Property Manager Evolve Lays Off 20% of Its Workforce

14.09.2023 - 02:41 / skift.com / Dennis Schaal / Brian Egan

Denver-based property manager Evolve is laying off 20% of its workforce, Skift has learned.

The company shared the details, and co-founder and CEO Brian Egan’s letter explaining it all to staff, after Skift asked the company for details. The firings covered around 175 employees, the company said.

The layoffs followed job cuts of 14% of staff in May, when the property manager said that supply in the vacation rental market had exceeded demand, and average daily rates, bookings and revenue per property fell below expectations. In that round, Evolve fired 164 employees.

Egan told employees Tuesday that the company determined it would have to scrutinize all its costs, including payroll employees and non-payroll staff so it could transform the company into a very profitable enterprise.

“In May, we were reacting quickly to a precipitous shortfall in Revenue, it was defensive and volume-driven; this decision is the polar opposite, we are acting strategically to unlock value creation and accelerate Durable Growth,” Egan wrote in a Team Update dated September 12. “We are confident in our work to re-underwrite our allocation of all resources, our self-sustaining profitability trajectory, and the ways in which our narrowed focus and rigor will serve to speed us up and protect us against future market volatility. So long as those things remain true, we will not be considering another broad-based reduction of our team.”

Asked about a news tip that the layoffs included a move to offshore customer support, Egan said:

“Workforce augmentation partnerships are not new to Evolve, and we’ve found that owner and guest experiences are improved when we blend partners into the mix — especially during peak season demand, which is a challenge for all hospitality companies and a consistent friction point for travel consumers.

“We see an opportunity to focus our internal team on what they do best — relational interactions to provide the level of hospitality and support our customers have come to expect. When it comes to more transactional interactions, our goal is to continue improving and streamlining our customer experiences by enhancing self-service capabilities, including AI, and scaling our existing workforce augmentation partnerships, which, as I mentioned, enable us to ramp support teams quickly and provide customers with world-class response times regardless of demand levels.”

Here’s the full text of the Team Update:

E

September 12, 2023

Team,

Four months ago, I introduced three themes that we needed to center on in order to define our path ahead:

My intention was for these themes to serve as a call to action, essentially as questions to be answered. I didn’t know exactly where they would lead us, but I had conviction