15 - What Spreadsheets Don't Show: First-Time Hotel Owners Document Every Decision with Micah & Adam

In this episode, Adam and Micah share raw, unfiltered updates from the renovation trenches—from navigating their first contractor draw that took two weeks instead of two days, to making over 3,600 decisions in just 33 days of ownership. They also announce their new role as official hosts of the Boutique Hotel Secrets podcast and reveal their strategy for a soft opening before the May 1st grand opening.

Connect with Micah:
Instagram: micahinvests
Tiktok: micahinvests1

Connect with Adam:
Instagram: adaminvests1
LinkedIn: adaminvests1
Tiktok: adaminvests1

Thinking about Boutique Hotels?Schedule a call:
https://bit.ly/4t1q3bb

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

And we've only owned the hotel for 33 days. It just there's just so many decisions. There's so much more. Like you can underwrite, you can look at marketing, but these are real decisions that don't show up in spreadsheets and will never show up on a direct booking page, but they need to be made every single day.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Hey everybody, I'm Adam Walls, and I'm here with my co-host Micah Thomas. We're short-term rental operators who made the jump into boutique hotels. And we're in it right now, raising capital, renovating a 50-room property. We're figuring it out as we go.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

This is the Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast, and these are secrets.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Welcome everyone to another episode of the official Boutique Hotel Secrets Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Walls, co-founder of Comeback Hospitality. This is the show where we talk all the things, spill the tea, tell the stories, give you the lessons, jumping from short-term rentals into the space of commercial boutique hotels. I'm not solo, thankfully. So let me bring in my mister from another sister, Micah Thomas. Micah, how are you doing live from hotel room number seven?

SPEAKER_02 1:08

I'm doing as good as I can for living out of a hotel room that's clearly dated. I'm happy. It's Super Bowl week. We got one last football game this week coming up, and I'm constantly putting out fires and learning more about this property every single day. Yesterday I was on two separate roofs learning about what goes on top of the hotel. So it's been fun, exciting, but we're making great progress. So I couldn't be happier to stay in hotel room number seven.

SPEAKER_00 1:39

I love it, man. And by the way, did you get a grill there finally? These hotel rooms, it's not like you've got a master kitchen or anything. Did we get you some? You got some food?

SPEAKER_02 1:49

Yeah, so I'm currently working off of a microwave, a high quality microwave in the room. And the GM was nice enough to pull over a gas grill for me. So right outside my courtyard door is a propane grill that I can use at my leisure. I haven't taken advantage of it yet. I think I might kick it off for Super Bowl weekend actually and put some steaks or something on the grill. So we'll see. Excited about that. I love being on the grill and football on the grill feels like perfect timing, but enough about my FUD stuff. We were to talk about hotels, man. Got a lot of interesting and exciting news coming up. So I'll let you share.

SPEAKER_00 2:26

Yeah, we do, man. And by the way, looking forward to getting back down there. I'm actually flying back down to Arizona, actually right after the Super Bowl. So we're recording this episode on the 3rd of February. You're probably hearing this a couple months from now. Again, Mike and I from day one said, let's just document our own story from letter of intent to purchase sale agreement to due diligence to raising money to talking with banks to acquiring to renovating. Right? The whole idea here is to build in public, to build out loud for one reason, to hopefully educate and be transparent and inspire the next generation of boutique hotel operators making the jump that we did. And maybe kind of a love letter to ourselves, like a little journal that we could go back to see in time. What were we worried about? What was on our mind? What were we feeling at different stages as we went to take down our first deal? Anyways, I'm excited. Hopefully, after a Seahawks victory, I get to hop on a plane, head down to see you. Maybe we can even fire up the grill. We're actually bringing investors too. Again, February 3rd, right now. We're hoping to have three model rooms done by the ninth. Let me just temperature check. What's your confidence level? Because you're my man on the ground right now.

