Life Conversations with a Twist
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Life Conversations with a Twist
Passive Income Secrets: Turn Your Property into a Cash-Generating Machine with Madeleine Raiford-Holland
"At the end of the day, you're only as good as the result that you're able to get people." —Madeleine Raiford-Holland
The most successful entrepreneurs understand that money flows where creativity and strategic thinking intersect. In today's dynamic economic landscape, diversification isn't just a strategy— it’s transforming passive potential into active income.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland is a dynamic entrepreneur who transitioned from corporate sales to building a multi-faceted business empire in short-term rentals and coaching. With a strategic approach to business and lifestyle design, she empowers entrepreneurs to reimagine their professional potential.
Tune in as Heather and Madeleine talk about effective content creation, business scaling, retreat hosting, work-life balance, podcasting, multiple revenue streams, personal development, and the transformative power of strategic thinking and intentional living.
Connect with Heather:
Episode Highlights:
01:37 Meet Madeleine
05:33 Building a Lifestyle Blog and Content Creation
12:26 Expanding the Business and Team Building
17:12 Client Acquisition and Funnel Building
24:23 Retreats Retreats
35:10 Balancing Business and Family Life
Connect with Madeleine:
Madeleine Raiford-Holland is a dynamic entrepreneur and business strategist who transitioned from government sales to building a successful short-term rental empire. As the co-founder of MHM Luxury Properties along with her husband, John, she manages 16 properties across Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida. Her coaching and consulting business helps aspiring entrepreneurs develop systems and strategies for creating financial freedom.
A military wife and mother of two young boys, Madeleine is passionate about helping families design lifestyle businesses that provide time and location flexibility. She hosts the podcast "The Lux and the Short of It" and leads transformational retreats, focusing on mindset and entrepreneurial growth. With a background in scaling businesses and a commitment to multiple revenue streams, Madeleine empowers entrepreneurs to reimagine their professional and personal potential.
Heather Nelson: Hello everyone, welcome to this week's Life Conversations With a Twist. I have Madeleine Rayford-Holland on. She and I just met and we have so many things in common, and I cannot wait to have this conversation with you.
Welcome to the podcast.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Thanks so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this so many common threads that we get to chat about.
Heather Nelson: I know we got podcasts, we have retreats, we have entrepreneurship. I literally just got into my office today and wrote some of the things I really want to focus on, like the remainder of the year, and all three of those things are up there. So I love this.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: It meant to be.
Heather Nelson: Okay, so tell me a little bit about you, who you are? Where do you live? I know you're married because you have a beautiful ring on your finger, for anyone who's watching on YouTube. Tell us a little bit about who you are, and where you're from?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: So as you said, my name is Madeleine. I am a wife, a mom, and a military wife there. I'm generally from Athens, Georgia. But I'm recording this in Fort Worth Texas because my husband is a reservist in the Marine Corps, and we've been here in Texas for three months. I'm getting ready to go home, and I can't wait. Because at home in Georgia, we have a little hobby farm with goats, horses and chickens. So that's like a kind of fun little part about our life is we enjoy the slowness of life. I have two little boys there, four and two. And our journey into entrepreneurship was spurred on by their arrival in the world. When John and I first got married, we were both in government sales. I was CEO of a government contracting company, and he was a state of Georgia sales manager. So we were both traveling over 100 nights a year in different directions. And it was so much fun when we're young and first married. We could go some places together, and we had different clients, and just got to experience a whole lot of stuff. And so when I was in that position, I said, I was traveling over 100 nights a year, and so I started this lifestyle website, like a blog. It was called Moderately High Maintenance. And so that is when I learned how to create content, write long form content, and I grew that to about a six figure business.
I was doing partnerships with brands like Delta Airlines, Target, West Elm and all kinds of fun brands. But fast forward a little bit, we had our first son, and traveling 100 nights a year in opposite directions just wasn't working for us anymore. And I remember when he was about 10 months old, sitting at the table and saying, you know what? We are making other people a ton of money, and we're not building anything for ourselves. Something has got to give. We're on this hamster wheel, and we both just kind of felt like we had plateaued professionally, and we wanted to make a change. And so I said, well, what about real estate? I knew that long term real estate was not really my jam because the ROI isn't there. It's hard to cash flow and cash flow quickly if we wanted to replace nine to five salaries. And so I said, we've stayed at a lot of Airbnb. If I'm doing the math right, those people are making a ton of money. And so we decided to open our first Airbnb.
