5 year Celebration of Boostly [live]

Okay, everybody, welcome. Welcome to a pretty special live Bruce Lee video. Again, pretty bizarre. I just, most importantly, I just wanted to document this more than anything. Something to look back to hopefully many, many years into the future. But this is the first fifth anniversary of Boostly. I'm very happy that we've got some Boostly Team Academy members, Boostly members that are in the Zoom Room with me. So to everybody that's in there, from Andy, Helen, iPhone, I think that's a deal. Linda, Louise, Louise and Chris, Martin, Nicola, Paula, Shirley, Zoe, thank you very much for joining us in the Zoom. To everybody that's tuning in live, with us around, we're on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, you name it. The power of technology now means that we can go everywhere live. And I just want to say thank you first and foremost, even if you're watching back on the replay, thank you so much for being part of this. An idea that was started five years ago literally in the middle of the North Yorkshire moors. Me and my wife went away for a few days just to sort of plan and I just had this little idea at the back of my mind and that little idea in the back of my mind is, has now grown from just helping Scarborough and Whitby business owners in the UK to now being worldwide. We're able to travel to do this amazing job, which is fantastic. I'm so excited and so happy that I've been able to meet so many people from Boothley, just Shirley, literally a few days ago went to go down and stay at the Cave House, which was fantastic. And this is what I'm really looking forward to, hopefully now with the world reopening up, doing more of this over the next couple of years. So I just really wanted to do this live video to just say thank you to everybody that has been part of the journey. Whether you've come and go or whether you are just starting or if you've been with and sticking around forevermore, it means a lot. And for everybody that has recommended Boostly, whether it was training, whether it is content creation, website, hospitality, community, you name means a lot to be able to start something and, you know, build a community and then build a business around it, which I think I put out in an email today, but we've just hired our 14th member of staff, which is insane, which is crazy to fathom, but that's where we're at. It's growing and it's making a difference, which is the main thing. The whole reason why this started was to help hosts with direct bookings. It's as simple as that. The message may be tweaked and fine tuned over the years, but it's just all about helping hosts increase direct bookings and not having to rely on Airbnb, Booking.com and Expedia to bring those bookings in or people like third parties like Sykes, et cetera. And I think that was a really not a niche as such, but I think a message started in 2016 and I think it's just caught the wave at the right time. Lots of people were at the time, especially in my area, which is Scarborough in North Yorkshire, were bemoaning the fact of, you know, the likes of booking.com etc. And, and I think a lot of people started to realize that was more than just them to get bookings and the, you know, everybody's known about things like email marketing and Facebook, et cetera, but I think it just needed maybe somebody and I just seem to be that person just to, just to sort of show. So again, what I would invite everybody to do, whether it's live with me or in the zoom or on the replay, is if you've been part of Boostly at any point in time, just again, I would love to know what you've learned, what wins you've had, the best thing. And I just got a WhatsApp message today. It was in a group chat, a WhatsApp message today. And it's somebody that's only recently come into my world. We met in a clubhouse room back in February, one of the 24 hour clubhouse rooms that I've been running at some point during this year. And the lady was maybe not struggling is the word, but just struggling to sort of take the next step. And today message in our little WhatsApp group that we had to say that she's just brought on five new properties, bookings are up, confidence is there, just sort of the next step. And that's everything that I wanted to do is just help hosts. Whether you're just getting started or whether you've been doing this for many, many years, just get that confidence to believe in yourself to be able to do the crazy things of marketing and, and, and, and that, and that is everything. So again, it's amazing to see these wins and, and the amount of people that send me messages on Instagram or send me an email, um, showing X, Y or Z, whether it's from a training that I've done or a podcast I've guested in or the one of one of our websites that is driving bookings, it's it's, it's all. I love to see it because again, all