Revenue Reality Check: How to Build a Smarter Revenue Strategy for 2027 with Julie Brinkman

Revenue Reality Check Kickoff

Alex Husner 0:00

Today we're back with another edition of our bi-monthly series, the first of the month revenue reality check presented by Beyond. Because if there's one thing that vacation room managers know, it's that your revenue strategy does not happen on autopilot. Markets change, booking windows shift, owners ask hard questions, and guests get more price sensitive. And suddenly, the rate strategy that looked great a month ago needs a second look. That's where Beyond comes in. Beyond gives property managers the tools, data, and dynamic pricing technology to make smarter revenue decisions across their portfolio, from protecting peak dates to filling need periods to understanding what's really happening in the market. And that's exactly what this series is all about. Each month we're going to take a look at the moves that matter most right now, what to stop doing, what to start paying attention to, and where managers may need to double down. Okay, let's get into it. Welcome to Alex Nanny, the real woman of Vacation Rentals. I'm Alex, and I'm Annie. And we are back for the first of the month, the revenue reality check. And of course, we've got Julie Brinkman with Beyond. Julie, so good to have you back.

Julie Brinkman 1:07

So good to be here, Alex. How's it going, Annie? Oh, it's going well. It's fall. It's there's a crisp, cool wind in the air.

Annie Holcombe 1:15

So we get to wear sweaters. It's sweaters that are. I know, right? I looked at John yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. So we've had a couple of great sessions with you, and I'm looking forward to today's chat. But before we get started, maybe just kind of give us your take on where the industry is right now as we go into the fall and the offseason.

Two Camps Shaping The Industry

Julie Brinkman 1:36

Yeah. I mean, so we're just coming off Virma. You know, I think by the time this airs, we'll have a month between now and Verma. Um, and as we were just talking about off-camera, it was it was such an interesting conversation. The themes of the conversation at Verma were so fascinating and different from years past. So what I'm really observing about the industry is you have sort of like two camps. One, you have these up and coming property managers that are now getting to a size where they can't go at it alone. And these tend to be more tech forward, more sophisticated, you know, generally, you know, the millennial Gen Z set. And they're really thirsty for information and really tech loving. And so that's really cool and um awesome to see. And then obviously, we still have these large operators that are consolidating and still continue to consolidate. And how do they um put their capital toward the most effective use of their capital, which is buying businesses and growing, versus um expanding their team? And so what I'm observing is these conversations are turning from predict the future to like tell me what I can do internally in my operation to make myself more effective so I can free up more of my time, my money, and my people to be more strategic. And that exists both at the smaller property manager level and the larger property manager level. So it's really exciting for me as somebody who loves tech and who loves um, you know, adopting new ways of doing things. And it's just, I think a really exciting time to be in the industry, especially as a tech provider.

Alex Husner 3:13

Yeah. And you know, we we spent some time hanging out at your booth at the conference, and it was busy basically the entire time, I would say. But just listening to some of the conversations, I feel like you guys are really looked at almost as like a strategy partner, you know, in a different way than some of the suppliers are that companies work with. And I think it's because, I mean, you really you you touch some so many parts of somebody's business that it's not just the pricing. The pricing touches every single part of the business. And you kind of end up being a little bit of therapist for your customers in a way too. But as operators are looking at this year, trying to understand, okay, was it was it a good year beyond just looking at total revenue? Like how what should they be looking at to really understand the effectiveness of what they have put in place

KPIs That Tell The Truth

Alex Husner 3:56

for this year?

