Avery: Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the short-term show. I am super excited about our guest today. He and I have been rubbing elbows at different events in the industry for a couple of years now and never had him on the podcast. You guys are probably familiar with his podcasts through a number of them. Uh, he’s doing weird things with his eyebrows right now and distracting me, so I’m gonna go ahead and introduce you guys to Wil Slickers. How’s it going, Wil?

Wil: Good, Avery. How are you? Long time no see. I know since yesterday.

Avery: I know. It’s like wow, we can’t get enough of each other.

Wil: Yeah, it’s crazy.

Avery: All right, well, why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience? I’m sure most of them are familiar with you already, but for those that aren’t, just tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, and what your background is.

Wil: Yeah, so the short and dirty version of it is, uh, I’m Wil Slickers. I founded a podcast network called Hospitality.FM. Before that, I was a hotel manager, worked my way up the ranks, got introduced to short-term rentals, and fell in love because it immediately solved a lot of the problems I was facing as a hotelier. So I went into the “dark side,” as a lot of my hotel friends would have said back then, and haven’t looked back. I’ve been doing my podcast, Slick Talk, full-time since 2019, and yeah, I have a small little management company. We’d have about 15 homes under management throughout Florida, Pennsylvania, and Washington State. So kind of a little bit of everything going on in my world.

Avery: Awesome. So let’s start. I think it’s really interesting how you came into this from the hotel world because the vast majority of the content out there is people coming into this from the real estate investing world and then scooting into the hotel world from the investing side of things. But you’re coming from the hospitality side of things, and I find that very interesting because I think a lot of things translate over to that. So how did you end up in the hotel industry, by the way?

Wil: Well, we’ll start there. Yeah, it was kind of a weird chain of events that were very much needed to happen in this order, if that makes sense. But um, I started a show for an event company in Spokane, Washington, and let’s just say at 20—I think I was 20 years old, maybe 21—I wasn’t the smartest when it came to business and understanding how to generate revenue and profit and loss and all this other stuff. So basically, after running this show for an event company for about a year, I had a clothing shop. I was like, “Okay, I can’t keep doing this; I’m dead broke. I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. Uber’s taking off.” I didn’t know about Uber until one of my VIP-like chauffeur clients was like, “I almost called an Uber,” but then I forgot that I had you saved to my phone. I was like, “What is this thing called Uber?”

Anyway, long story short, after closing that business, I walked into this hotel. It was a Four Diamond Marriott property, and having a little bit of the entrepreneurial bug, I have all these suits and ties and nice dress-up clothes, and it’s like I gotta put them to good use. I can’t let this investment go to waste, you know? And I walked into this hotel, immediately asked for the manager, got an interview on the spot, got hired on the spot, and immediately just fell in love with the hospitality front desk operations—uh, part of that whole world.