BNB | Palo Alto BNB

Building Recession Immunity in the Age of Social Media

I’ve used social media for a few years now, since the Summer of 2014 when my old friend and fellow submariner Jeff Marcey told me Facebook was the way to go to promote my business.

Before, like many people who resist change, I had a very prejudiced attitude against social media and platforms like Facebook but knowing my friend is usually ahead of the curve with his ideas, I decided to take a first step.

All of those years I spent in relative isolation in my former corporate engineering space, I was hard at work though not involved with the world of the social media, those apps that were altering the minds of the new generation of socialites and professionals.

Staying in isolation from the influence of the internet doesn’t allow exposure to the advantages offered by smart phones and the apps that power them – and, yeh, it doesn’t help being turned off by the sight of so many people postured with zombie-like face to Iphone, an idiosyncrasy on a pandemic scale, evidence that we have not reached any kind of zenith in human development.

Nevertheless, with the crash and burn of the smoking remnants of my corporate career in 2017, there has perhaps been no better circumstance to entertain and develop new ideas like running a BNB! (This option wasn’t obvious, only after not succeeding at other efforts to build a survivable income).

Now, from my experience, there is no better platform than Facebook that I know of that is more useful for organizing reunions. For me, It’s been a labor of manly camaraderie without any kind of financial intentions. We’ve already managed to help gather many shipmates from the submarine I served on (USS Bremerton SSN 698) of which many have attended a couple of successful gatherings.

USS Bremerton SSN 698 submariners: Dave Cortese, Juan Acosta, Challen, Capt. Doug Wright, Bob Perina, Joel Walton, Tom Canter at the Fairfield Inn, Bremerton, WA. May 2018.

A reunion is one thing, what about other purposes?

What other ways can you get social media to help with your goals and how is it done?

What does it have to do with hosting a BNB?

That’s a complex question and one I hope will make sense as we go along.

CKY

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Back in 2016, our family was about ready to sell this property thinking we had held it long enough. Long story short, we reconsidered the opportunity to renovate it to rent it out to the open market.

We did a lot of work ourselves, my hands, back and knees still feel the wear and tear. There were plenty of long days and weary nights over a year’s time when a second or third wind had to kick in knowing darn well that we had to get to the magical survival point where we could pay the mortgage instead of further depleting our savings.

Working on this project and bringing the level of this home to a new plateau was nothing less of a start-up company-like effort where hitting goals was simply a relentless hacking away of front-end to back-end tasks day after day without any option to surrender. Quitting was not an option.

Despite depleting funds my wife and I had to fix our own house, we couldn’t leave this family investment undone. Thinking bed and breakfast was a possibility, at least for the short term until we knew what we needed to do for sure with the house, we knew we needed to design the house and landscape in such a way that it would please people, though without the money and time to work with a professional. So we mustered our collective experience and hacked mercilessly to completion.

For a bed and breakfast in Palo Alto, there has to be something nice about it, at least that’s the way I figure. The house is neither extravagant nor overtly trendy or fashion setting, but simplicity holds a value all its own. I grew up in the Menlo Park/Palo Alto area since the 1960’s so the reminiscent value of a house that is not a modern era Mac-Mansion is pleasing to me. The house was built in 1955 and still retains its simple proportions.

Think about the “great idea”, it happens when your mind is clear, and we hope that the uncluttered nature of the home will inspire a sense of vision of your own as our guest. The detached garage could have been a humble inventor’s oasis, or the lab of budding scientists which Palo Alto is known for.

The nice thing about a bed and breakfast not just that we get regular opportunities to keep the house clean! The nicest thing about hosting is providing a place for so many amazing and satisfied guests: tech executives, scientists, engineers, families on vacation, or those staying with us while they are recovering from procedures performed at nearby Stanford Hospital. They come from around the United States and from around the world and they appreciate what we have to offer. We’re proud to take a small part in representing city, much like an unofficial ambassador for the great City of Palo Alto.

In Closing

I write this on my mother’s birthday, December 16th. She passed away in October 2017 but she was able to see us complete this house in time and enjoy our little gathering of family for a modest “Grand Opening” dinner party just prior to receiving our first BNB guests.

Thanks to mom, if it wasn’t for her vision, we wouldn’t have ended up with this property. She had a vision of the value of real estate long before it was synonymous with insanity.