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Show Summary
In this conversation, Martin Howell discusses the challenges faced during the launch of a product initially scheduled for September 5th. He emphasizes the importance of quality and community respect, leading to a decision to delay the launch to October 1st to ensure the product met their standards.
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Martin Howell (00:00)
We’re never going to charge them the platform fee that you’ll see on these other places. And so they automatically get a military discount. But on top of that, not only do they get a military discount without the host needing to do anything.They also have a stay that is now compliant with the joint travel regulations or the federal travel regulations, and they can get it fully reimbursed, right? So that full reimbursement, I’m not saying that they can’t, you know, stay at a B &B normally on a physical travel, but it won’t be fully reimbursable. It is fully reimbursable on Foxhole within per diem limits, right?
Quentin (00:29)
Welcome the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host Q Edmonds. You know
I’m gonna say. I’m excited. I don’t think it’s gonna be a time when I probably don’t say that because this really, really excites me every time I have somebody on who I know is just gonna give great value to you, the listeners and to me myself. We’ve been talking backstage. I’m so excited about his business. The way his business is strategically set up, the clientele or the demographic, he’s
serving and I’m gonna let him tell you all about it, I am really excited for you guys to meet Mr. Howell. Mr. Martin, how are you doing today, sir?
Martin Howell (02:54)
Good. How about yourself, ? I’m doing well.Quentin (02:57)
man, man, doing good. Just even more, even better, just listening to you talk backstage. And I’m excited again, that’s my word, but I want our listeners to get a chance to see things from your perspective. I’m excited that you get a chance to talk about what you do, because it’s very, very important. And so if I’m being honest, man, I kind of want to dive in. I want you to tell our viewers and our listeners what your main focus is.If you want to tell them a little bit about how you got started, that’s fine as well. And also the market that you are serving as well. So the floor is yours, Mr. Martin. Please tell us, man, what you’re
Martin Howell (03:33)
Sure.Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll just start with a little bit about myself. My name is Martin Howell. I’m the Chief Operations Officer for Foxhole. It’s a military B &B platform. I served 16 years in the military. I started out as an air traffic controller and ended my career ⁓ as a Chinook pilot in the Oklahoma National Guard. So I flew for seven years. I worked for the federal government. I’ve deployed multiple times. I’ve traveled around the United States on official travel. I’ve done permanent change of station, all these things.
And about a year ago, ⁓ I got out of the military. was working in my own business and a friend of mine’s brother, his name is Will. He’s the CEO for Foxhole started this company to serve the military community. And I heard about it. And, ⁓ you know, I asked them, Hey, are you looking for people to come help you? It sounds like what you’ve got going on is, is really, it has a really good mission. And he said, yep. ⁓ and I came on and just started hitting the ground running.
know, cold calling people, trying to set up the strategy for what we were going to do and all those things. And then, you know, eight months later, here we are just launching iOS app and a new platform online. But what is Foxhole? That’s a good question. So Foxhole is a B &B platform like many other platforms that people are familiar with.
However, our primary customer is
the military community. And so we have a 100 % verification process for every guest on our platform. We verify that they’re either currently serving military, they’re a veteran who has served, or they’re a dependent of a veteran. And we go through a company called Verify Pass and we verify every single member. So anybody who books a stay on Foxhole is 100 % verified to be a part of that community.
⁓ And our hosts love that because they can trust who we’re putting into their homes. They really enjoy that. And for our guests, they love it because we don’t charge them a platform fee like many other places. So straight off the top, no matter if you have the same home listed on our platform and another platform, doesn’t matter. They’re going to get a better price on our platform because we’re never going to charge them a guest fee.
never going to charge them the platform fee that you’ll see on these other places. And so they automatically get a military discount. But on top of that, not only do they get a military discount without the host needing to do anything.
They also have a stay that is now compliant with the joint travel regulations or the federal travel regulations, and they can get it fully reimbursed, right? So that full reimbursement, I’m not saying that they can’t, you know, stay at a B &B normally on a physical travel, but it won’t be fully reimbursable. It is fully reimbursable on Foxhole within per diem limits, right? And so ⁓ the way that we set it up,
Quentin (07:16)
ThankYeah.
