Am I calling you stupid? Not really. Just grabbing your attention. But let me break down something I see in company after company that, frankly, is a little stupid.
We’ve become obsessed with everything except the one thing that actually drives results: our people.
The Industry’s Love Affair with Technology
If you walk the expo floor at any vacation rental conference, you’ll hear the same buzzwords on repeat: automation, AI, dynamic pricing, channel optimization. The booths all promise higher margins, fewer headaches, and more scalability. I love great tech. I use it. I invest in it. I’ve built entire companies around leveraging it.
But here’s the problem. The industry has become so fixated on technology, data, and revenue management that we’ve convinced ourselves those things are the business.
We’re tracking RevPAR to the decimal. We’re monitoring conversion rates in real time. We’re running weekly pricing syncs and A/B testing guest emails, yet when it comes to hiring, onboarding, and leading the people who make it all happen, most operators are winging it.
We’ve built entire dashboards to measure everything except the humans using them.
And I get it. Over the past 35 years, I’ve founded 16 companies, most of them in the vacation rental space. For more than half of those years, I did the same thing everyone else does: obsessed over systems, structure, and strategy while underestimating the single biggest variable, the people running those systems.
I’m a technologist. A nerd. I love automation and efficiency. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way, it’s this: you can’t build a world-class company without a world-class People Stack.
Your People Stack is the organizational counterpart to your tech stack. It’s the structure, alignment, and communication system that determines whether your team actually functions as designed. You can have the most advanced tech in the world, but if your People Stack is weak, your company will always be playing defense.
Don’t wait as long as I did to figure that out.
The Blind Spot: People Still Drive the Machine
Here’s the dirty little secret: every single company in this industry lives or dies by its people. Always has, always will.
And yet, most companies treat hiring and team development like a necessary evil. Something to rush through when someone quits, not something to design, measure, and optimize like any other system.
We’ll spend six months evaluating which property management software to use, but we’ll hire a general manager after a single “good vibe” interview over lunch. We’ll pay consultants to tune our pricing algorithm, but we won’t invest in leadership training for the people actually running the business day to day.
If that’s not an imbalance, I don’t know what is.
And here’s another one I hear all the time: “People don’t want to work anymore.” Really? Maybe they just don’t want to work for you. Maybe you haven’t inspired them, aligned them, or incentivized them the right way.
The truth is, most people want to contribute, grow, and be part of something meaningful. If they’re not showing up that way, it’s not because they’re lazy. It’s because leadership hasn’t given them a reason to care.
The result? Constant turnover. Burnout. Misalignment. And teams that are busy but not productive because everyone’s rowing in slightly different directions.
The Data Doesn’t Lie
At Better Talent, we’ve seen this play out hundreds of times across the 500-plus companies we’ve supported. The data tells a simple story: when you hire the wrong people, it’s expensive. When you fail to develop the right people, it’s even more expensive.
Turnover costs a company anywhere from 30 percent to 200 percent of a position’s annual salary. That doesn’t account for lost momentum, broken culture, or client churn caused by inconsistency.
Here’s another truth: hiring on gut might have worked when you had a five-person company. It doesn’t work when you’re managing 50 employees, 200 homes, and multiple markets.
Talent isn’t intuition anymore. It’s a science. Behavioral data, cognitive data, and structured hiring frameworks aren’t HR fluff. They’re how you build scalable, predictable performance in a business where people still do the heavy lifting.
You can’t scale chaos. And bad hiring is chaos.
The Real Tech Stack: Your Team
What if we treated our people like software?
We’d start by measuring how they’re wired. What are their drives, their strengths, their blind spots? We’d align them to the company’s mission, making sure they’re in roles that fit who they are instead of trying to force them into who we wish they were. We’d provide continuous updates through coaching, feedback, and development. And when things go sideways, we’d debug, not by blaming, but by diagnosing the system.
That’s what true talent optimization looks like. It’s what separates great companies from average ones. It’s the difference between a team that reacts and one that executes.
And yes, your team does in fact need to be highly technical. This isn’t about going soft. The modern vacation rental team has to be Iron Man–level capable. Think Tony Stark in a headset: data-driven, tech-fluent, and relentless about improvement. But those kinds of people don’t grow on trees. You have to invest in them. You have to develop them. You have to build the environment where they can become that capable.
Here’s the kicker: your team is your technology.
Every process, every guest interaction, every system runs through people. They’re the interface between your vision and your results.
If your people are inspired, aligned, and accountable, even imperfect systems will work. If they’re disengaged, burned out, or in the wrong seats, no system in the world will save you.
Leadership Has to Evolve
This industry talks endlessly about innovation, but innovation isn’t just about new platforms or APIs. It’s about evolving how we lead.
Most operators started out as entrepreneurs, not organizational architects. We learned to manage properties, not people. But as companies grow, your biggest constraint becomes leadership capacity, not market opportunity.
You can’t scale beyond the strength of your team, and your team can’t outperform your leadership.
That means it’s on you, the founder, the CEO, the GM, to build clarity, accountability, and culture. To define what “great” looks like for every role. To hold people to it. And to invest the same time and intentionality in your People Stack that you spend evaluating your tech stack or marketing spend.
I’ve watched companies double revenue simply by getting the right people in the right seats and aligning them with a clear purpose. No new software required.
The Punchline: No One Leaves Because of a PMS
Let’s be honest. No guest has ever left a review saying, “Five stars for their API integration.” They talk about the experience, the service, the feeling. The people.
And employees? They don’t quit because your pricing algorithm was off or your tech stack wasn’t sexy enough. They quit because of how they’re led. They quit because no one invested in their growth, listened to their ideas, or gave them a reason to stay.
So yes, we can keep chasing the next tool, the next dashboard, the next shiny object. But if your team isn’t aligned, inspired, and optimized, none of it matters.
The future of this industry won’t be won by whoever has the best software. It will be won by whoever has the best team.
Because at the end of the day, and I say this with love,
It’s your people, stupid.
