How to Find the Perfect Homeowner with Ginger Harrelson, Co-Owner of Beachball Properties
In this episode of The Vacation Rental Show: How We Grow, host Lynell Gordon is joined by Ginger Harrelson, Co-Owner of Beachball Properties. Together, they go over what the perfect homeowner looks like; how your goals change as your business grows; and why you need to take on any and all work when starting your vacation rental business.
Ginger is the Co-Owner of Beachball Properties, alongside her husband, Hunter. They have grown their vacation rental business to over 225 properties in 6 years in the highly competitive Alabama Gulf Coast market! She serves as Corporate Counsel for Beachball Properties and enjoys guiding owners through the legal and technical aspects of owning a vacation rental. She also leads the Beachball Marketing Team and is the founder of the Facebook Groups: ‘What’s Happening – Orange Beach, Alabama’, ‘What’s Happening. — Gulf Shores’, and ‘Alabama Gulf Coast Vacation Deals – Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Ft. Morgan’.
Should You Accept Any Work?
When you’re starting out in your career, a lot of people might say to you, “don’t take on just any work, take on the work that you care about” or “only take on the work that you feel comfortable doing”. But, if you’ve ever actually started a business, not just a vacation rental business, then you’re probably aware that you really should be taking on any and all work that comes your way.
At the end of the day, your business is a new business, there is no reason for any homeowner or even your local community to trust what you’re doing. You’re the new kid on the block with everything to prove. So, when you’re lucky enough to get some new work; when, for whatever reason, somebody actually wants to give you a shot, it doesn’t matter who it is, it doesn’t matter what kind of property the homeowner has, you better take it, because it’ll help you to grow further down the line.
“People will say ‘don’t accept everything’. Well, sometimes you have to accept everything. When we started, we were accepting pretty much any type of unit to build our book of business, to get our name and trusted brand. Everybody wants the beachfront homes, everybody wants the two hundred, three hundred thousand dollar a year producers, but the competition for those is high, so get what you can get.”
Goals Change All the Time
Again, when you first start out in any industry, you’re probably going to have a set of goals you want to achieve by a certain point in time. But, what about when circumstances change? Do we have to alter our plans? Well… yes, sometimes we do! But that’s okay, because nothing in life is fixed, least of all your goals and your career.
Take Ginger, for example, she had to change her goals far sooner than expected:
“Our goal is to get to 500 [properties] right now. I feel like when you evaluate goals, you can change those or if they don’t meet your needs anymore, but our original goal when we first started the company was to get to 100 properties in five years, and we were able to do that in three. […]
We’re kind of known as a dinosaur market. You know, vacation rentals have been popular here for quite some time. There’s some big names down here that have been down here quite a while. And when we first started, people were like, how do you think you’re gonna compete with them? It’s like, I’m not gonna compete with them. It gets me every day, right? But at some point, you do have to say, what am I gonna do to make myself and my company different? And for us, it was being authentic on Facebook, on social media.”
To listen to the full conversation between Lynell and Ginger on The Vacation Rental Show: How We Grow, follow the links here: