Operations Manager: Short-Term Rentals (US Graveyard Shift)

OPERATIONS MANAGER: SHORT-TERM RENTALS (US GRAVEYARD SHIFT)

Please read this whole post before applying. There are instructions at the bottom, and how you follow them is the first thing we look at.

ABOUT US

We run short-term rental and vacation rental hosting for owners across the US, fully hands-off. An owner hands us a home. We furnish it, wire it, stock it, style it, photograph it, register it with the city, connect it to Airbnb and Vrbo and the other booking channels, and open it to guests. Then somebody runs every stay, every turnover, every vendor call and every 3:00 AM alarm, for as long as that owner stays with us. That second part is this seat.

Nine homes are earning revenue today, eleven are live with us across four US markets, and fourteen hosting agreements are signed. Every owner we have came from a referral. Nobody found us in a search, which means our reputation is not a marketing asset, it is the entire pipeline. A guest who walks into a home that is not ready costs us a review, and a review costs us the next owner. Most days in this seat are a dispatch board, a photo set, a vendor who has not called back, a shift log, a hiring pipeline and one decision that has to be made now on two-thirds of the information. Operations, vendor management, scheduling, escalation, owner communication and hospitality customer service, on US hours.

We automate everything software can do. What software cannot do is notice that a cleaner has fired thirty-two not-started alerts in twenty-six days and nobody has counted them, or notice that a pool vendor billed us every month all summer and two of those months reached no invoice at all.

Our written plan is 150 homes by the end of 2027. Eleven is where we are. The gap between those two numbers is not a software problem and it is not a sales problem. It is whether the operation holds when it is four times the size, which is exactly why we are hiring a person to run it.

WHAT THIS ROLE REALLY IS

We have five people covering guest operations twenty-four hours a day, and none of them has a manager. Five separate one-to-one relationships with our founder. Five windows that tile the week perfectly and overlap nowhere. Nobody runs the handoffs, nobody scores the turns, nobody holds a vendor to a second chance, and every problem that falls between two shifts lands on one phone. That is the seat.

Two lanes, one person. Every case below is real. The dollar amounts are changed. The counts, the dates and the shapes are not.

LANE ONE, THE OPERATION ON THE GROUND.

• Thirty-two not-started cleaning alerts fired in twenty-six days across four cleaners. One cleaner fired three no-show alerts in a single week on a single door. Four of the thirty-two landed on live same-day flips with a 4:00 PM arrival. A chronic no-show survived months, because nothing counted them.
• A house that sleeps twelve takes about sixteen labor hours to turn as our checklist is written, thirteen once a crew knows it. On a 10:00 AM out and a 4:00 PM in, four trained people finish at 2:53 PM, three at 3:56 PM, and two after 6:00 PM. Somebody has to make that call on Thursday. Nobody does, so we find out on Saturday.
• A damage claim after a party asked for $584.10 and collected $77.20. Soaked mattress, ruined linens, broken skimmer cover, all real. The turnover photos that would have proved the before-state lived in a text thread and never reached the evidence folder. We lost that on filing, not on the facts.
• A recurring pool vendor bills $370 a month at one home. June reached an owner invoice. July and August reached nothing, and no payment record exists for either, so it is not even clear the vendor got paid. About $740 sat invisible for two months, because nothing watches a recurring vendor against what we actually billed.
• A door went live with instant booking on and no named first-call vendor in its file for a lockout, a leak, a power cut or a dead AC. The water main shutoff is written down nowhere. Neither is the gas shutoff, and neither is the breaker panel. The printed house rules still carry a placeholder where the 24-hour local contact's name belongs. Eleven weeks earlier, at 3:39 AM, a guest at another home reported a gas alarm and was told to get outside and call 911, because there was nobody local to send.
• A home launched mid-renovation and sits at 4.60. The first guests found the hot water running out in a house that sleeps ten, half the kitchen outlets dead, a second fridge taped shut and never plugged in, a dead hot tub, an empty propane tank, and glass in the driveway. Then somebody edited the permanent guest guide to tell future guests to stagger their showers. A launch defect became a house rule. One guest's actual words: "I just wish you had been honest upfront."

