In this episode of The Vacation Rental Show: How We Grow, host Lynell Gordon is joined by Steve Schwab, CEO and Founder of Casago. Join them as they discuss how to cultivate a strong company culture, outline the importance of empowering team members, highlight the value of building customer trust through actions, and explain how to expand your rental property business across multiple destinations
Steve also shares some personal anecdotes ranging from his own formative experience in the Army to recognizing the personal sacrifices he has had to make as an entrepreneur, including spending less time with family in order to grow a successful and sustaining business.
Steve Schwab is the CEO and Founder of Casago, an internationally recognized leader in the vacation and short-term rental industry with over 40+ destinations across the US, Mexico, and the Caribbean.
Cultivating a Strong Company Culture
If you run a vacation rental company, ask yourself this: what’s your company culture? This is an incredibly important factor of your business, especially in the world of vacation rentals, as it will determine the direction of where it’s going. It also establishes your principles and values as a company.
For example, what do you prioritize as a business? Your vacation rental guests? Your property owners? Your customer service quality? Your website? It could be any one of these, but you must always remember just how important they are to your company image and, more than that, what it means for the people who work for you. By having a strong and positive company culture, you’re creating an environment that people will want to be in, where they’ll want to come to work for you.
“So people kind of talk about culture like it’s this sort of mythical, vaporous thing that happens inside of a company. And it’s really not, it’s just a matter of being very intentional about what we do and what we don’t do, communicating that daily.”
He also credits his past in the Army, talking about the process of defining principles, values, and social norms as being the key to empowering employees which ultimately leads to company success.
The Power of Building Trust
Every single vacation rental person we speak to on this podcast always says the same thing: you need to build trust with your homeowners. Remember, they’re the reason your company exists in the first place, they’re the reason you pay the bills, so you need to treat them with the utmost respect and, over time, build a trusting, lasting relationship with them!
But what about trust amongst your team? How do you build trust amongst them? Yes, homeowners are important, but if your own team doesn’t trust you then how can you ever hope to succeed? Everyone needs to be facing in the same direction and share the same passion for a common goal.
Steve says: “When you can scale those good decisions, you start to build trust because now you can start to trust this team to operate without you. And once you get that trust going and the scale of good decisions, you start to get empowerment, you can give your team agency and at that point; the scale becomes automatic. You’ll find yourself growing.”