Guest: Nicholas Falcone, CEO & Co-Founder, NDM Hospitality
In the vacationing and hospitality world, NDM Hospitality does it all. From its roots as a family restaurant franchising business, NDM has grown into an innovative company with multiple business ventures.
Take a peek into the future of vacationing on this episode of Tales from the Trails, where Nicholas Falcone, co-founder and CEO of NDM Hospitality, takes us through the evolution of their tech-powered resort and restaurant experiences.
After getting their start in the Food & Beverage sector, Nick and his brothers expanded into the vacation home and rental management market. Discover their groundbreaking approach with Rentyl Resorts, where the familiar comforts of home meet the luxury and convenience of resort-style amenities. This fusion, wrapped with stellar guest service from booking to check-out, creates an unforgettable travel experience that leaves every guest longing to return.
And they didn’t even stop there. On top of using Salesforce as the base of their CRM, the Falcones have further integrated hospitality and tech, building additional programs to provide further functionality specifically for the hospitality industry.
This episode is full of valuable insights for businesses of all industries aiming to thrive in today’s competitive environment.
From Restauranteurs to Hospitality and Tech
Don’t have time for the full episode? Here’s what you need to know:
The Highlights
Briefly, what is NDM Hospitality?
We are in multiple different industries. We actually own multiple businesses within that company that range from real estate, hospitality, technology and management. So that's what we do and, you know we're everything from restaurants to resorts and much more.
Can you tell us a bit more about your main focus, Rentyl Resorts?
1:07 - With 'Rentyl Resorts', . . . what we're doing is we're taking the industry of vacation homes and we're really evolving it to the next level, where you get the comforts, the spaciousness of a home when you're going on vacation, but we couple that with resort amenities, services and brand standards. . . . They don't have to sacrifice any of the amazing amenities and services they would get at a full service resort and you really get that confidence of knowing the product and the consistency behind it. We're having a lot of success. We've actually opened up resorts around the country and some internationally and we're growing like crazy. So really looking forward to getting Rentyl out to all the great vacation destinations.
What inspired you to enter the vacation industry and create a brand that offers residential rentals with resort style amenities?
2:05 - A lot of it was based on personal experiences. So first and foremost, [with] my family, my wife and kids, there were safety concerns with going to a vacation home. You don't know who has the key or who's able to access the home, things like that. . . . We've gone to other vacation home providers and what you see online and what you get aren't always matching up. There were those inconsistencies.
2:36 - But also then, as we were developing one of our projects . . . we're developing a piece of land that we had in Orlando, and we started selling to individuals. We had historically been used to selling to end users—people that are looking to live in the home. In this particular instance, every single buyer was asking us, “How do we rent? How do we make money off of the investment?” At that time, my brothers and I were looking for ways to diversify our business and it really led us to learning more about the industry. We just learned very quickly . . . that we could provide a better experience—a more holistic travel experience where you don't have to play travel agent to find the things to do around town because they're all there at the resort at your fingertips. From there, we just started to build off that vision and turned it into what it is today.
Tell us more about how you got started in the hospitality & rental industry
3:36 - I've always been in hospitality. My brothers and I got our start in food and beverage which is a sector in hospitality. I'd always worked in restaurants. My father, who's a big inspiration to my brothers and I, actually got his start with McDonald's back when he was in his teens and early 20s and always preached to us how much he learned from that business that he was then able to apply to everything that he's doing today. Hearing that growing up becomes a major inspiration. . . . Got out of college and started to do things in restaurants and more of a managerial-ownership role with a couple companies that were looking for owner-operators. From there [we] really were looking to continue to develop into more ownership capacity.
4:20 - We found BurgerFi. So at that time, BurgerFi had not franchised. They had one location and my brothers and I were actually able to come in and become the founding franchisee for the brand. That's where we really got our start with NDM Hospitality.
At what point did you decide to shift over to real estate and then into the technology space?
4:49 - We got more into the real estate space about 7 and a half, 8 years ago with that 1st property that our family was developing. . . . It was a perfect storm. They had a need for a rental component and we were looking for ways to get bigger and diversify. I started educating myself on the industry and came up with the vision that I mentioned earlier. . . . since then, we've opened up management businesses for multi-family and long-term rental homes and have gotten more ingrained into the real estate space .
5:29 - and then, with technology, we actually got into that a little bit later—about 3-4 years ago. We were embarking on these businesses, and especially with Rentyl, what we're doing is so unique and different that there isn't really a technology purpose-built for what we do, and I . . . realized very quickly that we're going to need to customize and take either off the shelf product and turn into what we need or build from the ground up. That's what really got our inspiration to go out and bring some technology in-house and start doing that customization and that software creation.