Martin Howell (07:34)
really helps our service members again by giving them a discount without anybody having to do anything because we don’t charge them a fee at all and we charge a lower fee than everybody else. And now it’s a fully reimbursable stay so they can get it reimbursed by the federal government.Quentin (07:57)
Again, I told you and I’m gonna say it again, man, I love what you’re doing. I love the clientele that you’re going at the clientele that you’re serving. love how, you you reached out to Will, your friend, was like, hey, kind of like, you know, how can I be involved? How can I get involved with this? And I love it, man. You’re growing it. You see who you want to serve. And I know it’s not always easy in this climate, right? So what’s been the key to keeping that machine?Martin Howell (08:13)
Yeah.Mm-hmm.
Quentin (08:26)
running smoothly, like what systems have y’all put in place to kind of keep things going in a consistent, strategic type way?Martin Howell (08:35)
Yeah, so super good question. ⁓ One of the things that we talk about regularly in our meetings. So we do a daily stand up, right? We get together every single day and talk about a list of different things, go over the metrics that we’re seeing, ⁓ talk about what needs to happen, what bugs we found in the app, all those things. But one of the things that we constantly talk about in the team is finding a way in, not finding a way out.So it’s, think one of the things that you get when you have a veteran owned company like Foxhole is ⁓ you have folks that are used to working in like a resource constrained environment. You don’t always have the stuff that you need in order to execute a mission, but that doesn’t mean that you get to stop or you don’t get to complete it. You still have to be successful. And so something that the, the, what we bring to the team is that.
right there and it gives me goosebumps thinking about it because I love, I love talking about what we’re doing, but it’s all about finding a way in. There’s no challenge that we’ve come across ⁓ today that we’re like, ⁓ you know, we’re just going to ignore this or we’re not going to address it. No, absolutely not. The entire team has the mentality of like, Hey, how are going to fix this? Our team is built of, you know, it’s a small team. It’s not very big in the,
what that allows us to do is be agile so we can move quickly.
from one thing to another. And we have our Chief Technology Officer, Troy, he’s a veteran in the software development world. He’s been doing it for over 25 years. He’s extremely knowledgeable. And if there’s something that we want to do with a piece of technology, he knows exactly how to do it. We talked a little bit earlier about how we have, the tax environment across the United States is extremely difficult to navigate. And so we sat down for…
I mean, it took months. It isn’t like it, we sat down for one meeting and figured it out. It was a month. It was months long trying to figure out, how are we going to tackle this issue? ⁓ and we spoke with a bunch of people who offer software that can help us. And we ultimately said, Hey, you know what? I think we can do this ourselves. And that’s what we did. Right. And so we went out and built a whole tax system that allows us to apply the appropriate taxes to all these different.
Quentin (11:07)
ThankMartin Howell (11:32)
states or counties or cities. And we did all of that stuff in house. And again, it was because we’re trying to find a way into serving this community, not finding an excuse for why we can’t do something. We’ve set out from the very beginning, this is what we want to do. These stays must be reimbursable. We’re never going to charge the guests and we’re going to be the most host friendly platform that’s out there. How do we do that? And we just started knocking things down left and right.Quentin (11:33)
ThankThank
Martin Howell (12:01)
⁓ And so there is like a vision from the very beginning in that what I just said, I mean, that’s really the mission of what we’re trying to do here. And we, everything that we do, we bounce it off of that to say, does what we’re doing today meet that requirement? If it doesn’t, then something’s got to change. ⁓ And what that, and you know, we capture what that is and then move forward from there. But there’s some intangibles that I think that you gain from being in the military that.Quentin (12:06)
ThankMartin Howell (12:30)
Mindset of like hey, even if I don’t have all the resources to do this, even if it’s not going to be easy there’s just some things that we can’t fail at and And we take that mentality into all the stuff that we doQuentin (12:45)
Man, you talked about, you got goosebumps just talking about it. You gave me goosebumps. Like when you talking about finding a way in, just that, I mean, I don’t know, man, just that statement alone. just, it just, it gives me chills because I, well, for me, so I am a, I’m a visual type person. when people talk, I’m seeing pictures and I am just imagining when you say find a way in, like we are, we’re gonna be successful.Martin Howell (12:58)
Yeah.Mm-hmm.
