read a little bit more about Wendy so you can hear about all the awesome things that she's doing. And dubbed the vacation rental gurus, Wendy Schultz and her husband Scott, are revolutionizing the vacation rental industry (Airbnb)! After leaving a high-stress corporate job in healthcare over 5 years ago to pursue her dream of owning a business, Wendy has developed a company that incorporates her love for vacations and real estate known as The Simple Life Hospitality.

Her team teaches investors how to get started in vacation rentals and offers consultation from property selection to remodelling/furnishing to ongoing property management. Wendy, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Wendy Schultz 1:26

Let's do that.

Gresham Harkless 1:26

Let's do it. So the first question I had was a here a little bit more about what I call your CEO story and what led you to start your business.

Wendy Schultz 1:35

So I always knew that I wanted to start a business, I grew up with a father who was a business owner. And I quickly discovered that I'm not the best at following rules. I didn't, I didn't really like to have anyone telling me how to spend my day, how to spend, take a lunch break when I had to take a lunch break and things like that. And I was often having to I was always forward-thinking.

So I often had to try to convince an entire organization to move in a direction that I could foresee was the right way. But they couldn't yet. So it was it could get pretty exhausting. So that was you know, a course of Gosh, how many years was I in corporate pi, about six teen years maybe. And I just really got burned out. And I decided that I wanted to start a business wasn't really sure what I wanted to start, I just knew I need to get out of there.

And I had originally started as a vacation rental or I can say vacation home decor type store. When I started it mine eventually evolved to a brick-and-mortar and then later decided that I liked vacation rentals when we purchased the property for us to stay in while we were working at the store it was 30 minutes away. And so we didn't want to go back and forth to the store.

And we just want to play this day. And we decided that we really liked renting it out a lot more than we'd like giving up that money and staying there for ourselves. But we ended up getting kind of in a backwards way into vacation rentals. And then people started asking us to help them with their vacation rentals. And it really snowballed from there to the point where we ended up closing our store to just focus solely on vacation rentals.

Gresham Harkless 3:36

Nice I absolutely love that and I love how you know how you never know which way you know life will take you or business will take you but it seems like he just kept kind of you know testing out different things and then starting to kind of listen to what kind of felt natural what could establish yourself and have legs and you kind of went with it.

Wendy Schultz 3:56

Absolutely that is really been one of the biggest things is that I was really open to the ideas and I also wasn't I I also wasn't afraid to try something I've never done before. And that's something that a lot of people admire about me and also think I'm crazy for because I will start I'll start new businesses I never had a retail store before I opened one I'd never done a hotel remodelling project before I bid on one and got it I had never owned vacation rental I'd never managed for anybody else and a lot of people that would stop them and they don't have experience and I'm more of a figured out and at times I've been wrong but usually I can draw upon skills I've learned in other roles to figure out something new.

Gresham Harkless 4:50

Yeah, and it's funny you say that because I feel like true power is always knowing thyself and understanding how best you can kind of learn things or how best you move forward I feel like I'm sometimes Jump In The Deep End type, and figure out how you can swim. Sometimes I have not to swim too well. Other times I have a lot better than I expected I would. But a lot of times that action is kind of like what entrepreneurs and business owners kind of need to thrive on.

Wendy Schultz 5:14

For sure, especially if you're looking to put something that's new and innovative out in the world, you can't have experience doing something that's brand new. So you have to venture out a little farther, and I didn't, I would say that the muscle that kind of that grew up wasn't something that I started out being like, hey, let's try something like this, I would put my toe in the water. And that was, you know, I didn't, I didn't die. So I'm gonna go a little farther, a little farther, a little farther. And now the risks that people see me take are massive to them. But it wasn't like I just started this. The first day I started my business, it took a while to evolve to this.

Gresham Harkless 5:54

Yeah, and that's a really great point, it's all kind of relative because a lot of times if somebody who's not even anywhere near the pool, they're not looking at water at all, they're gonna see taking a massive jump. And in reality, you know, you had your progression on what you did that kind of test that out to make that happen. So I definitely appreciate you for sharing that. And I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper with simple life hospitality to hear a little bit more about what you're doing for your clients and what you feel kind of sets you guys apart.

Wendy Schultz 6:20

Sure, so simple life hospitality started off as a vacation rental property management company. So, we do full-service property management for people who have vacation rentals, Airbnb, VRBO, whatever you want to call it, short-term rentals and other terms. And so what we do is we will help with guest bookings and interactions, and help the guests while they're on site.

Basically, if somebody owns a vacation property or short-term rental property, we basically take care of everything that they need, so that they can enjoy their property without having to work at it. So it's really passive for our owners. And over time, discovered that a lot of people were really interested in this area because Airbnb has been a very big topic in the market. And people are really intrigued by it, especially real estate investors who have a number of my circles. And so they really wanted to learn about it.

So basically, we ended up taking what we've learned over time and putting it into a consulting-type role package that people can purchase. And they can, we can help them pick out a pot of property, we can help them, get it remodelled, and get the permits and licenses and get everything running. So basically, if someone's interested in that property, we can help them get completely set up.

And then we also started with a kind of a DIY thing for the people who really want to learn the process but don't need don't necessarily want the hands-on help. We've started a course for them to learn how to do this. And the main difference for us is that property management is kind of an old school thing and in a lot of areas, it's still you know, you go to an office and you pick up a key or sometimes it's a rent linens, you have to pay by tack.