And so we bought our first, and it was set up in such a way that reflected the lifestyle website. So our property management and our Airbnb company is called MHM Luxury Properties, and that's from Moderately High Maintenance. A nod back to the lifestyle website because we had taken all of the different partnerships that I had done over the years and made a physical representation of that so that my online community could have a physical space to experience it. And so that first property was so wildly successful that we opened five more of the next six months, and have since scaled to 16 properties under management. We both left our 9 to 5 a couple of years ago, and we're able to choose how we spend our time. And now, the most rewarding thing is that I'm able to help other people and families do the same thing because we scaled it intentionally to have systems, processes, automations to where I spend less than an hour a week in that business. And my husband, my sons think that his office is the golf club. It's been truly transformational in our lives. And now, I just want to shout from the rooftops that there is another way outside of the traditional 9 to 5. You don't have to settle for that and help people achieve that in the fastest way possible.
Heather Nelson: I have so many questions. I want to back up to the lifestyle blog, because this is something that I've been trying to figure out. We have a podcast, I have a retreat. I feel like I have all these things that I need to say. I've been a surrogate before. I want to do so much and get so much information out, but I'm so scared about blogging and content creation. How did you build that empire, and how did that get traction for anybody who's out there that knows that this is part of the route to scale ahead.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Yeah. When I started that, it was back in 2016, so it's totally different now than it was back then. And I think one of the pieces of advice that I would give anybody in that is just to start, because it's so difficult to get in that analysis paralysis of, oh, I have to have this figured out. I have to have that figured out. But what I did was I committed to a posting schedule of three days a week, on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And what that forced me to do is get good at writing content, different types of content and say, I don't care what's going on in the world or in my life. I don't care if I'm traveling. I'm posting Monday, Wednesday, Friday. And so one of the key things is consistency, because your audience wants you to be consistent. And so one of the ways that I do that back in the day is I batch created a bunch of content. So I had a set schedule with a photographer. Because one of my core values has always been quality over quantity, and so I wanted the level of my content to be on a certain level. So about six months in, I said, you know what? My little camera isn't cutting it anymore. I started every Tuesday afternoon having my content list for the next coming episodes, or not episodes, but blog posts, and we would just crank it out. And I'd say the biggest thing is just getting started and then learning things like SEO and backlinking, either that or outsourcing it quickly.
Heather Nelson: Consistency is definitely something that I tell people all the time, especially with podcasts. I see so many women reach out and they're like, we wanna start a podcast. And what do you know? What is your biggest advice? I like consistency. You literally have to show up at like, whatever your plan is, that's what you got to continue on. And I have posted for almost four years every single week, and it's all about consistency. It's working out. If you want to move the needle, you have to be consistent about it and figure out a way to be consistent about it too. And for you, since you have so much backlog of content, I would leverage AI. There are so many transcription tools that you can just plug in some of those videos to and then have AI, one, understand your voice, and then have it condensed into a blog post. That's like a whole podcast.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: My team, oh, my gosh, the things that they are doing with AI these days. They pretty much do everything that I do that they have video of, they feed it into this transcription bot and all of my teachings. And they literally have a Madeleine bot that they'll ask anything, and it spits it out in my voice. So all of my emails, all of our social media, it fools me. I'm like, did I write this? And they're like, the Madeleine bot did. And I'm like, gosh, it's scary.
Heather Nelson: Are you doing any of your blog posts, you've now moved on? Okay.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: I still have the website, and so I still get brands that I have really long term relationships with. They know that I'm not continuing to consistently post on the blog, the podcast. That was big picture lifestyle stuff, so gluten and dairy free recipe, travel life on my farm, like dabbling interior stuff in there. But since we've shifted to short term rentals, my social media has shifted straight into short term rentals. So the blog is still there, the legacy content is still there. It still gets a crap ton of page views just because we did a good job with SEO back in the day. It still leads over there. But the brands typically want to see, they're the brands that I worked with on the short term rental side of things, and they want to see things on my social media.
