We were lucky to catch up with Barrett Thrasher & Roger Pippin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Barrett & Roger, appreciate you joining us today. Are you happier as a business owner? Do you sometimes think about what it would be like to just have a regular job?

In general, I am a very satisfied business owner, mostly because I have the opportunity to cultivate genuine relationships with both homeowners and guests while setting my own schedule and workflow. I had always worked for someone else — usually in the hospitality industry — until I was 30 years old, and now that I work for myself, I wouldn’t have it any other way. We love the seasonal working culture, living at the beach, and having the autonomy to make our own decisions about how our business moves forward. We are, if nothing else, a boutique company that is run the way we see fit. We have concrete objectives to meet, not abstract policy goals. In the past, we tried doing things in a more corporate kind of way, from offloading certain work to third party companies and trying out the latest whiz-bang cloud software, but it never worked out, so we are always mindful of keeping things simple and straightforward.

That being said, I’d bet that pretty much all small business owners daydream about having a regular job when things are going wrong, particularly when multiple bad situations are happening simultaneously. My husband calls this “9 to 5 ideation,” and these days I look at it as simply a normal thought to have when things get really hectic. During our peak season, I typically indulge in the fantasy of leaving all of this behind and going back to bartending! This fantasy usually gets particularly strong around the July 4th holiday weekend.

For example, this year we had multiple houses lose their AC at one time — all during the “heat dome” that was covering most of the South. Being without AC is not only a major inconvenience for guests, but can also be a legitimate safety concern during major heat waves. This same week, I had some major bookkeeping software problems that were preventing me from paying both my clients and myself. My golf cart, which is my primary work vehicle, broke down and was in the shop. To top it all off, we had just gotten a new puppy — a pharaoh hound no less, who requires a lot of labor and attention due to her “colorful personality.” And of course, there were visitors everywhere to celebrate the 4th, which can sometimes add an extra layer of fun to the dynamic. At least this year we didn’t have to break up any fist fights at the beach!

Now, it all worked out in the end, but these are the moments that I think about pouring drinks for a living. The way I see it, it’s normal and healthy to think about doing other things when caught up in the weeds like that. It’s just human nature, not a signal that you need to liquidate your business.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

We never intended to get into property management, it’s just something that happened and we were good at it, so we just kept going. When Roger and I decided to leave Atlanta and move to New Orleans, he had already secured a job at one of the local universities and I immediately got a job bartending. After a few months, we made the call that he should leave that job and start teaching martial arts instead. At the same time, our good friend Charlie made us a business proposition: We would live on one side of “shotgun double” (that’s a duplex made out of a 150-year-old house) next to the French Quarter, and we would manage and clean the other side as a vacation rental and take a management fee.

Obviously, that’s not the kind of money you can live on, but it was a good side hustle. Over the next two years, we started picking up clients left and right, and before we moved to Alabama we were managing 30 properties and had our own cleaning staff. Looking back, our success in the beginning is based on three basic principles: we always meet new clients face-to-face, in their home, and when they call they get to talk to me directly, and I always pick up my phone. When a guest has a problem, we respond as fast as possible — and in-person, if feasible. There’s no call-center or guest manager in our business. When you call, you get to talk to the boss. Finally, we make sure all of our homes are cleaned like a surgical theatre. This is where guests notice the difference, and they say so in their reviews. So you could say our business model and success is based on talking to people and having an obsessive level of cleanliness.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

Like so many other Americans, the pandemic radically changed our business. When the music festivals and the bars all closed for a year in New Orleans, it effectively terminated all of our business there, permanently. It’s was a real gut check watching a year of reservations, and therefore income, evaporate into smoke. Luckily, we already had a small foothold here on the coast, so we spent the next two years basically recreating the same business model. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was easy, but growing a business when you’ve already done it once allows you to avoid pitfalls. Plus, 90 percent of the homes in our community are either second homes or vacation rentals, so acquiring new clientele came a little quicker. As of now, we manage homes in five different states and are working on a sixth. Our plan for when summer is over is to visit all the houses we manage outside of Alabama in a road trip extravaganza.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you how I met my business partner. Back in Atlanta, I was teaching yoga and one afternoon, this boyishly charming — but clearly weird — guy came in the studio. He was on a blind date, and the woman he was with brought him there to check out my class. He was really bad at yoga. I mean terrible! But at least he was funny, and a few weeks later he brought me some homemade jambalaya. Six months later we were married, and we just celebrated our 10 year anniversary. Roger is the strategy brain in our organization, our company’s real estate agent, and my closest advisor. Goes to show that you never know who you’re going to meet at yoga.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.beatsworkingvacationrentals.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beatsworkingvacationrentals/