SPEAKER_02 3:37

Yeah. Oh man. Let's break this down into steps. All right. So do I think that bathrooms will be, and for the record, we're doing tile flooring in the bathroom. We're doing shower pans, but tile showers all the way from the shower pan up to the ceiling. And then we're doing like a backsplash for half of the bathroom from like the mirror on down to the floor tile. Do I think that'll be done? Absolutely. I think that'll get done. For three rooms, they'll be done by next Monday. We need to paint and do wallpaper. I believe that'll be done. We're doing LVP flooring, but we're using a herringbone style. So a little bit different than your standard straight front to back. That's correct. Straight front to back. So that'll take a little bit more time, but do I think that'll be done? Yep. I think that'll be done too. Where it gets hairy for me is furniture, just the construction of furniture. I think some things will be done and maybe not for other things. And best case scenario, it all gets done. They work through the previous weekend, and best case scenario, they work through the next weekend into Monday as well. But what I will say is even if the entire model room for these three rooms aren't done, we will have a very good picture of what it will look like pretty much being finished. You'll be very close to finish, if not finished, by the time you, as well as investors, get here. And just to give a little bit more context, not only do we have investors in you coming, we have a potential investor coming as well. We got about 200K left of allocation in this raise. And there's someone who's so excited, he wants to see the project for himself before he invests. So very excited to walk him through an old room, through a room that is truly gutted and not even a tub or toilet or sink in the room, and then the end product, what the hotel will look like at the other side of this renovation. And also for more context, we're painting the exterior tomorrow. They've already started wrapping the doors so they can paint at least one face of our two-story building just to get an idea of what the final product will look like from the exterior. Tons of things going on, tons of moving parts, but we are making good progress to have at least three model rooms finished next Monday.

SPEAKER_00 5:55

I love it, man. And what's the update on roofing? And and maybe you can tell folks at home a little bit about getting our contractor paid because I I think that's we're at the end zone on that one, but that's been a journey in of itself. So roofs and payments.

SPEAKER_02 6:11

Let's talk about that. Let's talk about the uh the payment first. So we are in the end zone, we're like going through like a booth review to make sure this was actually a touchdown. It's like they've confirmed on the field, yeah, but like the points aren't on the board yet. So that's right. What we thought would be like a one to two day process has turned into like a one to two-week process from the time our contractors submitted for their first draw until we got the actual third-party inspector out here to inspect the work that was done. And now we're at the process of the bank wiring the third-party company money. So then the third-party company can overnight checks. No wires, they overnight physical checks to our contracting company. So it's been a long time coming. We've owned this since December 23rd, and we're here February 3rd, and the contractors have not been paid from the bank. That's not to say that they haven't received any funding. Adam and myself, we've both put out quite a bit of money to make sure this project keeps going. Contractors stay motivated and working hard. But what we've fronted is nothing like what the first draw will be. And that's the first part. And then I'll move on to roofing because we have a small amount of roofing to buy, something along the lines of$48,000 of roofing material that needs to be purchased. And our first draw is contingent, or our roofing material is contingent upon the first draw. So once the contractor receives funding, he's able to then go and buy more materials, including that$50,000 price tag for roofing. So we're at a standstill in some things. He's pretty much pivoted and shifted his workers to do other things until we can get money for material. But it's definitely starting to slow down the progress. And he's also got another team of people who do painting and roofing and plumbing pretty much at bay until he receives the next draw or the first draw so he can get those guys working as well. But right now he's doing like a cost savings plan where he has people working, but it's not his full team until he can truly employ and pay for them to be up here and pay the per diem for them to work. So we're pushing along. It's not as fast as we would have liked, but we know this. Everybody says that you can anticipate a renovation costing this amount of money and being this amount of time, but reality says it's probably double that in time and hopefully not in cost as well. But things run over. The good news is I'm still very optimistic on the February. I'm sorry, not February, May 1st grand opening. Yep. Sometime in the beginning of May, I think we will be on par with a grand opening. So we'll just see and we'll keep on dropping. And go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 9:05

Yeah, yeah. I was gonna say on that, what are your thoughts on a soft opening versus a grand opening? Because obviously a lot of people put pressure on themselves on a grand opening. We need the red ribbon, everything's dialed in versus friends and family, or give us 30, 60 days with the new product to work out all the kinks. Now, I know we're going live with Muse, Akia, saying about the branding, the logo. There's so much that's happening right now in parallel work streams. But I again, I know you got it in your head. You probably write this down every day, visualize May 1st. I would love to know what your expectations are for May 1st and any initial thoughts on soft opening or friends and family versus full-scale invite the mayor.

