All about GDPR with Sean Rogers of My Legal Club - Full Interview

What does it mean for small business owners in the UK right now and how is it potentially affecting them as we speak?

A lot of the rules in essence that were brought in are pretty similar to things that were in place. Anyway, the problem was that the Data Protection act wasn't really being enforced. It wasn't as public, I suppose in essence didn't really serve its purpose. And everyone knows, everyone haven't either. Cold calls. I'm a practicing solicitor. I grew up I suppose in the law in the northwest doing claims and civil litigation. We all know about the, you know, the cold call on ppi rta. Everyone's at them. So everyone can completely understand why data was of such importance at that level and cold call and nuisance calls. But then at the other end of the scale, and you're seeing stuff out in the press today about Amazon, Google, loads of stuff to do with private health services, data being sold, information being sold and everything's gone on with Cambridge analytics. All sorts of stuff.

The Boost Hospitality Podcast we're in season seven episode eight and today we're talking about gdpr. Before we start I want to thank the podcast sponsors hostfully help you design digital guidebooks that will wow your guests. Check out Paula Butler's Cockington Cottages. She's been using them and she's told me personally that her guests have commented on how good her her guidebook is. Now you can go get started for free with one guidebook. When you want to upgrade, make sure you hit boostly 2M into the promo code for 2 months free. Now onto this episode. Here's what we're going to talk about today. I've got Sean Rogers from my Legal club. My legal club is a fantastic new service that is a one stop shop for all of your legal and accountancy services. Shaun is a very clever guy and he's on the ball and on the point with all all things gdpr. He's going to introduce himself a bit more about my Legal club and we're going to delve into the topics which is some of the core basics that you need to be doing a year on since it become law in the UK and Europe. We're going to talk about emails, talk about your website, make sure you stick around to the end because they are doing a free assessment for your business for everything GDPR related. So go to boostle.co.uk mylegalclub to check out more about the free assessment. Really happy to feature him on there. Sean's a great guy and I really recommend you check it out in full as always, please make sure you rate, review and subscribe without further ado. Please sit back and relax.

Yep. My name's Sean Rogers, I'm based in Merseyside. Currently I'm in London waiting for my train home this evening. I founded a company called My Legal Club. We are soon to be launching three other services. So we have My Legal Club which is like a B2C sort of personal, individual, one stop shop for legal solutions. In essence, any issues in your personal life, cover everything, divorce, probate, conveyancing, you name it. We also then have a number of business offerings where we have the Business Services Club that's free to use and any businesses that need anything, working capital and accountant, web design, graphic design, insurance, ELPL Insurance, you name it. We try and service every business need with an accredited panel. I know myself having a beauty parade of all the services you need for any business can be difficult, time consuming. So we've put together an accredited panel of ours which we think deliver a great sweet spot on service and price so people can get freedom obligation quotes via the Business Services Club. And then we'll be launching an employee benefits product and we'll also be launching a business legal solution called the Business Legal Club for any HR needs. We're looking to provide some GDPR support and solutions within the business service club.

What does it mean for small business owners in the UK right now and how is it potentially affecting them as we speak?

A lot of the rules, in essence that were brought in are pretty similar to things that were in place. Anyway, the problem was that the Data Protection act wasn't really being enforced. It wasn't as public, I suppose, in essence didn't really serve its purpose and everyone knows everyone. The cold calls. Now I'm a practicing solicitor. I grew up, I suppose, in the law in the Northwest doing claims and civil litigation. We all know about the, you know, the cold call on ppi, rta, everyone's at them. So everyone can completely understand why data was of such importance at that level and cold call and nuisance calls. But then at the other end of the scale, and you're seeing stuff come out in the press today about Amazon, Google, loads of stuff to do with private health services, data being sold, information being sold and everything's gone on with Cambridge analytics, all sorts of stuff really.

What I want to dial down to is maybe two of the most important places. As we're sort of talking on a marketing point of view, we're going to focus on website and emails. Now, obviously there's A couple more avenues to go down. But I guess if anybody wants to find out more, come to mylegalclub and you can do that. But let's just focus on two things then. Website. Let's focus on there, dial down on there. To start off with what is the most essential thing that everybody needs to be doing if you've got a website in to be compliant with the gdpr.

First thing I would say in relation to any website nowadays is Google for SEO purposes, likes websites that are secure. You can get things like SSL certificates that are really, really cheap peanuts. Google likes them. That's where you'll get the green padlock in a browser. So you go on websites that are nice and secure. That's what you'll get. If you use quality companies with really good products and software within them for cyber security and so forth, then that's your starting point, I think for your website. And I think with SEO Google being so important, it's a no brainer to go through that strategy. So if you're not already done that, I'd have a chat with whoever you host your website with and look at getting your SSL certificate in and check what protection measures they have in place there. I think your starting point would be to make sure that your privacy policy. So I think in your terms of use, you can explain a little bit in there about you want people to use the website and do it in layman's terms. Really our best, almost avoiding the law. In terms of the way that you explain this and that is part of the regulations, it's really important that lay people can read this to give you.