Julie Brinkman 3:56

Yeah, I mean, you know, when you reflect back, there's there's a you know, myriad of KPIs that you can take a look at. You can look at total revenue, you can look at revenue per available night, you can look at your overall ADR and your overall occupancy. But we know that portfolios in and of themselves, while that might be how you report to your board or your investors, or overall to your company, your portfolio is made up of groups and of listings, and it's really the sum of the parts. And so what we really encourage our customers to do is not only look at the portfolio as a whole, but in segments, right? And so those segments can be as simple as bedroom size, simple as geography, sometimes people group by owner persona, um, by luxury, by value, by um, you know, by mid. So I think thinking about the metrics, not only at the highest level, but like one click down and reflecting back and saying, okay, as I'm marching into 2027, what do I need to do to not only repeat, but inflect performance that I had in 2026? Because overall in 2026, the US market did pretty well. ADRs were up, right? Um, occupancy was pretty good. There weren't a ton, and I'll save Hawaii uh for, but there weren't a ton of sort of natural um disasters, um, knock on wood. And so, you know, supply has grown. And so if we continue this momentum going into 2027, I think thinking about your portfolio as a sum of your parts, and then also thinking not just in total terms of like gross rent, but all of the things that go into making a listing successful. So thinking about reviews and reputation management. It's mattering now more than ever, especially on the OTAs and the LLMs. And how are you responding? How are you ranking? What can be improved on your listings? You know, today technology is so accessible for you to be able to very easily analyze your listing, its content, the quality of its photos, its search ranking, its search ranking over time, and show your owners, hey, this is how I think we can perform, in addition to the strategies that we want to put in place to inflect rates.

Segmenting Performance By Cohort

Annie Holcombe 6:20

Last time you were on, we we talked about owners and and talking to owners. And I think that right now, you know, this is the time when owners are starting, especially the ones in the beach markets. This is the time when they're like getting look at their numbers for the year end and they're thinking, like, okay, I gotta make a change. I need to start looking. So I think managers need to have their, they're need to have their game face on. They need to know what they need to be talking to the owners about and they want to grow their portfolios and there's all these things like looking forward. And so while I I certainly do agree there's a lot of housekeeping that needs to be done, and this is the time of year to do it. There's also that, like, what is the plan for these owners and attracting these owners and having these conversations? And so if you were going to tell a manager, what would be like maybe two or three things that they could do to like get their house in order to make sure that an owner looking at their listings and seeing their distribution strategy, it would be impactful and that the owners will go, okay, this manager knows what they're doing.

Owner Reports And Contract Flexibility

Julie Brinkman 7:14

Sure. Yeah, I think there's a couple ways of going about this. One for the owners that you currently have. My hope, my true hope is that this is not the first time that you were talking about how 2026 is performing, that we've been proactive throughout the year, um, both on a monthly and quarterly basis, to tell you how you're tracking, not only against uh last year, but against the market. And so now is the really good time to be delivering those sort of full year reports. We're 11 months into the year nearly, and those full year reports to show you how you're tracked against market against last year and where you stacked up against your comps. I think that's a really good story as well, but that these are proactive communications to the owners. And then ultimately, I mean, I know a lot of the traditional beach markets were getting contracts signed, right? And um, you know, our clients use um performance from the prior year to try to get owners to have less and less restrictions when it comes to those contracts. And so using performance in your portfolio to show, hey, if we have a more flexible minimum stay requirement, if we have a more flexible minimum price requirement, we'll be able to earn more revenue. So using data points in within your portfolios to talk to your current owners. And from a new listing owner perspective, I mean, you do have owners out there who haven't been talked to all year, who don't know how they performed against last year, who don't know how they performed against the market. And so I would fire up your business development and marketing teams to show uh to show these owners what you can do for them and what you've been able to do for your current owners. Now, that might include case studies, it might include some high-level projections, it might include a free analysis of their listing and where you think that they could improve and overall how your owners perform relative to the competitors. And guess where you should shop is probably in your in your comp set where you see people underperforming. Those are two strategies that I would um that I would definitely employ as a property manager, you know, closing out the year on top of what you're already doing, which is uh super busy, you know, creating budgets, getting everything ready, but absolutely making sure your owners understand how they did and how they can improve even more going into next year by giving you more more autonomy and then really going at being aggressive with those lower performing cops that are generally RBOs. And so we're not, you know, um using um sort of like bad tactics to steal from folks that you might um have a peer relationship with to grow your overall portfolio.

Owner Communication That Actually Lands

Alex Husner 10:00

As far as owner communication, is there anything that you would suggest for the actual the vehicle of doing it? Like I've heard some companies they'll do like a monthly webinar or quarterly webinar and they go over updates of what's going on, you know, with the properties, with with rates, you know, kind of at a high level. Some are more, you know, one-on-one. They're just having those conversations. But is there anything that you've seen that's that's worked well?