SPEAKER_02 9:51

Yeah, my gosh. It's funny you say invite the mayor. I feel like I'm probably going to run into the mayor of the city sometime soon. But yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with a soft opening. I think it is a really good way to stress test this property, get it fully occupied, make sure we're doing things the way it needs to be done, and get feedback, frankly, from people who will care to tell us versus leaving it in a review. I've just put up a calendar while you were talking. May 1st happens to follow on a Friday. I would love a week or two before, whether that be April 24th or April 17th, a friends and family weekend for just that to stress test and see what works, what doesn't work, and what we can improve before the grand opening. And keep in mind that towards the middle, if not already in the beginning of May, Page sells out every single hotel, and that's 25 hotels in Page, Arizona. They all sell out all their rooms. We can definitely push further, but there's a real relationship where the less rooms we have, the more money we lose in that time frame. But I'll give some idea on the timeline and why I'm still bare or bullish on the fact that May 1st will be our grand opening. Even if we don't have the office renovated, I think we can get all 50 rooms renovated by that time. So first thing I'm going to say is we have at least another month. If we can get to March 1st and get all 20 of the rooms in the two-story building done, that puts us on a good pace to have all 10 rooms for one building done in March, all 10 rooms done in April, and then the remaining 10 rooms done towards the beginning of May. But the context for that is right now they're doing 20 rooms in all of our other buildings, are 10 rooms. And there's there's their strength and speed with repetition. So doing the first bathroom and having to learn how things go, it's going to take a lot longer than the 31st bathroom or the 41st bathroom as well. So I'm anticipating that they pick up some speed and some momentum as they copy and paste the same design from room to room. But we intentionally started with the worst building and the building with the most room in our renovation to give us a timeline of what that'll look like as we progress through the life of the renovation. So I'm very confident that by May 1st, if we don't have the office done, we will at least have 50 rooms ready for sale to the general public.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Yeah, I'm with you on that. 50 50 rooms feels like that's the MVP product. But again, we got to think about the exterior amenities, rooftop bar, doing kind of the manager's unit. There's a two-bed, two-bath kind of Airbnb type unit, exterior amenities, I think I mentioned. So it's just all these other things. So it's not just the 50 rooms at play. If it's just that, I feel really good about May 1st coming to life. The X factor in the back of my mind is because we're trying to parallel path 15 different things, right? Yeah, you and at some point you run out of either time or money. We can throw more labor at it, but that becomes really expensive. So, anyways, I'm with you. I want to sell rooms in May. If the town is selling out, I want as many of our rooms available as possible. And you can see, like listeners listening in, there are real trade-offs at some point. I imagine a month or two down the road, we're gonna have to make decisions about is it this or is it that? Now, over a grander timeline, let's say over the next year, we can dial in, we can tweak, we can make sure everything gets done on the property. So it truly is done. But in some ways, that's I don't know. I'm of two minds. It's fun to be able to iterate and evolve, and this is a living, breathing thing. I think Steve Jobs even would talk about like Apple or Walt Disney would talk about as theme parks, like never being done, right? You're always building, you're always adapting, you're always learning. So I like that part. And then part of me goes, Oh my God, if we leave this open and we're not careful, we could spend the next 30 years dallying in one hotel when our real goal, right, of comeback hospitality is to do this at least three times over the next five years. And again, I think we're learning a tremendous amount with hotel number one. But we're hoping to copy and paste and we're hoping to get faster and more confident and better at this game as well. Anyways, this is where I'm of two minds about the May 1st. I have no doubt that we're gonna have 50 hotel rooms, but it's all the other stuff, right? Do we have red? Do we have yellow tape around the sauna still, or is just everything available to guests right from the get-go? So, anyways, I thought that was it's fun to illuminate or highlight some of these things for listeners. How militant are you to a date, or how expansive are you to let this evolve? If you're getting value from this, follow the show and share it with one person who's ready to move beyond short-term rentals.

