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A podcast for Casago homeowners by the Partners of Casago. Learn about our programs, market updates, and the local heroes in your market.
Speaker: Hey, welcome to Keynotes.
I'm your host, Steve Schwab.
I'm here today with Mike Mears.
Uh, I've known Mike Mears
for a long time now.
He's been in the industry for, uh,
a couple decades now, and comes from
a background of being a professional
musician and an entertainer.
He's been working in the OTA side,
and even in the AI portions of the
industry, and he's moved over to
the staffing side of the business,
which is a real curiosity for me.
I'm not quite sure why he's decided to
do that, but we're about to find out.
Mike, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Hey, Steve.
Always good to chat.
How you been?
Speaker: Great.
Saw you in London and thought
that we should get you on the
podcast to learn about t- your new
direction in the industry, and just
wanted to find out more about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, it's always good to
be a passing ship with Steve
Schwab, the USS Steve Schwab.
We're always passing-
Yeah ⦠back and forth, right?
Yeah, it's, it's been quite a journey
the last year or so on everything
from just what the market has done
and what technology has done to my own
personal journeys too, and ended up
landing with Ari over at Extendteam.
And funny enough, just like knowing
you for a long time, I've actually
known Ari for a long time too.
My first experience with him was back
when I think he was, like, 21 or 22,
and he took a bunch of us when I was
at Expedia to Universal Studios, and
that was my first experience with Ari.
So we've- Yeah
kept in touch over the years.
Speaker: So you and I, uh, met while
you were originally with the OTAs-
Speaker 2: That's
Speaker: right ⦠at Expedia Group.
And I think you were actually,
I think you were actually my
advisor at one point, right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Yeah.
I was your account manager
for a little while.
Uh, I think it was around
the time when you hadâ¦
I'm trying to remember, maybe 150
units, 200 units, something like that.
And, and I remember a lot of phone
calls of just late night stuff going
on, and just having to go scrub
toilets, and just all the things.
Yeah.
Just constant process, and you just
getting your hands in the middle of
everything, and it always impressed me to
have a leader like that would put their
hands in the middle of, of their business.
It's more rare than you think.
Speaker: I, I appreciate that, Mike.
I remember having some really great
conversations with you back then.
You've moved from the supply side,
or excuse me, the demand side of the
equation to working then on a private OTA.
That's right.
And that went on for a little
while, then you moved into AI-
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm
Speaker: and built a few AI tools, and
then to Extend team, and now you're the
global head of revenue at Extend team.
But you got there with Ari through
some of the tools you built, and you've
brought some of that to Extend team.
What did you do, and
why was that important?
Speaker 2: One of the things that's
become really important to me, and
even the last time we chatted it was
still important, was to be involved
with something that was people first.
The more that I spent time in this
industry over the years and whatnot, and
saw people's lives change, saw property
managers provide for their families.
Uh, I saw the panic that they had
whenever technology would happen
quickly, and there wasn't somebody
there to sit them down and be like,
"It's okay, let's talk through it.
Let's figure it out."
And that just really moved me over
the last few years to continue those
types of journeys, and part of that
was with talking about the AI product
that I put out, which was theâ¦
It's basically a vacation rental
library for anybody who's trying
to start up a vacation business.
It's not there to be there for the super
pros that have been there for 20 years,
but quite frankly, there's people in the
space that are just getting started, and
they don't know what quality means, and I
wanna help them get that started so that
we have better quality in our industry.
So it's people first.
It's teaching.
It's educating.
It's doing things that matter, that
allow people to provide for their
families, or have a future forward.
They don't know where to turn.
Here's a centralized way to do it.
The same kind of philosophy tied me to
Ari on this particular project going
into Extend team because as Extend team
for years and years have been a staffing
service, they hire physical staff to go
with a physical property manager, right?
It's a hiring VC call center type set up.
But what's interesting about all of
it is that we've hit an age now where-
Y- you can find good ways to utilize
and create high quality with those
people that you're using, and utilize
AI at the same time to take care of
things like remedial tasks and whatnot.
And so one of the big changes that the
company was making as I was entering was
going into what they are calling a shared
services model, which basically allows
you to have both the human feel on things
that matter and things that need to have
a phone call, and things like door locks,
pool heat, what time is check-in and
check-out can be handled by AI so that the
response time for the guest is very quick.
And that's the biggest thing, right, is
that your response time, your follow-up
and whatnot is what leads to better
reviews, to better quality scores,
which ranks you up on the OTAs, yada.
The snowball just continues to go, right?
And so coming into this product, I
saw an opportunity to do two things.
One, continue the human element,
which is important for me.
But B, also add an extra spin to this to
where we can use our internal employees
who are already trained, and use them
to plug them in and be- and create a
plug and play solution that makes it
easier for people who are not looking
to interview, not looking to hire
staffing, to actually have a solution
that already has it all built in.
So it's a plug and play type of scenario.
And so I've been over there with the
team working on that and creating the
charge over the last 30 days, and been
there for about 30 days now, and I'm
just seeing some amazing results out
of this, and seeing that the market is
really ripe for something like this.
That ease of use piece is so
huge right now, as you see.
Speaker: Mike, do you think
that with the rise of AI that
staffing companies are at risk?
And what is that risk?
And then how is Extend Team trying to
solve that problem and create value
with the humans versus the AI and then
working that entire ecosystem together?
Speaker 2: It's been really interesting.
I, uh, had a hypothesis walking into
this that that human layer was gonna
be the differentiator between a lot
of the market and how it's being
approached with AI response and
guest services and communication.
And that has rung true, especially we've
had three trade shows in the last month
that I've been there, and at all three
of them, one of the major differen-
differentiators with Extend Team that got
people to go was, yes, AI can do a lot.
AI can do up to 80% of everything that
you need it to do, which is great.
As long as you tell it what to do and you
load in those instructions from, let's
say, your property management software,
it can rock and roll for you really.
The problem becomes the, the
family that's locked out with
a three-year-old at 3:00 AM.
AI does not do a good job
on that kind of stuff.
It's not empathetic.
It doesn't know how to really answer it.
It doesn't know how to pick
up the phone and call the fire
department and the things like that.
And so having that little extra layer
right there goes along a very big
narrative that I've heard all year,
and I heard again in London, which was
there-- the best way to get quality out
of the technology that we have moving
forward is to have a marriage between
what should be human led, managed,
versus what should technology take over.
One of the things that I heard Jensen
Huang from NVIDIA say, which I thought was
really interesting, was that the future of
jobs, and this is me just spitballing and
saying this, but the future of jobs in, in
the next three to five years are not gonna
be about general operational statuses.
It's gonna be about AI directors and
AI managers, people who know how to
talk like a human, know how to code
like a human, know how to prompt like
a human, and then having that human
element in the middle to, let's say,
play traffic cop on the quality, right?
And so that's what Extend Team is
doing really good and really well
with right now, and again, very low
amount of competition in the space that
actually offers all these little pieces.
And so it's an interesting offering,
and it's definitely turned some heads.
Speaker: Yeah.
I don't know if you've had the opportunity
to, in London to listen to Graham Donahue
and myself discuss AI on the main stage.
For the listeners, if you guys haven't
had a chance to listen to that, I think
it was a really great discussion with
Kate from Guesty and Graham, who's
Europe's largest short-term rental
operator, and then myself on stage.
But we talked about AI and how making
sure that as you're using AI, the
interactions between you and the guests
don't become arm's distance, and that the
human element's still gonna be important.
When I'm thinking about- Either
staffing or I'm going to use AI,
where should I split the difference?
If I'm thinking should I go with Extend
Team or should I just Build a artifact
in Claude and run automations and agents.
Where do I make the decision
to either call Extend Team or
start vibe coding on Claude?
Speaker 2: That's a good point, 'cause
there's plenty of vibe coding you can
do nowadays- Yeah ⦠that's for sure.
It really comes down to
qualification and size and whatnot.