Julie Brinkman 10:22

Yeah, I mean, it's like honestly and not a one-size fits all, unfortunately. I think webinars are super important, but the attendance of webinars, as we all know, can be quite spotty. But the ability to deliver that webinar over email and then also have snippets of the webinar so owners can come back to it. I think it also depends on how your owner likes to be communicated to. And so, you know, some owners crave just a plethora of information. And for those owners, you know, we want to make sure that we're delivering on that. Some owners, they'd rather have less than more, and but we still want to make we still want to stay front and center and let them know their property is being managed and being managed, you know, better than the market. It's funny, it and it depends on the geography. Like in Europe, there's so much communication happening over WhatsApp, for example. And so I'd say email is really crowded. And so, how can you stand out? We do a lot of short video content, we do a lot of like audiophile content. You have to imagine people on the go. And so, how can you get in front of them and make sure that they're at least hearing the parts that you want them to hear?

Annie Holcombe 11:35

So it sounds like everybody needs to do an internal podcast to be able to get to their owners and cutting it up into cutting it up into short bits. Okay, so we've kind of tackled, gone back to tackling the owner, the owner issue, but now we're thinking, okay, we we do have to clean house.

Distribution Strategy And Channel Testing

Annie Holcombe 11:50

We do have to make sure that we're ready for 2027. And so, you know, I've been talking with people about, you know, this is the optimum time to go ahead and handle distribution strategy, like adding channels, removing channels. People are thinking, like, okay, maybe I need to walk away from some of these ones that I've really given all my inventory to. So thinking about next year, what do you think people really need to be focused on so that they're set up for success when the booking window starts? And I'm thinking, like, you know, beach markets are going to start mid-February. Um, so it's really not that much time once you get the holidays involved.

Julie Brinkman 12:22

I mean, honestly, there's some markets that have already started, right? Um, what was surprising, I was looking at Cabo a couple of weeks ago, and like their their booking window you'd think would be quite tight, you know, for three to four night bookings, but it was like there was a non-significant amount, like 20% of their bookings were like 200 plus days. And so I think um from a channel perspective, what you want to do is you want to look at the quality of the guests that you're getting. So, you know, whether that's reviews, price ultimately, and the number of nights booked, you want to consider the commission structure. We all know that the commission structures have been changing on some channels.

Direct Bookings Win With AI Search

Julie Brinkman 13:02

And so I think now is the right time to think about potentially testing other channels that are maybe more easily tested. So there are certain channels that make it very hard to test. But I think most importantly is your direct booking strategy. So from a direct booking standpoint, the LLMs are loving direct booking, right? And so if they can, if you have fresh content and if you have um, you know, your AEO and GEO strategy is on point, it's updated, you have user-generated content, meaning that you have reviews that are posting to your direct booking site, and most importantly, that you have a very easy checkout process, the LLMs are going to rank you when people are going to the LLMs to look for prop, you know, look for properties in certain areas. And so if I'm focusing most of my effort, it's going to be on making sure my direct booking site is able to capture that growing population of LLM referred traffic. And frankly, the tools are getting much better in being able to track what's coming from the LLMs. And they're looking less at like Reddit and more at like help center. And so I think to the extent like you can make sure that you're understanding these trends and evolving your website accordingly, AI makes it really easy to update websites really quickly. And so you should be leaning really heavily into that and you should be pushing on your direct booking provider to make sure that you have quick checkout, Apple and Google Pay. Things are just like, you know, one, two, boom, I can make the booking because the LLMs, they're not gonna want to push people to a very convoluted PDF form or request to book. So that's another thing to cover with owners, is like, let's go from request to book to book directly. So those are just like off the top of my head what I'm thinking about.