Quentin (13:15)
What’s the right approach that we need to take? What’s the entry point that we need to take? And so I just see all kinds of visual pictures as you talk. And I love how you said y’all agile, right? You don’t have everything that you need sometimes and that comes from your experience, but we’re agile. What kind of move do we need to make? What’s the next pivot? And anybody that’s listening, has been listening to this podcast, know where I’m going next because one of the parts that I love to talk aboutMartin Howell (13:15)
yeah.Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Quentin (13:45)
A lot of us like to talk about the success, but enough of us doesn’t talk about the journey or the process on how to get to that success. And there are times when things get real, when things go sideways, moments when you have to pivot fast, just like he was talking about. And within you guys creating Foxhole, is there moments maybe that you can share where you had to pivot fast? And I’ll tell you why, because there’s people that’s listening, they’re on different parts of their journey. Some are at the beginning.Martin Howell (13:47)
Mm-hmm.Yeah.
Quentin (14:14)
some are right in the middle, some have had to fallen off and they’re coming back to it. And I think just hearing something like that could again normalize the process in the journey to success.Martin Howell (14:26)
Yeah, for sure. ⁓ You know, I will say so an example of example of what I’m talking about here is that ⁓ Will and I, we we both served in the military. He was an infantryman. I was an aviator. And that’s what I knew. So as far as like as far as like what my experience is in my expertise, right, I’m I was an expert at being a mission planner for aviation operations. OK, ⁓ but I came outAnd we started again.
There was a daily grind of like, how are we going to find people to, how are we going to get the message out about Foxhole? And Will took over that. He’s a great marketer and he does a really good job of that. And he just, he, he went out and figured out how to do that on his own. He built the first website using WordPress all by himself. Right. And we decided at some point that what we.
The offering that we had on WordPress for that website wasn’t serving the community like we wanted it to. didn’t offer all the things that we wanted. It’s a powerful system and it’s great and you can do really cool stuff with it. But what we needed was something tailored to what we wanted to do. So ⁓ we found Troy Teague, who’s our CTO, and he came on board. within a ⁓ month of him being…
Excuse me, within a month of him being on board, the plan came out like, hey, we’re gonna make an app and we’re gonna make a new website, right? And I was like, I looked at Will and I was like, man, you’re crazy. What are you talking about? We’re not gonna develop an app. Like we just started this thing, you know? And he was like, no, we’re gonna do it and you’re gonna be in charge of it. And I was like, I have never done anything even remotely close to software development or development of anything like that.
I can fly a helicopter pretty well. I can do some mission planning, but as far as developing ⁓ an app or anything like that, I have no idea what that is. And so I took it and started running with it. I worked with Troy, getting his expertise, like, hey, what’s a good process for all these things? ⁓ We went out and found a designer and contracted her for a few months. Her name’s Rashida, and she’s excellent.
Quentin (17:03)
youMartin Howell (17:30)
⁓ She did a really wonderful job of working with us. She was very direct. So anytime we had ideas or something that didn’t work, she was like, that doesn’t work. ⁓ Here’s why. This user experience ⁓ is better. The way that this interface is a lot better for the user. So it was really good having someone like that on the team. And ⁓ initially we said that we were going to launch in September, September 5th of 2025, which was a few months ago.or a little over a month ago. ⁓ you know, I, we, it was a four month of development process and I was leading it and I have never done it before. ⁓ and so in that entire time, right, there, there were changes to how we we, must’ve changed the fee structure three or four times to make it fit where we were going. Like none of it was, none of it was perfect. The first time that we brought it up or implemented it or something like that.
And there’s, you know, there’s features that we want, but we’ve got to make sure that they, ⁓ you know, they fit what we’re trying to do. But, ⁓
I, I told him, you know, one of the things that we’ve talked about is like, sometimes, man, I just like, it’s like you had, we’ve talked about anything in this way. You have a plan and it’s good until first contact until you get punched in the face, right? Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. And so sometimes with some of it, it was like, we don’t know the answer to all these things.