A big organization that's got a bunch of
internal people managing, and they've been
able to, let's say, define their roles
and they're not having to do four or five
different things and it's running rather
efficiently, then getting a piece of AI
and just running the tool like that on
the backend for just normal operational
day-to-day makes a lot of sense.
There's no need to have to
jump into that boat, for sure.
But if you're small or if you're
scaling or if you're in a market
that has high churn when it comes to
just support in general, I takeâ¦
When I think about high churn, I think
about mountain towns and whatnot, where
you've got a lot of your support living
two hours down the mountain, right?
'Cause it's too expensive to live in town.
You can think of Breckenridge
or places like that, right?
It's very hard to keep butts in seats,
long story short, for a long time.
They may be only good for seasonal,
they may only be good for six to eight
months, or a lot of times they're very
young and they're going to school.
They go to college and they
leave, and then you've got this
gap now of going, "What do I do?"
And that is why the shared services
model is so interesting, is because that
actually ticks off of our own tree of
employees internally, and you're not
having to go interview or go chase people.
And so that whole hire and fire
scenario that can, kinda scares
everybody when you're talking
about, did I hire somebody good?
Are they gonna quit on
me during high season?
That kinda thing.
That won't happen here because this
product, again, is a plug-and-play
solution, and it gets away from
the whole hourly push and pull,
and it's just a subscription.
So it's very simple to understand.
It's a per-property thing,
and you can jump in.
And again, it takes that whole
stress, especially off of a small
or a medium-sized manager, where
they don't have to go looking for
people all the time, hire and fire.
They can even use us
seasonally if they want to.
And so it's really just there to be a
complement to their business and kinda run
that orchestration layer more efficiently.
Speaker: How long does it usually
take a small to mid-sized operator
to get onboarded with Extend Team
if they're going to be doing,
just say call center services?
And maybe there's a different
onboarding time and process if
they're handling statements.
Can you walk me through the different
pillars or segments that you guys offer?
Sure.
And, and then how long does it take to
onboard, and then what are the economics?
What does it co- You said it
was on a per-unit basis, or
is there a per-hour basis?
How does it work?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really great.
So to give you some comparison, so
when it was just staffing, meaning
going and interviewing, finding
somebody for somebody, and putting
it all together, that, that whole
process would take anywhere from
about 30 to 45 days to stand up.
That's the old model, right?
Going into this product with
everything already warmed up, we
can have a property manager with
100 plus units or whatnot onboarded
anywhere from between five to 10 days.
It just depends on how proactive they
are to connecting, and also whether
they have a property management software
that we're just gonna connect into and
then we're gonna rock and roll that way.
So it's a much shorter time span, and then
a lot of it comes down to the constant
learning that the product does as well.
Obviously, there's gonna always be nuances
with every prodi- uh, property manager,
meaning, like, different questions a
guest might ask and whatnot, and the
system itself learns that, builds new
rules around it, and then is able to
auto-respond on those things later
as long as it isn't something that
requires a human to get involved with.
Just like every other AI tool,
it's a learning machine, and
it's constantly evolving.
And again, that's where
the efficiency comes in.
We can tag in and we can just get
the ball rolling pretty quickly
in about a quarter of the time.
Speaker: And a quarter
of the time being what?
Speaker 2: So instead of 30 to 45
days to have staff, you can be up and
going in as, at most, like in 10 days.
Okay.
We've had people do it in within three
days, depending on how proactive they are.
Speaker: And, and what
about back-end services?
'Cause the Extiem team offers
back-end services, right?
So- Mm-hmm ⦠statements, accounting.
Yep.
What else?
What are the different
pillars that you guys offer?
I know there's obviously the guest facing.
I'm gonna make sure that
you get into the property.
If you got a problem, you can call me.
There's an AI tool that I'm using to
help me figure out what to say and do.
Okay.
But then there's accounting,
there's statements.
What else does Extend team offer?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Quite frankly, if you're willing to
do the staffing side of the business,
we can pretty much do anything.
We have one property manager, as an
example, that wants cars wrapped.
They just want their cars wrapped,
and so we went out and actually
sourced somebody to be able to go
and wrap their vehicles for them.
They're a rather large
property management outfit.