Alex Husner 14:53

Yeah, I mean, it's spot on. And it's so funny. It's like you look back over the years and I feel like there's these different surges of like people focusing on direct bookings, and then all of a sudden they kind of like pull back and it's like, well, the OTAs are quote unquote cheaper. And then all of a sudden something happens and it's like, oh God, we gotta get back to the direct booking strategy. Meanwhile, the companies that have been, you know, doing this for a long time, it's like they've never taken their eyes off the wheel with it. And I think it's it's important that not just when things happen that you focus on direct bookings, but it should always be part of your marketing strategy and should always be a focus of the business. And was listening to something the other day that was a really good point. I thought that, you know, never before have local companies had the ability to be kind of on a level playing field with the OTAs. I mean, you're never going to win the game in Google against Airbnb, Verbo, XP, it's just not gonna happen. But the fact that the LLMs, at least at this point, are favoring direct booking sites, like you said, with user-generated content and fresh content, you know, that's that's a really strong thing and certainly a motivator to keep going in that direction if you're trying to focus priorities for 2027. So 100% interesting. Yeah.

Julie Brinkman 16:03

I mean, I think the other untapped potential too is, you know,

Using Guest Data For Repeat Demand

Julie Brinkman 16:08

to the extent that you have some hungry younger talent on your team, where they don't have to be younger, but just hungry talent that's willing to test some technologies related to like your current guest database. Never before have we been able to create personalized content and target it directly to those guests. Hey, by the way, you stayed here on this day. This is what you said in your review. Like you can pull in all of that from your PMS or your CRM, direct it right to them, click to book. So I think using the data that you have in your PRMS, your PMS, your CRM, your RMS all together to have a robust email strategy, I mean, that's free, right? Um, aside from the API token cost. But that, you know, I think when you think about, you know, if you use OTAs and direct booking, well, OTAs to get new guests and and direct booking is for current, you know, new guests and repeat guests, you also want to create that demand through your email channels.

Dear Julie Questions From Listeners

Alex Husner 17:08

Well, in typical fashion, Julie, we pulled the listeners and we asked them to send in some questions for you. So we're bringing back our dear Julie letters. And the first one we got, this is very much in line with the theme of today's topic, but it says, Dear Julie, our total revenue is up this year, so leadership feels good about the results, but we're not sure how much came from stronger demand versus filling more nights or adjusting rates. What should we look at to understand whether we actually improved our revenue strategy this year?

Julie Brinkman 17:41

Yeah, great question. And first of all, I love being called dear Julie versus hey mom. We'll do a hey mom segment later. Okay, great. Like it sometimes don't even get the hey, it's just the ma. Uh so um, first of all, congratulations. Um, having a good year is, you know, it's so easy to move on from good years and start thinking about what's next or what's, you know, what's coming and and and get fearful rather than taking the W and saying, like, okay, we did something right here. But now let's figure out what we did right. So, you know, if you think back to the top of the conversation when we thought about those metrics that we want to look at, it's not just total revenue, it's nights booked, it's ADR, it's RevPan, it's occupancy. And then you think about the cohorts or your grouping. So um, which segment of your of your portfolio outperformed versus which segment underperformed? You know, we have like a really easy way of showing that in our dashboard called Performance Manager that shows you how you're doing against last year versus um versus market. And you can see quickly, okay, my two bedrooms in Pedregal, for example, well, they were they were not doing so great, but my eight bedrooms in, you know, the the corridor were doing really, really well. And so how do you then think about getting everyone from the bottom left to the top right as you're going into planning next year? But overall, I mean, I think take the W, feel good about it, but know that there's always room to continue to improve. And I think when you go one to two to three clicks lower, um, especially within those cohorts, within those groupings, um, you can start to see patterns that will emerge that give you an opportunity to continue to inflect performance.

Alex Husner 19:37

That makes sense. Annie, do you want to do the next one?

Annie Holcombe 19:41

Yeah. So yeah, this one's a good one. Dear Julie, our portfolio-wide numbers look healthy, but performance varied a lot by market and by property type. Some segments did well, while others lagged. The team wants to carry one broad strategy into next year, but we're worried that hides what's really happening. How should we break down the results before making a 2027 decisions?