I literally see is a camera. I see a camera, a ring light and a computer that I'm talking into. And you know, I don't get to see a lot of people, but when I do get to get to read these comments and I get to see these things, it's, it means a lot because all I literally do is I've tried and tested things for our family business, but now that I've sort of stepped away from the family business and the family business has come and gone and being sold, it's. These now are the tactics that I'm sort of looking at from outside of hospitality. And I think, okay, so how can we put this into hospitality terms and how can we, how can we word this and how can we make this work? And, and again with, with all of us to see it come off, whether it's an email template or a social media post or some ideas, it's amazing to see. So I just want to say thank you and I look forward to the many, many, many years to come of this. There's maybe going to be one or two people that are watching this right now who are thinking, who is this guy? What's he talking about? So I have made a little video that I want to end this live video with just to show which will be nice. What is coming up next? Well, in a couple of weeks time, I was interviewed by the amazing Neely can at the back of 2020 for a series that she is putting together called Unspoken Stories. So I'm really excited to see that all put together in. It's. I haven't seen anything yet. I've been told I can't see any drafts until the 7th of June. So hopefully between the 7th of June and hopefully a week after I'll be able to put that out. It'll be in a PDF. It's just basically everything from, from everything really. She asked me loads of questions and we talked for about six hours in total and now she's taken those six hours and putting it down into a, into like a mini PDF. So I'm excited to share that. And we've got the book, the book called the book the Playbook that should be edited and ready to sort of go for the back end of this year. So I'm excited to share in that with everybody and, and yeah, we're just keeping on going. We've got websites obviously really coming together nicely with all the things that we're creating for there and there's going to be some new training coming out which I'm going to be excited to, to talk to you more about. Talking about training on the 14th to the 18th of June, I really wanted to put something together, a five day style bit of training to help any host who needs bookings now it's going to be called Operations bookings. Those of you that have been part of one of my five day trainings in the past will know that whenever we've done something five day and we've done something in a Facebook group, it's been around Facebook giveaways book. But for those of you that did it last time, you'll know that Facebook has got a bit of a problem at the moment when it comes to Facebook giveaways and pages getting ripped off. So I've created a totally different style of training and I'm excited to test it out and it's gonna be totally free. If you wanna find out more, if you wanna put your name down, it's boostly.co.uk operation bookings. It's going to be Monday to Friday, very, very quick videos. It's going to be a lot of action but it's, it's going to really help. And again it's something I've never done before. So I want, I'm going to invite as many people as possible. We normally get about 400, 500 people and it'll be really good if you need bookings now or if you need bookings in the medium or the long term, it's going to help in every single stage of the way. It's going to be all focused around direct bookings and again it's be a nice little way to celebrate five years of Boost. Lee. So that's going to be in a couple of weeks time. It starts on Monday 14 June. So if, if you would like to be part of it, I would, I would love for you to do so. And again, thank you very much for, for doing this. What I'm going to do is we're going to finish on two things. Number one, we going to finish on a little video and then when we come back I'm going to do a very special Spin the Wheel. So I do love doing Spin the Wheel. We'll do a very special Spin the Wheel for those that have made it into the Zoom Room. Everybody that's in the zoom room, all 14 of you. What I would love for you to do in the chat box is just put a little number between 1 and 21 and 20 and then I'm going to spin the wheel and then whoever does win, I'll get some little special out to you in, in the post. I can see all the numbers coming in. All right, so first and foremost, let me just share this little video and then we will come back and we will do spin the wheel. So again, thank you very much. This is just this little video was put together a couple of months ago, but it really does highlight, I guess everything that Boostly's been about and hopefully will be for time to come. And here we go.