SPEAKER_02 14:56

And if you want to learn more about the boutique hotel secrets community, the link is in the show notes. Yep. Yep, I definitely agree. And we've talked I've talked to our general contractor as well about downtime and using downtime to work on other projects. For example, if we're waiting for flooring to come in or we're waiting for roofing material, that might be a really good time to work on the landscape of the courtyard or start prepping areas for where our fire pit is going to go. There's some tasks that can be done that don't really require much material, just manpower. And there's some tasks where the job doesn't get, you can't tile a shower without tile. You just need it. I just I guess uh I'm trying our best to optimize manpower and work. And like you said, you could have 40 people here, but at some point it just gets too expensive. So you have to find that happy medium where you have enough manpower to get it done in the time frame without going over budget. And these are just, I make fun of it in my TikTok videos all the time. This is decision number 3,622 that we've made, and we've only owned the hotel for 33 days. It just, there's just so many decisions. There's so much more, like you can underwrite, you can look at marketing, but these are real decisions that don't show up in spreadsheets, will never show up on a direct booking page, but they need to be made every single day. You need to make decisions like this to make sure your business is functioning the way it needs to. So that's a little bit of insight behind the scenes. You pull back that curtain and see what's happening. It's not just pretty saunas and bright colored doors and digital check-in. That stuff is great, and I'm so excited to see that stuff. But there's a lot more that happens before we can make that dream a reality.

SPEAKER_00 16:40

100%. And as you're saying that, I got a notification from a good friend. It was on our day 35 collab video, One Vision, where he's just saying, Hey man, like this is so good. Like, I I'm literally waiting for these, and I love these as much as new episodes of my favorite show. So we're man, that's amazing. Yeah. So I love it. You're out there every single day posting from the property, kind of new concept, new ideas, sharing again, building in public from day one was the goal. And then the our thought process was because I'm coming out like once a month, right? Like we can record some joint content, we'll release that once a week so people can see both of us on property, man. So I'm excited to get back there so we can film some more. Maybe not jump in the pool this time.

SPEAKER_02 17:23

It might be warmer. I don't know. I got up to 60 degrees. So I'll let you decide. I'll tell you who will not be jumping in the pool. That's me. I will not be jumping in the pool, but no, you're exactly right. We've got a little momentum going here. We're documenting our story in real time, and we continuously get feedback that people are loving this story. This gives me the perfect opportunity to say if you're interested in what happens on the daily, you can follow both Adam and I, Micah Micah Invest, Adam Invest on Instagram. We're both on TikTok. I believe the same handles Micah Invest and Adam Invest as well. So if you want more than just podcast episodes talking about behind the scenes of real estate, you want to see the day-to-day, what it looks like at the actual property, you want to see Adam taking a cold plunge at the Wesley Hotel, be sure to follow us. Give us a follow and comment with your ideas and suggestions as we build what I like to say is the number one hotel in Page, Arizona.

SPEAKER_00 18:18

Absolutely, man. So it's been a blast watching it, creating it. Even this, we've recorded probably 20 episodes at this point in time. And maybe this is even a good point in time to say that when you put yourself out there, good things happen. And I would say from the very beginning, Mike and I committed, we were going to do weekly podcasts for two years. We wanted to tell the story of Boutique Hotel Secrets as students, people that met in the mastermind that were getting great wisdom, coaching playbooks from people that had hotels, but we didn't have a hotel. So we didn't really feel like credible narrators, if that makes sense. We wanted to tell our own story, but it felt, I don't know, a little presumptuous for us just immediately to jump into the expert chair and say, ah, listen to us. We know what we're doing. But I would say absolutely, Micah, because of our persistence, because of how we're engaging in the school, because what you're doing every day on the property, and because we've been recording these podcasts for months now, the one and only Mike Shogren has paid attention. And he actually pulled us to the side last week. Do you want to share a little bit? Again, I don't want to like reveal anything crazy, but this is an example of good things happening when you put yourself out there. I thought this would happen two years from now, and this is literally happening what two months after we bought a hotel, which is crazy.

