Everyone is telling you to build AI tools. Ryan Lefebvre, the AI expert behind the tools at STR Secrets, is telling you to stop. In this episode, Ryan sits down with Mike Sjogren and Mike Reilly to explain why building your own AI is the new shiny object, and why it’s quietly killing operators who should be focused on their business instead.

Ryan is a former fraud analyst turned pilot turned STR operator who now builds AI systems for management companies. He shares which AI wins actually move the needle, and which ones are a total waste of your time. From cleaning up messy books, to a revenue manager that found thousands in missed bookings, to the listing fixes most owners never catch, this is the real playbook for using AI without falling down the rabbit hole.

 

Ryan Lefebvre’s Bio

Ryan Lefebvre just wrapped up flying the King Air 360 on medevac missions for BC Ambulance – pulling critical patients out of remote communities across the province. Done with that chapter, he is going all in on what he’s been building on the side.

Ryan Lefebvre got here backwards. Never finished high school. At 24, Ryan walked into the fraud department at one of Canada’s biggest corporations and lied about having credentials to get the job. They hired him. He spent 12 years there catching financial criminals using SQL and SAS – and somewhere in the middle of all that, he started automating everything he could touch, not because anyone asked him to, but because he couldn’t stand doing the same thing by hand twice. His boss eventually noticed what he was building on the side and that one conversation changed the entire direction of his life.

There’s a car sitting in Ryan’s garage that hasn’t moved since 2006. He crashed it. 100% his fault. No excuses, no one else to blame. That night he made a decision that he couldn’t stay where he was, couldn’t keep being who he was. He moved somewhere nobody knew his name, knew his history, or had a version of him in their head he had to live up to or live down. He started completely over.

Ryan went back to school as a mature student and did something most people thought was impossible: finished a computer science degree and earned his Airline Transport Pilot License at the same time while working full time. He then spent a decade flying medevac through the mountains of BC, pulling people out of situations they didn’t expect to survive.

During that season, Ryan made a gut call the night before a scheduled flight – switched his now wife out of the cockpit based on instinct alone. The plane went down on the return leg. Everyone on board was killed. Ryan got sued for $4 million for negligence. He’d make the same call again tomorrow without hesitation.

The rentals came out of that season of life. Ryan and his wife Dee bought their first place and it had an STR in it. They joined Secrets in Jan 2025 and never looked back. Ryan automated everything he touched – pricing, guest messaging, turnovers, owner statements. Other owners started asking Ryan to run their properties. Then they started asking how he was running them. That’s how Solnest Stays was born – short-term rental management across BC and into Colorado, properties they own and properties other operators trust them with.

The first deal that proved the bigger model happened at an event in Denver. Ryan stood up in a room full of high-output entrepreneurs and sold a $15,000 AI platform before Solnest AI existed, before a single line of code was written, before he had one developer on the team. On the flight home, Ryan hired the dev team. They delivered it, then turned that same team toward building AI platforms for STR operators across North America – for other people and for their own portfolio.

That one sale on the way out the door of a conference room became the entire company.

Solnest AI now builds custom AI platforms for small business owners drowning in admin, lead gen, and operational chaos – primarily STR operators, construction companies, and medical offices. $500k in contract value in 16 weeks. $20k MRR. Ryan also coaches inside STR Secrets and they’re currently building the AI platform for the entire community of 300+ operators.

Every single thing Ryan Lefebvre has built started with a decision to stop playing it safe.

Connect with Ryan

Instagram: @ryan_le5 and @solnestai
Facebook: Ryan Lefebvre and Solnest AI
Web: solnestai.com and solneststays.com