We don’t know, you you have three or four good options for specific ⁓ feature or specific process. You have all these good options, but you don’t know which one’s right because you don’t have the data or you don’t know. It’s all philosophical. And so sometimes the approach is like, hey, let’s just go get punched in the face and see, you know, what happens from there. ⁓ gathering that feedback from, you know, getting out there, being the man in the arena.
getting out there, doing something, and then being down to earth enough and not having an ego to say, when someone comes and gives you some criticism or gives you feedback, however you want to take it, being able to listen to what they’re saying, interpret it, and then make an adjustment to whatever you’re doing, right? One way or the other. And I know that’s kind of like very broad, but that’s what happened throughout this whole entire process. ⁓ And we were going to launch on September 5th.
And our first adversity was that we couldn’t meet that deadline. They wasn’t ready. And we looked at ourselves and said, we can release this the way that it is today, but it’s not, it doesn’t serve what we want it to do. It’s not ready. And we’ve already sold all these people that we were going to do it. And so what are we going to do? And, ⁓ you know, we turned around and said, Hey, we’re not going to do that. ⁓ we want to make sure that what we’re giving to this community, because we respect them, right. We’ve we’re a part of it. I love.
what we’re, I love the community that we’re serving. And so I don’t want to, I don’t want to put anything out and you know, it was a tough thing to do. And it was, ⁓ and so what we did from there was pivoted to a different timeframe and released it on October 1st. But ⁓ just throughout that whole entire process, I mean, I could go into many specific stories, but in general, that was the attitude for what we were trying to do ⁓ was be the man in the arena, get out there and do something.
And you can sit there and get stuck in this paralysis of like analyzing which thing is the perfect thing. But at some point, like you’ve got to, you’ve got to step off. You’ve got to take a jump. You know what I mean? ⁓ and I’m not saying that you can’t make an adjustment, but you, know, I think the important thing after taking that step is not having the ego to dismiss what you’re hearing from your customer.
Quentin (21:10)
Yeah.Martin Howell (21:27)
or what you’re seeing in the market or what the analytics like, you have to, you have to be down to earth. You have to have some humility. You have to go into it knowing, or I won’t say you have to, but the way that we approach it is we approach it with humility. We approach it with, Hey, we want to improve this. The only way it’s going to get better is if we put it in your hands, you, you use it and then you figure out what you like and don’t like, because I can only assume so many things.especially as a young startup, don’t have all this knowledge and we’re new in a lot ⁓ of cases like, again, I didn’t have any development experience, but four months we developed a brand new iOS app. We’ve got an Android app coming out, hopefully within the week and then ⁓ a ⁓ website all within that four months. To me, it’s pretty impressive, especially coming from zero background in that. ⁓
⁓ Hopefully that answered the question that you have there. there’s anything else that you want to, if there’s anything I can expand on there, please let me know and I will.
Quentin (22:33)
Yeah.Nah, man, you answered that thoroughly. Again, man, I’m loving your approach, right? Like, what’s our way in? You know, you hit me with the Mike Tyson references, listen, everything is cool until you get hit in the face. And then you went with my boy Tom Brady and said, we gon’ be in this arena. We are the men that’s gon’ be in this arena. So man, no, I love you answered it well. It shows me again. I mean, like you said it, and I’ve never been in the military.
Martin Howell (22:46)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.Quentin (23:05)
pretty trying to regurgitate what you said, but that mindset, something about being in the military is about that mindset about pushing forward the mindset that we gonna overcome no matter what we working with, what we got is what we got and we’re gonna make that work. so I absolutely love it, man. So I wanna ask you this, what are you most focused on scaling or solving next? Like what’s the next real goal for Foxhole?Martin Howell (23:05)
Yeah. Right.Yeah.
Yep, ⁓ scaling the user base, right? So we want to get the word out to the military community, which we’re doing through our network of veterans and things like that. But on the other side of that, we want to get the word out to ⁓ host. So I said earlier that this was a military-only ⁓ platform. I should have been more accurate in saying that our guests are 100 % verified military. Our host can be.