LANE TWO, THE TEAM, THE RECORD AND THE ESCALATIONS.

• Our five contractors cover 168 of 168 hours a week with exactly one person on every hour and zero overlap anywhere. That is a tiling, not depth. One sick night is a fully uncovered block. Twenty-six handoffs a week, and every one of them is cold, so a single skipped log post drops a live guest thread at a shift boundary.
• Guest-money authority was granted to the team in July, written down, and exercised almost never. Sixty-seven of seventy-two shift logs read "Money today: NONE," because two pinned channel rules still routed every purchase and every comp through our founder "until he says otherwise," and he never said otherwise. His own message volume went 47, then 71, then 97, then 192, then 201 a week as the team grew.
• Half our automation was silently dead for five weeks and nobody knew. Guest reply drafting off since late July, the daily brief dead since the 22nd, inbox triage dead since the 9th, one job failed 520 times in a row. Nothing alerted, because the health check measured whether a log file was fresh rather than whether the job worked, and a crashing job writes a fresh log.
• A sweep across nine homes found exactly one ready to run hands-off. One door had thirty-one gaps against fourteen filled. Seventy-two punch-list items are still open and the task board reads 484 open with 45 never triaged.
• Four known wrong facts have sat live on listings for months: house rules claiming a noise monitor that is not installed, a check-in message describing a hot tub that does not exist, a photo of a removed fireplace, a wifi password that does not match the house. Every one is handled by a human overriding it by hand, on every shift, forever.
• Nobody on our technician roster has a W-9 on file. No written services agreement with a cleaning company exists anywhere in the company. Every term we care about lives in somebody's memory of a phone call.
• An owner asked a question about her own statement and waited five days, with a follow-up in between. Two more owners waited three and five days on theirs. Nobody owned the reply.

The honest description of this role: you are building an operations team from nothing while the operation is already running, and the running one is louder.

THE PART TO READ TWICE. On day one, nobody reports to you. There is no ops team to take over. There are five contractors who each talk to our founder separately, a vendor list where half the numbers have never been dialed, and a written standard that is good and is not enforced. The first six months is hiring, writing, wiring and proving. The managing comes after you have built something to manage. If what you want is to walk into a functioning department and run it well, this is the wrong post, and we would rather say so here than find out together in month three.

The person who is great at it cannot let a repeated failure stay uncounted. They would rather build the small log that proves a cleaner missed four turns than argue about whether he did. They dispatch the plumber at 2:00 AM and then write the line that says what it cost and why before they sleep. And when a vendor misses twice, they have the conversation on the second miss, not the sixth.

This is not task-list work. Nobody will send you a list each morning telling you which turnover to check or which vendor to chase. You run a weekly scoreboard, a dispatch board and a hiring pipeline you built yourself, so you already know.

On our tools, so the form does not have to ask you about them. We run Hostaway for stays and channels, Turno for turnovers, Slack for the team, Google Sheets for almost everything else, and QuickBooks for the books, which this seat never opens. If you have used a different hosting product or a different turnover scheduler, that transfers, and if you have used none of them we will teach you in your first fortnight. None of it is what we are screening for. We are screening for whether you have managed people, held a spend authority, written a standard somebody followed and ended an engagement that needed ending. Those are the things we ask about.

If reading that made you want to go count the thirty-two alerts and fix the door with no emergency numbers in it today, keep going. If it reads as a lot of chasing contractors who should have shown up in the first place, we would genuinely rather you skip this one, and there is no hard feeling in it.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

THE TURNOVER MACHINE. Every checkout becomes a turn, the turn is the highest-volume event in this business, and it is yours end to end.

• Every checkout has a job in our dispatch tool, sized to the real gap, with a named cleaner assigned before turn day. Not the morning of.
• The same-day flip call. You size the crew against the house days ahead, and you enforce the checkpoint ninety minutes before check-in where a crew that will not finish calls us instead of pushing through and hoping.
• The CLEAR and HOLD gate. No turn reads done without the lock test performed with the arriving guest's own code, and every after-photo uploaded, including the two grounds shots. A HOLD is a phone call, never a checkbox, and you are the human who answers it.

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