Speaker: You guys offshore?
Yeah, how's- how do you get somebody to-
Speaker 2: So it depends
on what you're doing.
So if you're using the shared services
model, that thing is gonna be just
straight up operational day-to-day stuff.
That's guest communications, turnaround
time, check-in, check-out, reservation
management, those kinds of things.
If you want a bookkeeper or somebody
specialized in your business and
actually in your business, then you
would use what you would call the,
the direct-to-market model, which
is what's existed up to this point.
You can hire for anything
that you need to.
We source it, then that's the 30 to
45-day turnaround, if that makes sense.
Speaker: Okay.
All right.
And what do you charge?
What's the pricing model?
And I'm sure there's scale- Mm-hmm ⦠but
to start off with, what's the base
price, and then how does that scale up?
Speaker 2: Yeah, good question.
So the pricing goes anywhere from
about 25 a unit to $100 a unit, and
that comes down to what you need.
So you can have a version that doesn't
have people in the loop, you can have
a version that does have people in the
loop, and you can have an off-hours
package, which means we're only handling
everything after 5:00 and on the weekends.
Okay.
And so those are the three major packages
through the shared services model.
It's really down to whether
you want somebodyâ¦
And when I say no voice, what I mean
is that there's still somebody human
answering the text communications,
they're just not picking up the
phone, and then there's the version
where they do pick up the phone.
So that's where that whole enterprise
size and scale is the question.
It's do you need somebody answering the
phone or do you have that part covered?
Are you just swamped and you need somebody
to take care of all the Airbnb responses?
Then those two packages can bob and weave
for you, and you can pick what you need.
Speaker: And is that flat across your
entire inventory, or as you scale, say,
you're at 20 units and you're operating
and maybe you're right in the middle.
You're priced out at 75 bucks.
Mm-hmm.
You're not 25, you're not 100, but you
got services in there, but maybe you grow
to- 500 units, is there a price per unit
discount for scale or how does that work?
Speaker 2: It goes everywhere from
one to 10 units, and then it goes to
20 to 50, then 50 to 75, 75 to 150.
It just moves in stages.
And the team's willing to work with
you too as well because we're watching
all this stuff margin-wise too as well
because the one big question mark that
we all have right now with AI is how much
of AI is gonna actually take over this.
Because if AI takes over 90% of the
business, then the margins for the
business are very high, and that allows
us to be able to bring the price down.
If it's a very handheld situation,
maybe it's a luxury company or
something like that where it's 40% of
the time there needs to be a pickup
on the phone, that can change too.
So we're willing to adjust with your
business needs and how the product's
actually performing too, just so you know.
Speaker: So you're doing all this work
and it sounds like you're integrating AI.
How big of a investment are
you guys making into AI, and
how are you thinking about that
from the staffing point of view?
Are you deciding where, uh, to
continue to invest into AI and
where to continue to invest into
human capital and shared services?
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Right now as it stands, just in
percentages, we're spending 2 to 5%
of the cost that we did previously
when it came to operational efficiency
and how to do all this, right?
'Cause everything before was
actually hiring people and doing
everything manually, and now we're
switching from a manual structure
to something that's automated.
And obviously we're into it year
one, so we'll need a year full of
historicals to get the full kind of
flesh out of what it really looks like.
But what I can tell you is out of the
gate, the cost of doing business is
going down, and it's going down fairly
rapidly, which is quite interesting.
I, I can tell you that the-- when I
came in- At the 30 days ago, the product
had really gotten its legs, and even
in these last 30 days, I've watched the
operational margins increase by $3 a unit,
which to me is actually a very big deal.
That was like, that's solid.
And part of that was because the team
had rolled out a few more AI features,
the learning piece on the back end, just
trying to help automate a lot of that
learning model that already exists in the
space anyways, so that they, people aren't
ha- having to go back and edit everything.
We're being able to catch it,
tell the property manager,
"Hey, this is what we caught."
They approve it, and then we add it
to their knowledge base, basically.
Speaker: Mike, do you work
with co-hosts all the way up to
enterprise, or is there a minimum
unit count that you have to have?