Heather Nelson: You have 16 Airbnb properties. Where are they? I want to come to one.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: They're scattered throughout Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida. I know you're in California, so come on over. Probably love the Tennessee properties. They're little twin cabins in this great mountain top community that has some great amenities.
Heather Nelson: I love traveling, and I like Hotel Snob because I worked in a hotel. I stay in better hotels.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Moderately High Maintenance tells you anything.
Heather Nelson: My husband's like, oh, my God, you're so bougie. We're only gonna sleep in this bed for like 8 hours, and that's it.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Yeah. I'm with you, which is why I created my Mhm Luxury Properties, because I was such a particular customer. People say we think of everything.
Heather Nelson: That's so funny. And now, when you could probably know this too, now we have children and I'm like, I'd rather stay in an Airbnb. Or if we're having a girls weekend, you can have so much more fun to stay in an Airbnb and have a chef or cook, and just hang out. I'm always like, where's the cutest ones? I want to stay at the cutest ones.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: So as a mom, what are the things that you look for most in an Airbnb?
Heather Nelson: Honestly, sometimes I really don't want to bring them. I don't know, I'm really about, I love the cuteness. And then I think of fun things to do, like games or outdoor games. Obviously, a pool. I'm always down for a hot tub. And then, just for me, it's more like, what's close by that we could walk to or not have to Uber? It's about building the experience, right? What about that house? Something memorable. So with Airbnb, you own 16 of them.How does that work?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Interestingly enough, we have 16 under management. And so how can you get to an Airbnb or short term rental business? How can I best explain this? I like to call them short term rentals, because Airbnb is a platform, just like booking.com. And then my favorite, of course, is a direct booking website. So as an entrepreneur, you want to own your own book of business. And if you were looking at Airbnbs, you will typically get the best price if you book directly on a host website. So just a little Asterisk there, money saving hack. Airbnb typically charges you 13 to 15% in fees on top of what that host is getting paid. And so you can reverse, search an image on that, and typically find their direct booking website. So if you ever come to look at one of my properties, you will get the best price if you book on my website, MHM Luxury Properties or another host. But in the short term rental space, you can own properties. You can arbitrage properties, which means long term lease with an agreement to sublease it out as a short term. I have a few of those in there. And then we co host, meaning that we property manage other people's properties, because some people want fully passive income. And then you take a percentage off the top, since we're all entrepreneurs here, and kind of getting into the weeds on how businesses work. The majority of mine, of those 16, I manage five other people's properties. So the majority are mine, but I think to get started in the short term rental space, all three of those do the best to have a well rounded portfolio because they each have their own advantages.
So when you're owning a property, you get the tax benefits. You went on cash flow, equity appreciation and taxes, but it's obviously the most expensive to get into, because you need a down payment. Then arbitrage is great because it's not near as much of an upfront payment. You can typically get into a listing. The way that I like to use it is if real estate is really cost prohibitive to get close to a certain area of town, so commercial real estate is gobbling up all of the single families. Or other ways to make the numbers work as far as being profitable, you can get an apartment close to that downtown arena, or something for an arbitrage unit that's pretty reasonably priced where it would have been cost prohibitive otherwise. And so with that cash flow, you still get some tax benefits, but you're not winning with equity and appreciation. But you're still the one in control of that business. Co hosting $0 to start up costs, you're making money from day one, but you have two clients. You have the owner of the property, and you have the guests that you have to answer to. So much better cash flow from day one because you're providing a service, but you're not winning on equity or appreciation. But there's very little risk to that. So when you combine all three of those different business models into one business, you can take the cash flow from the Co hosting, and pour it into owning another property quicker arbitrage. You can get to those really great walking distance locations in a lot of areas that you can cash flow really well, but you may not be able to own. And then they all just kind of work really well to grow and scale in a really sustainable profitable way.
Heather Nelson: Then your business helps everybody in all those buckets, whether whatever type of property that they want to manage?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Absolutely. My coaching and consulting business does that because I do all three of my portfolios, so I'm really comfortable. All of my coaches are really comfortable working in all three of those avenues.