Julie Brinkman 20:04

So it sounds a lot like what we we've been talking about. Um, I think we are an industry where the sum of the parts equal the whole, but the parts are so very important. And if you don't take care of the parts, you will have no business. The parts being the owners, the listings. And, you know, having one fell swoop strategy for an entire portfolio. I mean, depending on your portfolio size, unless they're all the same bedroom size in all the same location with all the same type guest type, which usually never happens unless you have like five listings, you have to be nuanced and you have to be um elegant in creating your strategy. So again, I think the tendency or or the the instinct that you have in trying to look at your portfolio by segments, whether that be by geography or like um not even just by geography, but like hyperlocal. So beachfront versus second row versus behind the line, you know, the hot behind the highways. And how did each of those segments perform? What were the booking lead times for each of those segments? What were the what were the state dates for each of those segments? I think that can help you sway your leadership to say, hey, our strategy overall can be like grow, but underneath that strategy, we have to have a a well-thought out execution plan for each one of our segments. And you don't want to over-segment your portfolio, right? Um, you don't want to be managing at a listing by listing level because that isn't scalable, but you do want to be managing at a level that makes sense. And so where do where do listings perform similarly or where do they attract the similar type of demand? Um, whether that be night state or booking, lead time or type of guest, or where you know they perform on different channels. So overall, I think your instinct to to cut the segments and to think about them differently is the right instinct. And then I also think you have to look at how you did relative to market. Because doing well overall is great. Doing well relative to last year is also great. But what if the market did better than you? Is there money you left on the table? And how could you have captured that money? Was it because you had you had rates that were too low for far out? Was it because you didn't react quickly enough with any time-based adjustments? And so be willing to look ugly in the face is kind of like how, you know, as a CEO, like I'm like, great, I love the story. I love what you're telling me, but like tell me what what you would do differently. What's wrong? Where are the pimples? I know you're hiding them. I see a pimple patch. Yeah, right. Because that's like that's where the growth is and that's where the opportunities are. And so but it can feel really scary in in a world where we all feel like AI is going to take our job. It's like, I just want to make it like, oh no, no, no. I'm doing fantastic. Don't look at don't look over here. But I mean if you don't bring the problems forward and your boss or your leadership comes to you with what they found, guess who's on the hot seat? So I think you're better off bringing forward the pimples and creating a strategy around them versus hiding them and pretending they don't exist.

Annie Holcombe 23:23

Yeah. And I think um it goes back like to owners I I just remember in property management. You always have that one owner that talked to an owner who talked to another owner who overheard it at the grocery store. You know, there was always like this chain of this chain of conversation of like how well they're doing. And when you get to the root of it, it's not really that well, but it goes back to like people being truthful and honest because everybody wants to put, you know, like it's social media. Everybody wants to put their best face forward, no pimple patches, all the you know the all the things. But you do have to face the ugliness in order to get to the root of what the challenge actually is and knowing is it a market condition or is it maybe that that particular property has just outlived its usefulness within your portfolio. And that could very well be the case, right?

Julie Brinkman 24:03

I mean we uh the panel we ran at Fromo was all about the first five years and we talked a lot about the proactive churn. So what are the properties that are dragging your portfolio down? They can hide because they they might have great gross revenue but the reputation score isn't great maintenance is pretty high and honestly the owner might be like on your WhatsApp or texting you constantly and so how do you get proactive about the churn and making sure that your quality inventory your inventory is is high quality um that was definitely something that um it was really interesting to hear the different strategies between um between the panelists.

Alex Husner 24:48

Yeah

Pruning Bad Inventory And Proactive Churn

Alex Husner 24:49

and I think that point is being talked about a lot right now too just because there's a lot of conversation about acquisition, you know, and some of these companies if they're getting ready or they're exploring that opportunity when they go through this process with you know the acquirer or a consultant they're coming back and saying okay like you look good here, but you've got this segment of inventory that really is just not profitable and it's bringing down your whole valuation of the business. So I think people are are really thinking about that especially if they're in that type of a mode but it's good to be thinking about that at all times too. I mean it does come down to the amount of time that you have to spend with somebody and if it's a drain and it's really just not worth it and for your team I mean there's like there's a lot of things that that come into play. And this is the pruning season. So if you need to prune uh this is is the time. But one question I had for you Julie too talking about like broad strategies.

