Boostly Hospitality Podcast Season 6 Episode 6 - With David Diack

What was your background before you actually got into the world of SA and property?

I was working at a family computer shop, selling, you know, fixing computers. They're selling like loads of ink and toner consumables and I just like, you know what, there's a market here for ink cartridges and toner cartridges that people are buying them all around the country. So I could buy them at like 35p to a pound, I could sell them for a fiver. So I quit my job, took out a three year lease on an office, hired my first member of staff, realized I didn't know anything about selling, anything about anything about business. Just jumped in at the deep end and then it all started there, really. Within a year or two, I had five members of staff. We were doing pretty well in terms of turnover and sales. And then, yeah, I mean, the big learn happened. The big learn was like growing a business too quick without any systems or team in place, and it come crashing down pretty quick.

All right, welcome everybody to season six, episode six of the Boost Hospitality podcast. My name is Mark Simpson and today we're going to be chatting all about serviced accommodation. By now, if you haven't listened to the first five episodes, you have got in the back catalogue everything that you need to know about SA. So how to start SA with Trish McGeer, what actually SA is with Jason Living episode one. Episode three is with David and Amanda Healy on about outsourcing. Episode four is with Naim. We talk about channel managers and episode five was recorded with Elaine Watts. All about networking. So today we're gonna go the next step. So you started up an essay business. How do you grow it? And the gender I've asked to help me with. This is something that I've been following on social media for the past six to eight weeks. Recommended to me by somebody to follow him because he's doing some really good things with him and his business partner. David, welcome. If you could just spend a couple of minutes just introducing yourself who you are and. Yeah, and then we'll get started with today's episode.

Thanks for having me, mate, really appreciate it. And thanks for getting my name right as well. No one ever gets it right first time, they always say it wrong. But yeah, as you said, my name is David Dyack, I'm based in South Helland Sea in Essex. I've been involved in service accommodation now for, well, since September 2016 and we've gone from a standing start, no experience to 65 units, a strong pipeline and we're building the business daily Got a strong team in place, and our values as a business is all about building that business that's built to scale from day one. So we've implemented systems, we've got team, we've got operations, got manuals, everything in place so that we can build this business. And it's unable to grow and continue growing at the pace it's at.

What was the. How long did it take? What was the process? What was the obstacles that came up in that time? And what can you recommend to people that are watching who are pretty much where you were? You know, September 2016, I tell everyone.

The first deal was your hardest deal. You know, you don't know what to say to agents. You don't know how to position yourself. You don't know. You don't really feel very confident in what you're doing because you don't know what you're doing or how it really works. You're just trying to sort of share your vision, I guess. So we spent a lot of time sort of door knocking, learning that process. And I always say to my clients, look, whatever you do, whoever you speak to, document it, learn from it, and next time you go back, handle that objection and turn it into a positive and how it benefits them. So that was going on for two or three months. And the first significant mistake, should we call it or learn, was that we found a private landlord. We had 30 properties, was like, he didn't really care about his properties. And we were like, look, you know, we can turn this two bedroom flat. I mean, we walked in there and then he went through the floorboards. You know, them places where you just like, we're dying for a deal. Do you know what I mean? So we were like, we can make this work. So my business partner, Matt Ward, is a surveyor. Went away, schedule of works come back, nine grand was the schedule of works. And we sat down with him and he just literally looked at us and he went, I'm not gonna swear. But he swore and he was just like, what the f. Are you gonna spend that kind of money? What's wrong with you? And he'd done us a massive, massive favor. Because at the time we were like, you know, we're up for it. You know, we're up for it. And he said no. And what that meant was that we left that relationship there, went and met an agent and got our first deal. And I mean, I want to transition into how that deal come about, because even down to, like getting a deal, the agent didn't, you know, they wasn't really sure as to what we were doing, but they gave us like this upmarket one bed, which I'll talk about later on as to why we changed our strategy. But you know, it was probably a little bit too expensive. But we got there, we made it happen. And then we used that expensive high end one bed apartment to become our show home. And that enabled us to build our business.