A bit of an insight in how short stay accommodation works. 99% of the time, everybody that's watching this or has has a business, whether it's an Airbnb, a hotel, a guest house, rental accommodation, it will be linked up to a third party, a property management system. Most popular ones, free to book booklet Avivo. These are some of the big guys and all the payments are taken through there. So all of these guys are already got their compliance in place. So what you're saying in essence is just make sure that whatever data is on your website is the same that is being sent to these PMSs, so to speak. Is that sort of what we're saying?

Yes. You use my legal club as an example. You know, I don't hide anything like that. If you go on the homepage, you'll see we work closely with Commodore security for SSL certificates. We use Salesforce as our CRM system and we integrate that with go cardless. You know, we're on a sort of go cardless direct debit system. So in our terms of use, we basically explain we don't hold our card details. The membership information that you sign up for, we have to use that because we use WooCommerce as one of our commercial partners. So, yes, 100%. I would make sure on your website you explain all these things because remember, when people are. I think people are incredibly nervous about this over the next year because of the stories that are going to come out in the press. Morrison's going through an appeal at the moment to do with the GDPR issue. As I say, when news breaks about this other organisation that have lost passports.

Utility bills, we touched upon it and I just want to circle back to it. That SSL certificate is key as a starting point for a potential guest arriving on your website. If they land on it, Google now will have a top thing at the top left hand corner of the screen saying not secure. They click on that, it will say, if you enter your information on here, it could be sensitive to hackers, you know, for a guest experience point of view. If you're thinking like a customer point of view, who in their right mind would continue to go down the route of giving any sensitive information through you, they'll bounce and they'll go to booking.com, they'll go to Airbnb, and then you're losing your direct booking, which is what we're all about here, like cutting down the reliance on booking.com or Airbnb, getting them into your website and making that book. And so Sean's just given some fantastic little start off points there and you may be thinking, shit, that is a lot to go through, but just focus on SSL certificate, making sure you've got a privacy policy and just being super transparent. Whatever you do, don't just copy and paste what you see on one of these massive websites, because that's not how we do it. Quick question, then. Any tools or any apps or anything that you could recommend, any standard stock policies, do you have that? In my legal club, Anything that anybody can get hold of if they're thinking, I need to sort of get a bit of help on this before going into anything.

It's always worth, you know, dedicating half an hour to do some research yourself. That's the most important thing, no matter who. If you do decide to get any form of advice or outsource anything to anyone, I think it doesn't matter what service or sector it's in, I think it's good. Do some free research. The ICO website, whatever you think of this government, I suppose, as well, the government website has plenty of information on it and I think that gives you a real good starting point, like, say, under no circumstances product information. But go to some of the real big websites, go to some of your competitors, have a look at what they're doing, what they're not doing. We'll be launching, I think, a brilliant GDPR product very shortly. We want to try and offer people the ability to do a quick sort of online assessment, which will be free, so that people can use a sort of traffic light system, see where they're up to on compliance, and then we'll have a range of different products to support them if they want to outsource. We're going to make sure there's plenty of free information on there for people who just want to digest that, do it themselves. Absolutely no issues with that whatsoever. People want to do the free assessment, they can then, with us, purchase Data Audit Report as an example, which will give them a list of things that they need to put in place to make sure that it's operational and it will be easy for them, I think, to do that themselves if they then want to. And that's. I'm not doing that myself. It's a top law firm that I'm using, but I've convinced them to actually charge reasonable prices for once. So you'll be getting absolutely top quality service from leading GDPR lawyers, but at unbelievable prices. And then if you want the law firm to do the work for you again, crunch the numbers with them, and it is really affordable. I'm just putting the final pieces to it before we launch. So we've got links to insurers, directors and officers, cover all sorts of stuff where if you want to go belts and braces on it from a GDPR point of view, we're literally talking about a couple of emails and a lot less than £1,000. We're talking in the hundreds here for a full solution provided by a law firm. Alternatively, people will be able to use our site and the free assessments as a bit of a resource kit for those that would prefer to do it themselves.

Your website in the past, book directly in thepastbooking.com Airbnb, XBD, however you get them. That doesn't mean that you can then add them to your email list and start sending them emails. Now. What are the best common practices that people should be adhering to? With this show moving forward in a post GDPR world, if you're using someone.

Big, let's say you use mailchimp or something equivalent to mailchimp for example. They're really good at having like the unsubscribe or opt out options in there. But I'm still seeing stuff from other companies that don't use that kind of product who are not including an obvious opt out. The other mistake that people make is that it doesn't matter what service you're using really, but you might have an existing client for example, and then actually you're perfectly entitled to email them about whatever that product is. Perfect example, I'm sat on a train station right now, so I book some train tickets with Virgin and they're perfectly entitled to text me to say reminder about your train tomorrow, reminder that train is here, your train has been delayed as per usual with Virgin or whatever. What they can't then do unless I've opted in is start sending me text messages or emails two days later to say that they're offering a discount from services to London or they've got a new line going to Leeds or whatever it be. That's where people making big mistakes on gdpr. Adding people into their list where they've been a client or a former client and then things are gained. The problem with this without scaring anybody is you only have to type GDPR into Google and all you are going to see at the top is lawyers. Now it's happened over the last eight weeks. Look, we value gdpr. Seriously. We want to make sure that you've all opted in, you've got the ability to opt out. We want to keep sending you all these great offers and services. If you're not happy, please hit the unsubscribe button and then you've got a cleanse. So straight away, I think this is.