military or civilian, right? ⁓ So you don’t, if you’re a host, you don’t necessarily have to have any connection to the military. ⁓ But there is a verification process that happens, right? Cause we have to ensure that you’re over 18 years old and we have to identify, verify your identity and we have a process for doing that. But in many, many, many of these platforms is the same thing. And so we just want to make sure that we’re providing safe and secure
housing for our military guests. Normally it’s not a problem, right? ⁓ But ⁓ so scaling the user base as far as getting the word out to the military and scaling the user base as far as getting people to list their home, especially around these major bases, I think is pretty important because as we were talking about before, know, there’s a permanent change of station and that’s…
That’s one of the key things that we do for the military community is assist them with their permanent change of station. And so every couple of years they’re moving from one place to another. They know in advance, ⁓ they know in advance where they’re going, when they’re going to arrive and all those things. So we can help them set up their housing accommodations a few months in advance. takes one, takes risk off of them, but it also lowers their stress level because now they know that, that, you know, they have housing set up, which is
If you look at like Maslow’s hierarchy, shelter is pretty, one of the first things that you have to meet in order to have self-actuation. And so we’re really trying to find good quality hosts around the United States for vacation, but also for ⁓ these locations near military bases so that we have enough supply in these areas that we can make sure that we’re filling, ⁓ we can get our service members into homes.
Quentin (25:28)
Yeah.Martin Howell (25:51)
not only for long-term rentals. we offer long-term rentals, but also short-term. So you have your vacation style rentals, you have your long-term traditional rentals, but then there’s something that we look at as far as like an extended stay or midterm kind of deal where, you know, they may show up to an area and they, their housing, may have lined it up, but for some reason something falls through and there could be a number of reasons why that happens. But, ⁓ we want to make sure like if their housing isn’t ready,that we can put them in a short-term rental for a few weeks or maybe a few months, depends. It could be a few days or could be a few months. We want to make sure they have, we can set them up with furnished housing for whatever that timeframe is before they’re able to actually get into their long-term accommodations. And I’m telling you, that happens all the time. It is not an uncommon event for something like that to happen. ⁓ And as you can imagine,
Quentin (26:25)
Yeah.Martin Howell (26:48)
for someone that’s moving to a new place with all their stuff in their view hall or their rental rental van. It’s that can be an extremely stressful time, especially if you’re traveling with kids and pets and family members. so finding that supply, growing the supply is the key thing that we’re trying to do right now and get the word out to folks that, hey, Foxhole is here. We are the most guests. I’m sorry, the most host friendly platform that you’re to find out there. Everybody’s very approachable.And like I’ve said before, there’s not an issue. There’s no issue that we won’t be able to overcome, not a single one. And not only that, but we want you to come and use the platform so you can tell us how we can improve our Fox hole basically.
Quentin (27:33)
Woo, how would you can improve alfato? Oh my God. I love that, man. That was good. That was almost a drop the mic moment right there, bro. But listen, I can’t hear you drop the mic without me asking before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate, learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to reach out to you,Martin Howell (27:37)
HahahaYep, absolutely. So if you want to learn more about the platform, ⁓ you can visit our website at stayfoxhole.com, S-T-A-Y foxhole.com. If you’re on social media, you can look at us ⁓ at stayfoxhole. We’ve got a pretty huge presence ⁓ on Instagram and it’s growing daily. ⁓ And then ⁓ if you want to connect with me personally, you can find my LinkedIn.
Martin Howell, you’ll find me on there. If you want to connect with our CEO, his name is William Collins, and you’ll see Foxhole in our tagline. So if you search for us, you’ll find us on there. But again, stay foxhole.com. You can find the app in the iOS app store ⁓ if you search Foxhole. And then you can find me and Will on LinkedIn as well. if you have questions about what we’re doing, you want to learn more about the business, maybe we didn’t expand on it something.
⁓ and you want to dig a little deeper into it, we’re absolutely available and happy to speak to anyone.
Quentin (28:58)
Man, I love it. Martin, man, thank you so much, man. I appreciate you being here today. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your service. Thank you for your perspective. Thank you for your story. This was great. I’m so happy that we was able to collab and you get the message out about Fox Holdings, Man, I appreciate you being here so much today, man.Martin Howell (29:19)
Awesome, thank you, appreciate it.Quentin (29:21)
Absolutely, no problem. So listen, y’all heard? Y’all got the value, you got information, you got the resource. Just make sure you’re subscribed. That way you can continue to get this great content. So Martin, thank you again, and everyone else. We will see you on the next time.