Heather Nelson: So what does your team look like? It sounds like you have a big one. I have two businesses, and it's just me, so bless you. Yeah, all right,
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Before we jump into that, can I give you a book recommendation that changed my life? The book, Who Not How by Dan Sullivan will change your life. So I kind of divide my team into two buckets. I have the actual properties side of things where we're managing that piece. So I ran that with a team of three full time virtual assistants that are based in the Philippines, and they were Airbnb training managers. So they trained all of the trainers at Airbnb, so high level employees over there. They had already gone through their scaling and escalation process, and just phenomenal women over there. And so they ran all the property side of things. They managed the cleaners, the handyman, all of that stuff. I don't even know how many contractors we have on that side of things, because they run that show. And then, let's see. On the coaching and consulting side, we go through my little flow chart here. I have a fractional COO, and then I have a full time director of marketing. And then I have four full time coaches. And then I have a sales manager, and three full time sales employees, one one part time. And then we have four different contractors that are podcast producers, copywriter, graphic designer.
Heather Nelson: Okay. How long has this business been? When did you start this business?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: The coaching and consulting? Back early 2023.
Heather Nelson: Wow. I have so many questions because my consulting business is helping businesses with business development strategies more along the lines of like, what are you doing? What is your client relations strategy? What are you doing to maintain your clients? What are you doing to grow your clients? That's where my passion and experience lies that I never even thought about. I just thought I'm going to be doing this job for the rest of my life by myself, and you have this amazing team that is teaching everybody. What was the point, that tips that to grow so much that you were able to have a team like that?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Absolutely. So I was a one woman show at the very beginning in 2023. Do you want to get into my funnel of what that looks like for client flow? Because it goes into the scale of that piece.
Heather Nelson: That's another thing we're learning. I'm learning about the whole client flow, especially with our retreat. How do you get people in the funnels to get the emails? It's like a whole, again, I need a marketing person.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: I've got you one.
Heather Nelson: The analysis and all the things, but we'll get there.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: I've got the list if you need it. I'm happy to share my Rolodex. But okay. Our client acquisition funnel is primarily run through Instagram and Facebook. And so we run Instagram ads. People respond with a keyword. And then when I was first starting, we would just start a conversation and essentially get them on a call with our team to see if it was a good fit for our mentorship. And so that was very tedious, because I was talking to people in the Instagram DMs, getting them on a phone call with me at that point. And if they wanted to become a client, then I was handling all the client fulfillment as well. So lots of hats, lots of brain changing directions. And so the very first thing that I outsourced was the DM setting. And so somebody in my DMs chatted with people. He was handling all of the chats, then I was taking the sales calls and doing the client coaching. Then we shifted to the DM setter, doing both DM settings and taking some of the sales calls as well so that I was primarily focused on the fulfillment side of things. And the timeline of this was about how I got tired of the PMs.
After about two weeks, I said, I need some help here. And it was a pretty easy swap. Because most people in the sales professional world, they work on commission. So I was like, all right, you keep watching what you catch and so outsource that. You get me quality calls, and we'll go from there. And so after about three months of that, then I hired my first coach, and so he started shadowing me. He was already an Airbnb host, super host. Been doing it for years. And so he came in, really implemented all of my systems processes, all of my proprietary stuff he brought into his business. And so he was taking some of those coaching calls, but I was still doing quite a few of them. And then we got a new DM setter, so it was one person doing DMs. One person doing sales calls, two people doing the coaching to keep up with the sales team over here. And then we had to hire another coach because the sales team was rocking. And then about that point, we hired somebody to build out all of our funnels. And then we hired a marketing intern to be trained by the funnel consultant who was doing all of that. And then about four months after that, she came on full time from an intern role director of marketing, and we had to hire more coaches and more sales people to keep up with it, and off it went.
Heather Nelson: Wow. What an amazing accomplishment in that short of time. I'm like, oh, my god. I'm like, can I just get that goal to happen and then move, and then move forward? But I know what my experience is like, how it can help people move the business totally in so many ways. But I know at some point, I'm not going to be able to coach all these people. The capacity and the time to put together a strategy and all the things.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: That's where it gets challenging. And I brought in that consultant. I'd had such a bad experience with group coaching in the past. I was like, I only want to do one on one, and figure out how to tailor our offer to incorporate a very small, structured group cohort coaching program that we also implemented in there, which allowed us to have one to many, but not too many situations while maintaining the quality. Because at the end of the day, you're only as good as a result that you're able to get to people. And the reason why I was so big on scaling the team is because I never wanted our clients to feel like they were getting a decreased value of product just because we were taking on clients.