The Risk Of Starting Too Low

Alex Husner 25:39

I I've heard this come up um more recently that one manager in particular Myrtle Beach said that their strategy for next year is they are going to go into the year with rates like basically already reduced. So like what they would end up having to reduce to anyways looking at past years in order to get more bookings on the books for their owners heading into the year.

Julie Brinkman 26:01

What do you say to somebody who's who's thinking about that I am a pretty direct person. So I won't say the first thought that I had but who are we trying to please here? It sounds like my guess is this is maybe a newer property manager who thinks full calendars are great calendars and I can assuage my owners and avoid tough conversations if these calendars are full. I got them blocked yeah yeah I mean maybe this property manager wasn't even around in 2020 but I can I can certainly remember um May and June of 2020 when calendars filled up overnight. And that left some owners saying like hey um maybe we left money on the table. But there is I think the idea that you go straight to the rate that either was booked at or something below leaves a lot to be desired. You're never going to catch any upside. Yeah your calendar's going to be full but what happens I mean you know I don't I don't know that Myrtle beach is a huge event destination but what happens if an event gets denounced two months in advance? Now you have no inventory. What you're are you going to go cancel reservations?

Alex Husner 27:09

Yeah you can't do that.

Julie Brinkman 27:11

And so we just really it leaves like no room to maneuver.

Alex Husner 27:14

Yeah.

Julie Brinkman 27:15

And I guess I would I would ask a question back is like what's driving this? Is it owner pressure to drive occupancy? Because if that's the case and we have an education opportunity if it's the fact that you think that this is where you're going to end up anyway well I I think that's where you're going to end up if you undersell. But you're also going to create enormous pressure on these units if you're filling up the calendar. When are you going to actually get in there to be able to maintain them? So your overall Airbnb score, you know, uh review scores, you're going to take a hit. And then you like to Annie's point about the grocery store like people want to brag about the fact that their calendars are full but now all of a sudden they're like well I only achieved you know N revenue where I could have achieved Y revenue with fewer nights sold. I mean we have to give these properties a chance to breathe.

Annie Holcombe 28:07

Yeah. So I think a lot of it is fear though too I think it's you're you know you're the managers are stuck in such a precarious spot of driving revenue and then also appeasing the owners on both sides of it like getting those calendars full but getting those calendars full at the full at the right rate. And it might be you know maybe this particular manager, I don't know who it is, but maybe they just got their butt handed to them all you know all summer because either they didn't have the calendars full or you know maybe they tried to sell too high so they they feel like they were they were losing out on reservations because they were too high and they're just panicked and they're like, you know what, I give up like it's just a situation of saying uncle and and not wanting to really think about it. But I I agree with you. I think it's about you know I've always been in the mindset of it's like you always drive your rates up 15% minimum to start the year. And then you just you see how the market's performing you see what the demand looks like because anybody that lives in a beach market knows, I mean events do get added storms come through. I mean things happen that you can't control but if you have all these levers in place that you can pull that's much better than being you know already in the gutter and not being able to get yourself out of it.

Alex Husner 29:10

Yeah. And I think one thing that it comes down to too in this market and probably in many you know historical vacation rental destinations, it used to be that come January 1st the phones were ringing off the hook. I mean the online bookings were just spewing in I mean people were ready to book for that year. And that's changed over the years. But I think if you have owners that are used to the good old days, you know, that it really comes down to education for them of you know just because you don't have all of spring, you know, and and many summer weeks booked by the end of January, that doesn't mean that all is lost. But I think that's probably part of the mentality behind that question.

Julie Brinkman 29:45

But yeah I mean we do um so in our platform you can see search insights so market level search insights so you can see where how far out people are searching for state aids which gives you because once a once it's booked, you know forward looking occupancy is one indicator but that's like it that's already happened. But if you're seeing like there's no searches right now for July in Myrtle Beach, then whatever whoever is searching is just bargain hunting right and so we're just we're gonna leave money on the table and we should align ourselves to where the majority of the folks are going to be searching and when they're going to be searching.