SPEAKER_02 19:39

Yeah, I'll leave with saying, I don't think either of us thought we would be like content creators or like just in the forefront of the community, but we put ourselves in a very vulnerable space, open to criticism, and then we committed. I think that was a really big thing we did. Every single week we're gonna record podcast episodes. At some point, you bought me a road, Mike, and it was like every single day now. I'm just gonna go out and document. Nobody can see this ever, but we know we committed to it and we'll do it. And it's the exact opposite. It seems like we're getting tons of attention and attraction to our property and our story and the whole nine. But yeah, like you said, we had a really good conversation with Mike Shouldron last week. He pulled us to the side, very excited, very happy with what we're doing, and really just proud of us. We didn't really mention this, but we earned the Perseverance Award because of how much we pushed to make this deal happen and how much we continue to show up. And he without his mind, would there you go?

SPEAKER_00 20:40

I gotta pull it out for anyone watching on YouTube. Okay, continue. Sorry.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

Yeah, he's what he's showing right now is a what do you want to call that? An award. It's a glass award that literally says 2025 Perseverance Award that we ran, or we won, I should say. Yeah. Mike Schrodrum basically said he loved what we're doing. He's so happy that we're continuing to record, and he's hearing not only from him himself, but also from other people in the community talking about what we're doing. And he would love to make us the official boutique hotel secrets podcast hosts. So very excited. He even mentioned he'd be open to coming on once a month, which I'm stoked about because he's got a deal of his own going on, and he's got so much knowledge and wisdom to bring to the space. This is somebody that both Adam and I look up to. So, what better way to learn from one of your mentors than to have him on the podcast once a month to not only talk about things he has going on, but also the way things should be done. I think he's on hotel number four, and this is brand new ground-up construction. I don't think you get to four hotels if you don't know what you're doing. So, somebody like that in the space, I just want to be a sponge and soak up as much knowledge as possible. So excited to be now the official host of this podcast and so excited to be able to host him every single month. So, interested in your initial thoughts and Feelings now that we have that information.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

It's incredible. And again, I knew that we had committed to each other to tell the story and go from zero to one. But just like you said, I did not envision, I did not, I don't know. I someday wanted to maybe move or make the switch from like student to teacher. But I think the speed has completely surprised me. And I obviously feel very honored. There's a little bit of a responsibility that comes with that. He's got a big audience, a big following. He is a thought leader in this area, one of one of the biggest. But if we can be a vehicle for him to tell his story, to help people participate in the Outer Banks project, or just to attract more people. Honestly, there, I think there are thousands of people that do Airbnb or short-term rentals on the side, but they've got a W-2, they've got a family. They're, I don't want to say stuck, but even myself and my wife were incrementally making some moves, but we were plateaued and capped. And it wasn't until I lost my job, right? I got laid off out of the tech workforce that again I could make a decision. Like you say, hey, I'm gonna bet on myself for the next year. Let me just wake up every day and try and push the ball forward. I some of the things I have some proximate experience from running short-term rentals, but some of this is brand new stuff. But bet on yourself, get around people that have done this before, get into a community, soak up as much as you can, give back where you can. I just think of this as this big daisy chain where there are definitely people, lots of people ahead of us, but there are many more behind us. And so we have an opportunity to reach down with a hand and help people up just one step at a time and look to our mentors and people ahead of us. Man, it's just happened faster than I thought. It's a dream come true. I'm really I'm actually most excited to see who we can get on this podcast now. If it's just Mike and Adam, it's it's people in the BHS community and people that we bump into, like Jeff Crable in the coffee shops. But I think it'll be fascinating to say, okay, if this is really for the community, who do we know and who do we want to learn from? And who's an expert in this space? And so what guests and topics, honestly, moving from just like a few people chiming in with a few ideas to I think the world is our oyster. If there is anyone in this space that we want to learn from or talk to, I think it's just a matter of time and putting some attention in. So that that's quite frankly the most exciting thing to me is who we will get to meet over the next two, three years, just as a byproduct of making this decision to hop on the mic and tell our story.