Heather Nelson: Totally. As a startup entrepreneur, before we started recording, I said that I have a lot of women in my world who are trying to make that leap. Was there a podcast? Did you do any one on one coaching? Did you take any classes? What did you do? Anything outside of your normal stuff that you would recommend for another entrepreneur.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: So I've always been big on self development, and I think that entrepreneurship is the greatest form of self development disguised as a business opportunity. And so I've always been ravenous for that type of information. And when I was getting started and in the short term space, I spent over $50,000 in coaches and mentorships for short term rentals. And what I found was a lot of generalized information, and I had a really difficult time taking all of that information and bringing it down into my specific situation. I did a lot of education in the short term space, and chose what worked and what didn't work out of those. But I didn't necessarily do any coaching or consulting, coaching or like mentorship for me because I had been through so many of those different programs that I knew which things that actually moved the needles and got results. And so I built the program that I wish I would have had, and it was kind of minimized back in the beginning of my story. But in government sales and contracting, I was the CEO of a multi million dollar company. People process operations and manage large scale projects like that were already in my wheelhouse. That's where I encourage people who are just getting started in their entrepreneurial journey to look back at their previous experience, because no training is ever wasted. And we all bring our own unique gifting and talent to whatever business that we're wanting to bring into the world, and your gifting and talent is what makes you special and what's going to allow you to speak to your target audience in a way that nobody else is.
Heather Nelson: Oh, my God, so true. So now, you're consulting business. You help potential Airbnb hosts, owners, all of the things.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: All of the things. People who have two interests, unique audiences, people who may have never had any real estate experience ever. That's completely fine if you're green. Maybe you've had a long term rental portfolio and want to start into short term rentals, but you're not really sure how to make that leap? We work with them. And then we work with established short term rental hosts and property managers who don't have the systems, processes, automations or the marketing piece in there. The other aspect from that lifestyle website, Moderately High Maintenance, is I became really good at affiliate marketing. And so every single one of my properties is a shoppable property. So guests have in the guidebook, they have a little QR code that says, if you fall in love with something during your stay, you can shop it here. And it takes them to a website that has all of the property photos and all of the links to all of the products. And so I teach hosts how to add multiple streams of revenue to every single property outside of their booking revenue?
Heather Nelson: Do you do that for other podcasters? I know that my podcast needs to get in order to maybe make some revenue on it. I know that's like a whole nother world, and that's a personal question for me. Do you do that?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: I haven't. I have all of the course material built out for short term rentals, but I'm trying to think. If I know of anybody who does that side of things, but (inaudible). And if you're not doing affiliate revenue and you're coaching consulting with your software providers, we're making really solid money off of that as well.
Heather Nelson: I'll add it to my whiteboard over there.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Don't sleep on it. We did six figures in affiliate revenue last year. So as far as the needle moving and the Who Not How piece of getting somebody where you can fully turn that over to somebody and manage it. They pay for themselves and then some.
Heather Nelson: Okay, good to know. So you're a podcaster too. Talk about your podcast. I love meeting other podcasters.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: The podcast is a new thing for us, and we were talking about just creating that content consistently. We knew what we wanted in our next strategy of growth to be able to have long form content, and be able to break it up into short form content for social media. And so while I was really excited about podcasting in general, it was part of a larger strategy, which I feel comfortable sharing with other entrepreneurs over here. There's got to be multiple things in here. Because if it's going to take my time, it's got to have an ROI, for sure. And so my podcast is called The Luxe and the Short Of It, and we share parts of my entrepreneurial journey, as well as other people who have been successful in their field. And more importantly, creating the life that they want to live. So what does luxury mean for you? For me, it's not flashy watches and cars, and people flashing cash all over the internet. It's those simple moments and being able to choose how I spend my time with my kids and just other things. And so creating and showing people that there is another way, and being able to peel back the curtain on that is what The Luxe and the Short Of It is all about.