Search Insights And Booking Windows

Alex Husner 30:28

So a lot to consider. See we've got one more okay kind of similar to but um dear Julie we're building our 27 plan now some of this year's strongest results came from unusual demand around peak dates while booking patterns changed in other parts of the portfolio. How do we set next year's targets and pricing assumptions without simply repeating this year or overreacting to it.

Julie Brinkman 30:51

Oh yeah what a um I guess you know that's great that you had really great performance around peak dates. Owners love to see that they love to see greater bookings than the prior year. It sounds like potentially on other parts of your calendar though there were maybe performance that could have gotten better. So I think you know I'd go back to basics. History's a tool but it's not the full story, right? So if we want to look at not only just 2026 but 2025 and 2024 and use that in whatever sort of data or projection tool to tell you hey this is actually what we think is going to happen for 2027. And depending on what that data tells you, say like, oh that that makes sense with what where we've historically been over the last two, three years versus the last one, but not using one data point, not extrapolating one data point is an entire theme. So I think, you know, and then figuring out what you did so you capitalize on those peak dates um whether it was your tool or whether it was your RM strategy. But you know did you overweight your focus on those peak dates and potentially leave some other shoulder weeks behind. And that's where maybe I would I

Building A 2027 Plan Early

Julie Brinkman 32:08

would um consider thinking about enhancing your strategy.

Alex Husner 32:11

Yeah great advice great advice and if anybody has other questions for Julie please send them in to us obviously we we love going through these and it's just it's good to hear what's going on in the market and Julie sees so much across the world so she's she's the uh the guru to ask these questions to yeah as long as it's not hey mom can I get Chick-fil-a and I'm how that answer.

Annie Holcombe 32:36

Well what I mean that's an easy answer right you just say yes because you want Chick-fil-a too right girl it's like 2 30 on a Saturday I'm like what what time like okay don't fight it don't fight it right just like your owners just don't fight it have a plan.

Alex Husner 32:52

Exactly well to to wrap up Julie I mean for anybody who's listening right now and they're thinking about their plan and they're you know trying to figure out where they're going to begin is there like a right time to start working on your 2027 plan? I mean should it be happening now? Should it be happening closer towards the end of the year when you see what's going on you know within politics and the world or how do you look at the timing of making the plan?

Julie Brinkman 33:16

We in like we start working on our next year plan in H2, which starts July 1st. And that's not where we land but it's it incorporates what we're learning throughout the year. I think giving yourself permission to have an evolving plan and especially where you have owner contracts um you have to be really diligent and really proactive with getting those owner contracts lined up and giving yourself more autonomy. So the more you can get ahead of that the better the more proactive with owner communications you can get the better the more ahead of owner acquisition you can get the better. So I I am not a proponent of waiting until you know the final act and then this all of a sudden we miraculously come out with this beautiful strategic plan. And because ultimately there's trends that are emerging today that you need to be capitalizing on. If you wait too long they will be gone. And I think by by starting earlier you you give yourself the ability to iterate you give the yourself the ability to be a little bit wrong um and you give yourself the ability to be flexible. So the earlier the better is is how I see it. And my team loves me for it.

Annie Holcombe 34:34

That's always good when your team loves you.

Julie Brinkman 34:36

No I think they're like Julie wait right like we're like we haven't even gotten to July 4th and you're asking us what's going on for next year.

Annie Holcombe 34:43

But you know Yep that's your job push them forward right that's my job. Exactly exactly well Julie if anybody does want to get in touch with you and ask correct questions directly maybe a dear mom or a dear Julie question what's the best way for them

How To Reach Julie And The Hosts

Annie Holcombe 34:56

to get in touch with you?

Julie Brinkman 34:56

Yeah Julie at beyondpricing.com and if you do have DoorDash requests you can put them in there too or you can hit me up on LinkedIn I'm there as well.

Alex Husner 35:05

Excellent awesome well thank you so much Julie again for coming back on and if anybody wants to get in touch with Annie and I you can go to alex and annie podcast dot com. And until next time thanks everybody