There are just various things that are really antiquated and what we want to do with coming as a fresh new property management company that's going to really revolutionize the vacation rental industry and help make up property owners a lot more money than they're making currently.

Gresham Harkless 8:44

Nice I absolutely love that and I think that you know that when there's true innovation just as we kind of spoke about at the beginning you know, sometimes you need that fresh mentality or the fresh eyes to an industry that maybe you know is a little bit more antiquated as you said and can definitely use some change in some revolutionising

Wendy Schultz 9:02

Yeah, cuz I think there's been a lot of revolutionising by having Airbnb. That's pretty, pretty advanced. But there are people who don't want to necessarily manage your own properties. So we're trying to incorporate the Airbnb platform, the VRBO platforms, and other you know, social media bookings and things like that. Really, you're utilizing today's technology and putting it into a package so that people can have a property that they don't have to manage themselves, but yet incorporate everything that a modern-day traveller really wants.

Gresham Harkless 9:36

Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. And this might be an app or book or habit that you have, but it's something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Wendy Schultz 9:46

I've really embraced the kind of a lifestyle entrepreneur so I try to whenever I'm putting my businesses together and how I think about my business and trying To make it so that it's location dependent, or location, independent time, free time freedom, and that I can basically work whenever and wherever I want.

So what I try to do, as I'm really modelling after entrepreneurs who are not saying work-life balance, it's more kind of like work-life integration, how can I take something and we make money on something we love to do, you know, vacation rentals, we get, we can stay there and get to you enjoy the property ourselves. But yet, you know, do some work there while we're there.

And, our girls, we have two daughters, and they enjoy going and looking at properties to learn able to incorporate them and get there. It just did. In their mind. One of my daughters wants to become an interior designer after all the different things we get to do.

Gresham Harkless 10:50

Yeah, like Tim Ferriss, two, four-hour workweek, yes, people like that. Yeah, a lot of times you forget that you can kind of build the life that you want, you know, with your business. And I love that phrase work-life integration, whether than balance, because a lot of times when you're passionate about something, you build something around it, and you don't necessarily want to get away from it. But you want to make sure that it works in alignment with everything you want, in all your goals, whether that'd be personal or professional.

So I love that. Now, I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice. Or if you can happen to be a time machine, what would you tell your younger business self?

Wendy Schultz 11:23

So I'm telling myself this all the time is, to be open to the opportunities and that sometimes what seems like a bad thing happening or adversity is actually the springboard to something much more amazing. And just to really go with the flow and, and enjoy the journey, as much as the destination, I still am consistent, consistently growing, I'm still consistently having to remind myself to I'm still getting coached at, hey, you know, look, it's literally just an hour ago, I was on with my coach, he's like, go back and look at different times in your life when you thought things were, like bad or things weren't going to work out and, and that they worked out.

And that's really been, I think a driver for me is when I'm when I'm going into something new and scary. I will go back and say, You know what, I don't know what I was doing back then. And I survived. And it turned out really well. Or, you know, that didn't work out. But it actually ended up being much better in the long run. And what ended up working out was far better than I had imagined. So I think just really not being so rigid in how things have to be, and being open to the various opportunities that are presented to you. I think that's it.

Gresham Harkless 12:51

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, sometimes you never know where life will take you, but just kind of have to flow with it and understand that sometimes we don't want it to go the way it goes. And I think most you know, entrepreneurial type people would definitely want to be able to say direct as much as possible and be in control. But sometimes it happens the way it should.

And there's a reason for that and just kind of go with it, go with the flow, so to speak. So I love that. And now I want to ask you my absolute favourite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're all gonna have different quote-unquote, CEOs on the show. So Wendy, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Wendy Schultz 13:24

For me being a CEO is to be really the visionary of the company being the one who is driving the ship in a big vision, but not necessarily getting into the nitty gritty weeds, which has been a time difficult for me to not want to get into the weeds, but it's really, it's really being the leader of a revolution and creating a company. That's something that doesn't exist out there.

And it's important, and it's, it's important to create, but it's not been done before. And I as a CEO, I am building my team constantly. I've gotten new people on board. And I've been teaching them and showing them the vision and to see them develop as employees and to be able to take initiative on certain things that I've directed as a vision but they are able to take initiative and then go execute has been really very rewarding.

Gresham Harkless 14:38

Yeah, absolutely. And I love that and it kind of seems like it's built around your business and all the entrepreneurship that you've been doing, you know from the beginning, and I definitely appreciate that definition. So what I wanted to do was pass you the mic so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and our listeners know and then of course how best they can get a hold of you.

Wendy Schultz 14:58

Let's see here. What else would I like to know, I would say that you should really just go for it and not be caught up in not knowing how to do something. And not having figured it all out yet. As for myself, you can get a hold of me at simpleliferentals.com.

And if you want to contact Us, you can get a hold of us and learn a little bit more about our, our property management or our properties you can book and stay in. And we also recently launched a course that teaches you how to get started and vacation rentals. And if that's of interest to you, please go ahead and contact us and we will be happy to send that over to you. We actually have a free webinar on that too. So if you're paying or like what is this all about? We can get you hooked up with that as well.

Gresham Harkless 15:57

Nice. I truly appreciate you for your time today and for sharing that with us when he will make sure to have those links in the show notes as well. But I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Wendy Schultz 16:07

Thanks, Gresham. So nice talking with you.

Outro 16:09

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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