The cool thing about mailchimp. Free to get signed up. It's super transparent. So as soon as you're on the sign up form of Mailchimp it gives you that very visible tick box. And Mailchimp has drastically changed in the last 12 months. And I speak as somebody who not only uses it, but I show other people how to use it. You know what, you're on our email list. Can we still email you? If not, here's an unsubscribe button click that you won't hear from us again.

I was going to say the other thing of course is that if you're providing value, if you're providing the people on Your email list with great value and you're not pestering them so they're not getting an email every two hours, then weirdly you're not going to have any problems, are you in essence at.

The time of the year now where all of those emails that you, all those channels that you subscribe to maybe a year ago are going to start bombarding you with sales email. You were coming up to Black Friday sales Cyber Monday, we've got all the Christmas ones. It's that time of the year that I love to do a spring clean of who's going to pepper my inbox with sales emails. But you're 100% spot on if you take a different light to email marketing and you instead of just send an email to your guests or potential guests with sell, sell, sell and maybe start to talk about the local area. So what is there to do in Merseyside but not just like a copy and paste from like the tourism of Merseyside. Just talk about what you like to do, think about your guest in mind, where do you like to go, where's those hidden gems, things like that, share what's share what's going on that you like to do and what your guests like to do. And you know you're not going to get loads of unsubscribes. If anything, people will start to look out for your emails and that is what you want. So I think there's so much to take away from this. Again, don't worry about it. Just make sure you got your systems and your structures in place. I would 100% recommend getting on to my legal club and I'll make sure that all of the links are in the show notes for this. Like you say, like Shaun said, you could spend a couple of hours going for all the due diligence yourself doing the Google checks or you could just head on to my legal club investor a couple of hundred into it and just know that in the back of your mind, listen, you're safe so you can focus on what you really want to be doing, which is looking after your guests.

The other thing I was just going to say as well, sorry is important thing I think to consider has access to your logins and your passwords. I suspect most of the personal data is going to be stored with big organizations like we've referenced before. Your booking.com might be with your GoCardlesses, whatever your Internet banking key thing is think you know, you might have stuff in your WordPress dashboard in your site as an example. You might have stuff in mailchimp about all your subscribers, you might have stuff in Salesforce as a perfect example or to book who has your login details. Are you logging into your account in what they call like honey hotspots basically where people can rob your login and password. Allow the tight knit group of people like your web developers to download stuff onto their laptops, download stuff onto the PCs, put stuff into Excel spreadsheets. They're the little dangers for you because you only need one person to fall out with you and potentially they can post it on the Internet or email lists or whatever. I think was this while you leave personal data third party organizations, you've got nothing to worry about.

So if anybody's watching this and wants to sort of find out more about when you do offer that where and how is the best place that they could find out more about that or get a notification from you when that's.

In fab, you know on our homepage you can sign up to our newsletter for free. So touchwood and fingers crossed that'll look alright if this goes wrong. But we've got SMS preferences on there so if you can remember to tick the email preferences for me please and fill in those details then what we'll do is we'll you put some special discounts together for everybody who signs the newsletter after this show. And yeah, as soon as we're ready to launch the free assessment we'll push that out to everybody.

There's loads of places like we said at the start, it's a one stop shop. I'll get all the links in the show notes but quite simply if you just go to booster.co.uk mylegalclub it'll take you straight into the site. You can scroll down to the bottom, get signed up to the newsletter and Sean saying when they've got the GDPR free assessment in place you can run that through and just make sure that you are stock checked because by the sounds of it, from the insight that Shaun has, there's going to be a lot of touch at about this in the coming weeks and months in the press. So it's better to be safe than sorry. Shaun, thank you very much for doing this, really appreciate it and you can now go and get your train. I just want to say thank you to everybody for checking tuning in. This has been Season 7 Episode 8 of the Boostly podcast. Before we go, just want to say thank you to hostfully that are sponsors of the podcast. If you want to get a digital guidebook for your properties that a guest can access when they arrive. Check your WI fi code, get all the how to use a hob and all that jazz. Those digital guidebooks are really effective because they're just replacing those paper ones that you leave on the fridge that no one ever reads. So go check out Hostly.com you get two free months if you put in Boostly2 on that. I'll be back very soon for another boosted podcast, but for now, thank you very much for tuning in. Please make sure you rate, review and subscribe so it goes higher up those itunes charts and we get more eyes on it. All right, everybody, thank you very much for tuning in.

Sam.