Heather Nelson: I love that. I know so many people, like I said, I would love to just make more money, and I'm with you. I don't need the Gucci purses, the flashy cars or any of that. I want to be able to take time to do fun things, and I want to travel. I want to go on fun girlfriend vacations and stay in really cute Airbnb all over the world, and take my family on a good vacation. So for me, I'm the same way with you. How do we have financial wealth that makes you probably live a better life,have less stress, and live life in a different way?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Having a bigger impact. Being able to give big in places that need things more than we do. One of the biggest things that we do in our business is donate big. And I'm like, it's just one of the biggest gifts of being able to build wealth. I don't know, it's been different. It's been good.
Heather Nelson: I think too for me, especially with my podcast because I interview women with really cool stories or unique journeys, and to inspire others in a world that is so scary right now and unsure. If that's the one thing that I can bring to the world right now, I'm here for it. So that's absolutely another passion for me. And you do retreats. I'm like, what? Tell me about your retreats, and where are they?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: So last year was our first year that we did, it's called the Accelerate Your STR Retreat. It's a short term rental focus, but it's one that sells people on what they think they want, and then gives them what they need. Because it's a huge mindset to focus on a bigger impact in your WHY, and defining that in order to actually create the life that you want. What is your WHY? What is your actual WHY behind it? Everybody says time and financial freedom. But okay, what does that look like? What does your day to day look like when you get there? How do you visualize it? And how do you create an action plan to get there? And so we do that retreat in Costa Rica at the Imiloa Institute, which I love. We're going back there June 4th through the 9th.
Heather Nelson: So it's a five day retreat.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: It's a five day retreat in Costa, Rica. If you haven't looked at the Imiloa Institute. I highly, highly, highly recommend it. It is all inclusive. You fly into San Jose, and then you take a private charter that is included in it, private flight over to Quepos. It's up on top of a mountain overlooking the Pacific. You're seeing whales, gourmet vegan meals the entire time. You can have 30 people, which is about what we have when we go down there. But it is the most phenomenal staff people.
Heather Nelson: And you have 30 people attend, and this is how many have you done so far?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Our second this year. Then we're doing a mini retreat in Athens, Georgia, which is my hometown. We wanted to give people an opportunity to come tour some of my properties. Touch, feel, experience one of my properties. And so you have to be a client to get in the room. We'll have about 150 people at that one, and then that's a two day event. That'll be May 1 and 2nd. But I think we're going to live stream the rest of the event for folks who aren't clients.
Heather Nelson: Thank goodness you have a team to help you.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: I'm moving at some point between now and then. I'm moving back to Georgia because I'm in Texas at the moment.
Heather Nelson: I'm an entrepreneur of two businesses, and I'm a podcaster, and I have a retreat, which a retreat literally is like another job, another business, right? So a girlfriend and I, I bring the inspiration, the speakers, and live your best life. And then my co host, she's more on the yoga spiritual side. So we've teamed up together.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Continue. Please, continue.
Heather Nelson: So we did an overnight in April last year. It was like two nights. We also had a day pass so somebody who couldn't stay the two nights, they came for the day. I feel like we kind of started out too big. We went all in and had this beautiful venue. We're still getting momentum like getting women to put this on their radar, get encouraged to come. So we did two full day retreats. We run at Airbnb, a beautiful one that makes you want to dream big. And we have a spiritual type thing, whether it's a sound bath or an animal reading, some meditation, some yoga. But then also just having inspirational speakers there to inspire, to educate us, whether that's in health and wellness, whether that's finances, whether that's just living a better life and dreaming bigger. So we have our next overnight retreat in April, which will be a two night experience. And then we're working on a couple more day retreats upcoming this year.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: So where will the one in April be?
