Startup Operations Overhaul + Go-To-Market

Landing is one of the largest furnished rental providers in the United States. I had the privilege of launching and revamping multiple departments over our 1.5 year partnership. It was during this time where I really honed my craft for operational automation and doing more with less. Below are some project highlights:

Notion

Looker Data Studio

G Sheets

I was tasked with transitioning central operations to a field-operating model. I had to build systems so new operators could launch new cities with ease, much like a franchise model. 75 cities were launched over 3 months with a team of 3 orchestrating it all. Needless to say, we had to rely on technology to make this project a success.

The main challenge for this project was timeline. This had to be completed within 3 months due to the company's burn-rate. Urgency was the top-priority, which emphasized the need to remain organized and effective.

A robust launch guide was built using Notion. This broke-down the tasks needed to launch a new market. From customer service to sales, each operator in a new city had a list of tasks to ramp up operations as quickly as possible.

To decide where these operators would place, I built a system using Looker Data Studio. I streamed locations of each Landing home into a Google Sheet connected to a map in Looker Data Studio. From there, I conducted an analysis based on workload, distances, and seasonality to predict staffing placement needs. The deliverable was a dynamic report that flagged areas predicted to be understaffed based on historical and present information.

This project saved Landing tens of millions in costs and improved customer experience significantly. NPS soared from a 30 to over 60 within 3 months, signaling higher retention and clear ROI.

Keyboard Maestro

OpenPhone

SQL

Furnished rentals is a seasonal business. Each winter occupancy dips, and I was tasked with solving that problem. Standby was my solution. Live anywhere in the country for $1,295/month. The catch is that if the apartment gets booked at full-price, the Standby member would be bumped to another unit with 3 days' notice. My job was to make it happen.

The main challenge was the lack of resources. I really had to do more with less. Keyboard Maestro was the highest ROI software during this period. It did the work of 3 full-time employees, which allowed us to keep headcount as small as possible. This was especially important during the winter downturn.

After closing the first few Standby members, I had to figure out how to bump them. Keep in mind, there was no tech built to support this product. I had to prove it would work so the engineering resources were worth the investment. The reporting was not even built to support this, so I had to run a SQL query daily to see who would be bumped within the 3 day window. After weeks of sending notices manually, I automated this using Keyboard Maestro and OpenPhone. This saved hours of work so I could focus on growing the product and making it a more legitimate offering.

In 6 months, Standby had grown to over $1M in revenue with a ton of momentum. The service was later integrated into the app and could run without the scrappy automations. The Standby team was kept lean, so headcount costs were minimized.

Zapier

Parsio.io

Slack

Landing lists their 3500 homes on third-party platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. The Problem was that 80% of these bookings were getting cancelled. There was no tracking nor accountability within this department.

Managing 3500 homes across multiple platforms is operationally complex, and this process was never given enough time to be built properly. Accountability and dynamic, up-to-date information was presented in Slack, which resolved 90% of the problems.

The first step was to export all of the third-party bookings into a Google Sheet to better manage these reservations rather than using 4 different platforms independently. Already, the team was relieved that there was some order. The next step was to automate.

I built a Zapier script that parsed inbound emails from third-party platforms and pushed them to Slack, tagging the relevant team member. This way, the team could work under the most up-to-date information in real time. This system was used to manage check-ins and check-outs and verify availability. Additionally, we automated messaging to leave reviews in order to boost the rankings of our homes in search.

Cancellations decreased from 80% to 3% with these simple changes and Landing got Superhost status within 6 months.