Speaker 2: No, you can
go from one to a million.
If you got a million
units, come talk to us.
If you've got one, we can do that, too.
We do, we are going to, just so everyone,
just full transparency, we are gonna
roll out an AI only model at some
point in the next couple of months or,
just because it's for the people that,
especially that are seasonal maybe,
they just wanna turn that piece on
for a little bit, and that's fine, and
they can stay with the same company.
They don't have to run around and
have multiple buckets of stuff.
We're trying to keep this
as solidified as we can.
Speaker: Interesting.
Are you afraid, Mike, that will end up
cannibalizing your shared services model?
Speaker 2: Not necessarily.
It really only takes one or two instances
where it costs you 10, 20, 30, 50 grand
with a bad guest experience with AI before
you go, "Whoops, I better either hire
somebody internally or find a solution."
And that bite is starting
to happen more and more now.
Again, it's because
everything's so new, right?
Everybody's just now getting trans-
they're getting into this thing now, so
we're just now starting to get good data.
But we've already seen it on our side a
couple of places, and why they came to us
is they said, "Look, we had one person."
They, they didn't know how
to call the fire department.
They started a barbecue, and it
caught on fire, and it burned
just the corner of the house, but
that was like $100,000 in damage.
And they were like, "That could have been
avoided if we would have had an extension
piece in because then somebody would have
picked up the phone, and the fire wouldn't
have gotten as out of hand as it did."
It just was- Yeah ⦠vacation brain,
somebody just not firing on all cylinders.
Yeah.
Long story short, so it's those
little things that matter.
It's the, it's those small little
steps, and even people like Justin
Ford will tell you those, like those
safety pieces and all that, it's like
those little things can amount to big
issues, and you need somebody that
can facilitate that, especially if
you're asleep at 3:00 in the morning.
So I don't see it cannibalizing.
What I do see is that both products can
complement themselves in one of two ways.
One would be I don't wanna spend
25 or 30 or $100 a unit right now.
I just wanna tip toe into this thing.
Okay, here's a version just
to get used to the AI piece.
You get used to that, then we can, you
can try the other services as you go.
Or the second piece is it
is you're seasonal, right?
You don't need people on the phones during
this time of the year, but you may get
a booking here and there, and the AI can
help assist the check-in and check-out
stuff, and we'll just leave it on.
Because more than likely the
AI-only portion will probably be
pay-as-you-play for that reason, so
that it's just use it when you need to,
don't use it when you don't need it.
It's flexibility.
That's the thing about AI and companies
that I've learned over the last little
bit here and also consulting for
some other AI companies is you need
to leave flexibility on the table.
You can have your full-on big product.
You can have kind of the middle product
that gets you stepped in, and then
you have this one that just says,
"Look, it's zero until you use it."
Having those three buckets is
super critical in making sure
that you have a business that's
gonna work with it, I think.
Speaker: Mike, if I'm a property
manager and I want to get ahold of
you and figure out how to drop my
operational cost, make sure that I'm-
Taking good care of my guests and my
homeowners, how do I reach out to you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely.
So on every single page on extendteam.com,
there is a either Book a Demo button
or there's a Contact Us button, and
you can go directly to extendteam.com,
just like it sounds.
If you need to reach out to me
personally, I will actually leave my
email here as well for more information
if you'd like, which is mike.mears,
M-E-A-R-S, @extendteam.com.
Speaker: Mike, thanks
so much for coming on.
With AI happening and with the shortage
of labor in the force right now,
Extend Team is really a great solution.
We, we see a lot of our own franchisees
turning to it, making sure that they're
able to staff up and down as needed and
take care of a lot of their needs as
they go forward, especially in the early
days when they just need somebody like
you all to come in and step in and help
get figured out, get things figured out.
They've relied on you guys heavily
through the pr- their process,
and so really appreciate that.
And if, uh, you're looking for more
information, make sure to reach out
to Mike or Extend Team and check out
their website and give 'em a call.
Thanks, Mike.
Speaker 2: Awesome.
Good
Speaker: to see you, Steve.