Heather Nelson: It's in Yokayo Ranch, which is in Ukiah, California. It's like an hour north from us, so probably an hour and a half from San Francisco. It is so beautiful. It is this magical venue, and I think that was the thing for us. We stepped on site and we're like, this is where we want to host it. But it's very expensive, so there's a lot of money that's been invested. We're kind of figuring out what the next steps were. We would love to get to Costa Rica someday, or at least to these beautiful places once we get our group of women who want to continue these things. So it's been a process. I think the marketing thing is the hardest thing. Speaking the truth and getting what people are going to experience out of it and all the things. But we are truly inspired by it. We love it, the impact that it's made on the women who've attended, and the friendships that have been made out of that just are priceless.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: I think that's my absolute favorite thing about retreats, because I personally like to go deep with people. And you can only do so much over Zoom or virtual. And when you're able to sit and enjoy meals, do sound baths and do yoga with folks every morning, because we bring a lot of that as well. We do ecstatic dance. If you guys ever done one, oh, my gosh, it's amazing. It's so much fun. Look up seven rhythms or five, I don't know. I'll send it over to you. But ecstatic dance, it is such a fun thing to do in the retreats. But when you talk about the marketing piece, what I love about Imiloais when you do your first retreat with them, included in your package is that they bring you and your retreat partner all expenses paid. They pay for your flight down for a fam trip, so a familiarization trip down there, and they shoot all of your marketing content.
Heather Nelson: If we stop recording, I want to know how much that is.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Okay, I'll connect you with the founder. They plan all of it for you. They do all of your meals. They coordinate everything for you.
Heather Nelson: There's need to be more of those types of venue retreat places around the world. I even think of Sonoma County. There's all these little hidden gems and I'm like, can someone just host this for free? We will bring the exposure, we will bring the experience, and then now you have content to promote the retreat. And so that's another focus for me is like, how do we build on those partnerships?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Absolutely. Their goal is to have a retreat center on every continent. And I'm like, well, you let me know because we're going to host one with you guys. We will never do it another way, because they make it so easy for the host.
Heather Nelson: Okay, I'll have to look into it. How do you balance all of this? I think that's probably everyone's question, because that's the number one question I get asked all the time. How do you run successful businesses like this? You have two little ones, four and two. I have four kids, but one is three and a half. He's just full of energy, and a boy so I'm like, I know your pain when you say four and two, hosting a retreat and doing all these things. That is the number one question, and I would love to hear the answer. How do you manage it all?
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Manage it all. Manage is the key word, because DO IT ALL is not the case. Phenomenal teams on both sides, household team and business team. We've hired strategically. My husband manages our house for the most part. And so outside of this weird three month where he's on active duty orders with the Marine Corps, he usually handles special projects and then the day to day at the house. So our phenomenal housekeeper and our nannies are just other things. One, I won a great partner. But two, just having a team on both sides of things and not feeling bad about delegating or outsourcing, I learned really early on that laundry and cleaning were not in my wheelhouse. And why would I? Why would I take on a task that was a 25 to 35 hour and hour task when my rate is $250 to $500 an hour? It must be nice comments. And I just said, we all get to choose and create how we want to spend our life. I'm not going to take my time doing laundry when it could be face to face time reading with my boys or going out on the metro, and that's what I want them to remember. My kids do not spell love, L-O-V-E, they spell it T-I-M-E. and so my time is more valuable spent with them in one on one focused time rather than cooking, or cleaning, or laundry. so outsourcing that, and really just prioritizing what gets my time and what doesn't, and being ruthless with saying no.
Heather Nelson: So good. And I hope you have some women, girl time in there too.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Yes. My team on the business side is 90% women. and then my best friends, unfortunately, don't live close by, but we are texting constantly and just kind of fitting it in where we can. And one of my best friends' son is five months younger than my oldest, and they are best buddies. and so whenever we travel, we're typically traveling with them, and just having that quality time.
Heather Nelson: I love that. Is there anything we didn't talk about? I feel like we covered so much, and we did talk about a lot.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: I have so much to ask from you. I want to hear about surrogacy. I want to hear about all the things. And so I'm thinking you might need to come on my podcast so I can ask you all of these deeper dive questions, but I think we covered quite a bit of it.
Heather Nelson: Thank you so much. I purposely planned my podcast interviews on Mondays and Fridays. Mondays start my week off and just be inspired. And every time I do an interview, it fills my heart so much. And then Fridays, it's like, oh, the week's been so long. And then I just get inspired to go into the weekend. I just want to thank you for being here. I love what you're doing. I'm definitely going to be following and picking your brain on all the things well.
Madeleine Raiford-Holland: Thank you so much for having me. This conversation has been life giving, so keep doing what you're doing. I hope that I get to have you on my podcast soon.
Heather Nelson: Thank you. I would love that.