Tactics, the training, but most importantly the confidence to go increase their direct bookings and cut down on their over reliance on the OTAs. I'm very fortunate that I've been able to help over 1,000 hosts make a difference to their hospitality business. But what I wanted to do in this short video is rewind to show you exactly how I got to here. In the 90s, my parents decided to transform their 200 acre farm into four bed and breakfast property. I loved it. I was able to grow up with people all around. There was always somebody to play with. And also as well, I was able to grow up in an environment where I was living and breathing hospitality. I was serving on people at breakfast, I was helping people check in, I was helping change the beds and doing all of the other tasks in between. However, growing up, I wanted to do one thing and that was escape. I wanted to go and travel the world and I was very fortunate to apply to do soccer coaching in America.

And I got the job.

In 2002, I dropped out of college and I jumped on a plane and I went into Tennessee America. That was the start of what became my new obsession. Every year for the next six years, I went and traveled through every state in America, coaching soccer, meeting new people and making friends for life. Towards the end of my time in America, my best friend was finishing university.

And he wanted to go traveling.

We both booked a one way ticket to Bangkok, Thailand and that began two years of extended traveling all around Asia and Australasia. In Australia we ran out of money and we had to work in hospitality to basically pay our way. After Australia, we did a little bit more traveling, but in 2009 we ended up back in England and most importantly, we decided to not stay in Scarborough. We went down to London. It was in London that I fell into a job working for Quite, which was later acquired by Yelp, was one of the biggest review websites in the world. And that is where I learned my marketing background. I was there as a Sales role. But I spent so much time in the marketing department seeing what they were doing, how they were working and learning all Things Social media, TripAdvisor, Google, you name it, I totally geeked out. This is my new obsession. In 2013, my parents asked me and my wife and my eldest son Alfie to move back to the farm. They needed help. By bringing in new blood into the business to help get it into the 21st century and getting it online, I applied the tactics and the training I had learned down in London into the Granary family business in under two years. What we were able to do is to grow the online presence of the Granary so much that we had become the largest independent followed business on Facebook. We have become a top three category on TripAdvisor and our direct bookings and our online visibility had gone through the roof. In 2016, I started to help other hosts in the areas increase their direct bookings. I was working on a one on one basis to help them navigate through social media, online travel agents, their websites, email marketing and much more. As I was doing this, I created the hospitality community Facebook group. I'll be perfectly honest, when I created this, I thought it was going to be just for Scarborough and Whitby businesses. But just like with anything that is popular, word of mouth spread. We had people apply from York, from Edinburgh, from Newcastle, from Manchester and before we knew it, we had people coming in from further afield. France, France, Germany, America, Australia. Everybody was wanting to join. In 2017, after answering loads of questions every single day, sharing tactics and knowledge with posts from all over the world, I decided to do something about it. I started to create training videos. Training videos on YouTube, on Google, email marketing, Facebook, Instagram, you name it. I created a tutorial video for it. I uploaded it to a training website and I asked a couple of the hosts from the hospitality community if they would like to test it for me to see if it would help them in their business. Five people put their hand up and those are the first ever members of the Boostly Academy. Fast forward now and we have become the biggest online training platform for hospitality businesses in the world. We have over 600 members in the Boostly Academy and I am thrilled and excited on a daily basis to be able to help hospitality businesses increase their direct bookings and cut down on the over reliance of the hospitality community. We've also created Boostly Website where we create websites that are built for mobile phones first, that have been structured and styled to increase direct bookings and get more heads on beds and also as well. On the back of members requesting this, we have also created Boostly Content creator. This is where we will create for you every single month your social media content for you as well as email templates and videos that you can just copy, paste, personalize and post so you don't have to worry about creating content for your social media channels every single day. My big goal.

All right, let's stop there for a second. All right, well, that was the boosting story. Like I say, we, we've been doing this for five years now and hopefully, hopefully, hopefully things are place to me and it'll be around for many years to come. Before we finish, we're going to do one more thing. Let's do the spin the wheel. So I've asked everybody who have been in our Zoom party right now in our Zoom Room to pick a number between 1 and 20. Let me just spin the wheel. If you haven't yet put a number in, if you're in the Zoom room, we've got 14, 19, 8, 3, 11. Let's see what we can get here. So I'm gonna share my screen. Spin the wheel, which is right here. All right, so I'm gonna hit this and then if you are the lucky winner. And again, this is just for the Zoom Room. This is just for the Zoom Room. So if you're watching on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc or if you're watching back on the replay, this is only for the people in the Zoom Room. Let me hit this. Spin the wheel. 18. So let's see if we had an 18. Oh, okay. If we haven't got an 18, we'll just go to the nearest person to it, which I think is Martin. Martin with 19. Martin, buddy, well done. Thank you very much. I will make sure you get someone.

Nice in the post.

So, okay, the goal now over the course of the next couple of months is to make sure that everybody not only survives coming out of what has been crazy last year, but thrives on the other end. There's going to be more training, there's going to be more daily videos, daily help. The hospitality community is going to get bigger and better. We've got more things that are coming. The websites are going to get bigger and better. The goal now is to make sure that more hosts have just get more confidence to increase their direct bookings. There's so many people over the course of the last year who have been maybe over reliant on the OTAs who now realize that they have to do something about this. So I just want to make sure that Boostly is the, is the go to place. Boostly is the place where everybody who wants more direct bookings can come to, whether they want to read a book, whether they want to watch videos or listen or whatever. I want people to make sure that they feel that they've got the help and support. So if you know any host anywhere, if you see anybody in any other Facebook group who's asking about this kind of thing, just please point them towards the community or boostly.co.uk we're going to start off tonight in 90 minutes time. I've got somebody coming into the Boostly Academy. So if you're part of Boost the Academy you get to come into our exclusive Zoom Room and we are going to talk about free fomo, fear of missing out marketing and how we can incorporate this into hospitality. I'm really looking forward to this Making is somebody who is very, very, very good at what she does and I'm really excited to showcase what she's doing with the hospitality industry. So if you are part of the Boosie Academy, we'll be back later. If you're not part of Boosie Academy you can still catch the live stream but if you're in the Academy, if you're in the Zoom Room, you'll be able to ask her exclusive Q and A as part of that. So if you want to find boost the academy.com if you're not part of the Academy or if you are, check your emails because you'll have the exclusive Zoom link in there. So for me, to everybody who is.

Tuning in.

Thank you very much Philip and Martin, I'll get in contact with you afterwards because Philip got 17, Martin got 19 you2 can do a rock, paper, scissors afterwards to see who's going to win. I just want to say thank you so much everybody that's been part of this tonight. Super short, super sweet. I just wanted to document it and just say thank you. So from me or everybody who is part of Boostly, just want to say thank you very much. So to Helen, Andy, Hadil, James, Jill, Linda, Louise and Chris, Martin, Nicola, Paula, Philip, Ralph, Wendy and Zoe in the Zoom Room and to everybody that's on the, on the YouTube and to the Facebook, I can see all your comments, it does mean a lot. I'll be back very soon for another video but until then take care everybody. Thank you so much for being part of this and I shall see you all when I see you on Take care everybody. Thank you so much.