SPEAKER_02 24:44

Yeah, I love that. And that's exactly right. The world is truly our oyster. And this is now a platform where we have a voice and we can not only interview and learn from others, but we can also educate listeners. And I think that was one of our main focuses and reasons for starting this podcast. We want to tell our story, but we also want to help others and teach others what we've gone through so they don't have to go through the same thing. And this feels like a really good time to insert that community that you could be around. Adam and I met in the boutique hotel secrets community. We started this podcast because of that community. We've had the success mostly because of that community. So if you're interested, if you are in short-term rentals or you have dreams of owning a boutique hotel or scaling to something bigger, working with the team, you can go anywhere. But I would be remiss if I said, I don't think any of this will be possible without boutique hotel secrets. So just wanted to add that in there. I'm so thankful and grateful that I've been able to be a part of the community as well as meet you. And again, I don't think I have even a third of or a fourth of the success that I've had in the past year without joining that community.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

And I gotta quickly, if anyone's looking at home, this is Lorenzo, Lorenzo Mercado. I met him last week. I drove down, Micah, to Los Gatos, about 90 minutes with traffic, to go to a real estate meetup because Soli Caetano was there. And I got to see her live on stage. It was incredible. And then got to sit outside with her for about 20, 30 minutes and kind of talk shop, learn a little bit more about her project, just yeah, get to know her a bit. But was hilarious was some of the folks were actually from the RPM event, and you had actually gone and met Sully at an at Amy Breeze event and RPM. Got involved with those folks. And literally a guy comes up to me while like after the presentations, there's a little networking space before and after. And a guy goes, Hey, wait, are you are you Mika's business partner? And I'm like, I'm sorry. He's yeah, the hotel guys, right? And I'm like, Oh, I go he's like, Yeah, I'm like, Yes, I actually am. So, what's crazy to me is that as much as I look up to the Mike Shogrins, the Solis, these people with huge audiences, and they've been doing this for years, all of them started at one point in time with one follower and one deal and one dream, and we are documenting zero to one, but it's crazy to see already a year later, getting our first deal, talking about it publicly, people are reaching out and people are literally recognizing us in page, right? Like when you walk around, oh my god, people know you as the TikTok guy already, which is awesome. Yeah, it's and I'm getting out of hand, and I'm in the Bay Area, I'm a thousand miles away. And to have somebody going, oh yeah, I like I know you is crazy. So I'm excited again to increase our personal professional brands and platform, but in service of others, right? If we if we can do this, anyone can do this, and absolutely there is a community. So if you want to learn more about BHS, we'll take a look at the show notes. We'll make sure that there's a link in there. If you want to schedule a call with Micah or myself or someone else, just to find out if this would be a good fit. Again, it's a little bit of a financial outlay, but honestly, if it were free or if it cost 50 bucks, you'd probably forget about it. I can't tell you how many webinars I sign up for that are free that I think sound interesting, but then my life gets in the way and I'm too busy. But guess what? All of a sudden, when you pay tuition, you show up to class. You you want the A plus on the test, and you want to make sure the teacher's proud and that you're putting in the work so that you can be successful. Because to me, it was a very binary decision. This was a good bet if I got a hotel. And lo and behold, almost exactly one day or one one year later, almost to the day, I went from not owning a hotel to getting educated to under contract to December 23rd, owning a hotel with a guy that I met on the internet. What a ride, man!

SPEAKER_02 28:52

Oh man, that never gets old. Never gets old, but yeah, you've I couldn't have said it better. You're exactly right. There is something that is real, it sits deep inside you, especially for me. If I'm going to pay tuition to learn to do something, and this was something that I had.

SPEAKER_00 29:09

Yeah. Oh, it looks like I lost Micah there at the end. But look, we are at the end. So again, thank you for tuning in for another episode of the official Boutique Hotel Secrets podcast. If you want to learn more, please reach out. Don't be a stranger. And until next time, we'll catch you soon. And that's the pod.