Can you dive into what technology you're using to enhance your efforts in customer service?
6:19 - Yeah, so with regards to technology, . . . the systems that we built that were more proprietary to us, were our data system, our loyalty system, our booking engine overlay, things like that. With CRM, we'll talk a little bit about Salesforce. Salesforce is a spectacular platform. With customization, it could really do so much. We did leverage that for our CRM backbone, and then we customized on top of it and really built a whole bunch of unique functionality off of Salesforce that allows us to do everything we need for our business.
How has your company achieved such significant growth and expanded to multiple resorts in a relatively short amount of time?
7:04 - I think a multitude of reasons. Number one, what we're doing and our positioning is very unique. We're really the only people out there that are going to developers with a turnkey solution, on being able to educate them and perform how to build this product along with also how to manage and brand the product. A lot of developers are starting to learn how profitable, built-to-rent, short-term rentals can be and just don't know how to do it. They maybe don't know the sales process because it's a unique sale compared to a primary home, or they don't know how to legally structure it or how to get finance for this type of property or everywhere in between that goes into the development cycle. So, as a brand, we actually offer a complete brand playbook on how to develop finance as well as being able to offer the services to do the work. I think that's one of the very unique things that's allowing us to grow.
7:54 - Also, our network of developers around the country and around the world. In our development business, we land-bank for a lot of the top 30 builders in the country. So we do get insight into deals, a lot of time before they hit the market and whatnot that allows us to grow very quickly.
8:10 - But then lastly, our technology. The way we've either built technology or leverage off-the-shelf custom software, it really positions us in a unique way that allows us to outperform everyone in the vacation home industry very significantly. Through that increase in performance, we're able to acquire a lot more customers because people are going to go where they're going to get the best returns and so I think, the three of those things coming together has really allowed us extreme growth in a short period of time.
How are you managing all of these different verticals effectively?
8:55 - I think anytime you're looking to grow a company . . . first and foremost is people. We're very blessed to have an amazing group of team members at all levels—at the executive level, the mid level management, all the way down to our hourly team members. We have a tremendous team of passionate individuals that really believe in the vision. We're very big on empowering them and showing them respect and loyalty. We believe that's going to come back tenfold in regard to their passion and how much they want to put back toward the business’s success.
9:25 - There's a level of culture in our business that really promotes mutual success and people wanting to go above and beyond for the ultimate success of everybody involved. That's been a major component of allowing us to grow, cause we couldn't do this on our own. We need a lot of people. We actually have over 600 team members right now in the company. Having those great people and then specialization in all the different areas of the business is really, really important.
9:52 - I think on top of great people, we have a very strong process. Knowing how to grow. A lot of companies don't really have a growth plan. They just start going and picking a business wherever they can. We are very strategic, based on the geographic locations, the type of business we take on, how some of our businesses compliment other aspects of our business and come together to create ultimate success. We're very, very strategic in how we grow and how we set up our processes so that growth is manageable.
So what is next for NDM Hospitality?
11:24 - [In the] next 12 months, we have a major brand partnership that we're looking to close. Unfortunately, I can't mention them, but I'm hoping that in the next 30 days we'll have lots of press releases going out on a co-branding partnership with an existing hospitality brand that we're really excited about.
11:40 - We have a tremendous amount of deal flow on the Rentyl Resort side that we're looking forward to getting going. A few dozen properties that we're hoping to announce between now and the end of the year coming into the platform. On the real estate side of the business, we're actually getting very heavy as well into the multi-family and the built-to-rent long-term, rental home side and through Rentyl Resorts and our subsidiaries, rental apartments and homes. . . . Right now we have about one and half a billion dollars in assets in that portfolio that we're looking to take fully under our management, and over the next 3 years, we're looking to actually grow that to somewhere between $5-10 billion. That's a big part of our plan.
12:21 - We're also expanding some of our footprint in the restaurant space. We actually just became the founding franchisees of a company called 'Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza'. They have 63 locations that are not franchised. We'll be the first ones to do franchisee locations for Anthony's, which we're planning on opening two of them this year.
12:38 - We have a few things in our technology roadmap, mainly to continue enhancing our rental technology and everything that we've been building for the last couple of years, but then also deploying our loyalty program to a broader audience. Those would be kind of the big pillars of what we're working on right now.
Hospitality and tech are becoming increasingly linked. Are you taking full advantage of the technological resources at your disposal? Salesforce leads the way in CRM, giving you real-time customer insights so you always hit the mark.
