Corporate to Comfort: One Hosts Journey to STR Innovation and Family Balance

Welcome back to the Boostly podcast, the podcast that gives you the host, your tools, your tactics, your training and most of all the confidence so you can go out there and get more direct bookings. We're going behind a host today with experienced host. She's a coach. She's got an amazing business here in the UK in a place called Peterborough for our US listeners. And yeah, she's the founder of KVM Stays. You can check them out at kvm stays.co.uk We've got the wonderful Manisha here to join us on the show. So welcome along, Manisha. Thank you for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

So I know I've given you a bit of a drum up there, but tell me about your business, the. The elevator pitch.

Okay, so it started about seven years ago and I just felt very, very stuck in my job. I enjoyed what I was doing, but I just felt I traded too much of my time for money. I didn't have enough time for my daughter, just had my daughter and it was just becoming a bit too much. And that's when I thought, okay, could I do something else? And my husband at that time blessed him. He said, you like watching Home under the Hammer, why don't you go into property? Obviously. But obviously it was completely different to what I was expecting from watching Home under the Hammer and then going to property itself, doing all the training. So that's how it started for me and for me, my focus was always to kind of grow it in term of profit rather than scaling it up. Because a mum with two children, I wanted to make it work around me. I didn't want it the other way around. I had a very high paid job before, but then I didn't have the time. So I didn't want to set up a business that takes so much of my time that I still don't have time for the family. So I've made it work around me rather than me working around the business.

That's a nice way of doing it. And something which I know people listening to this, I mean, there'll be people who have just set up their first one. There'll be people with existing ones thinking, well, just getting that balance for family. This is why we started our business for many of us and I completely relate to that is so I'm not having to be told what to do. We mentioned this just before going live. I'm completely unemployable and just because I want to be able to have the time you need with family. So that's Completely understandable. So how many units are you currently looking after and what sort of guest avatar do you tend to host?

So we've got 21 units at the moment. We setting up one at the moment and we've got another two, four in the pipeline that we're just setting up or signing contract on some of them. Our main avatar is always being the long term booking for contractors in the area. That's what we focus. When we first initially started, when we did a market research, we kind of identified there was no high end. So we started with high end, but still the business travelers, still the contractor market. But as everybody else kind of start jumping onto that, we started looking at maybe doing the mid range rather than the low range. And that's what we focus on in our area and that works really well for us because we have got the demand for that.

Nice, nice. And when you say the longer stays, what would say your typical length of stay be and is there any tactics that you use to attract those longer stays?

So we have many things that we do within the business. So last time we were looking at it there was like a list of over 30 different things that we do from a marketing point of view. But some of the very successful one would be contacting directly the companies that coming into the area. So working on those who are coming into the area and calling them out is a really good method as well because they are in a need once they're in the area itself. So that's very important. What's also worked very well for us is I always say we don't list our property on Airbnb or booking.com, we actually advertise. So you have to make sure that you're advertising your property. So you have to make sure. So for example, with your title you have to be host by KBM stays. You have to make sure on your profile you have got your number somewhere on your profile. Make sure your logos are across all or your photos. If you've got a picture, we normally edit the photo. So you've got a big frame in the background, we edit it. We have our contact detail in there. So you have to make sure that you are positioning yourself in a way that people, if they wanted to, they can contact you directly. So these are some of the few strategies that I think has been more successful than others. And also having a really good. So apart from having a call out team, you also want a customer service team that do the replay repeat business booking. So if you have a person who knows what they're doing and do the repeat business, it's very important and it's very important for you to be able to track it because I think a lot of people do it, but they don't track the activity of what they're doing and forget about going back. So we have a free, free, free rule in our business. So when we're doing the repeat, we do repeat three days in a row and then we do three weeks in a row and then we do 3 months in a row and we'll still follow up with constant email from an email marketing point of view. So I think if I were to say what would be one of the few reason why we've been able to get so many direct booking would be because we, we've been very strong in being out there and contacting the guests and not waiting for the booking to come to us being very proactive.

I see you're proactive and we know each other before this, this podcast from, from, you know, the, the social groups and from the days of clubhouse. And I always see your kvm, you know, sort of in, in the groups and I, I see it when people mention Peterborough, it's often one of the ones mentioned. So just becoming that kind of name which is mentioned is just so important, isn't it? And like you say, putting yourself out there and then people start to see that you're out there and start to think when you know, who shall I stay with? And they'll put your brand, which is amazing. So.

Exactly. Yeah. So your branding needs to be there, it needs to be on the on point and it needs to be consistent. So one of the things that we do, we have like a free pillar of content that is consistent all the time and we just focus on those three pillars and we try and just make sure that. So if you look at some of our post, you will see that they're very consistent in a way. Like we don't go completely different every time because again, creating that image that people can remember you is with consistency. So if you come up with constantly different posts, again, people start not seeing you. They see the post, but they don't see you. So keeping the element of having consistency, like you say, you know, you see me and you know it's KVM because the posts are consistent. So it's very important as you're growing to have a really good branding, but also be consistent with your posting. Some people are very good with doing it for a couple of months, but that's not good enough. It needs to be ongoing as long as you're have the business.

So there's a couple of questions I want to just dive into in terms of like the, the business itself. Just as a real quick one. Why kvm? What, what, what. What's the story behind the name?

So K is my husband for K. V. Sorry, K is for my daughter because it was my daughter first and my daughter is Kyra V, which is my husband home name, which is Vic and then M is for Manisha. So it's. It's a family business.

Yeah, no, it's cool. And this is the thing that I. I speak to hosts all the time and if you're one listening to this right now, just going, I don't know what to call my f. My business, you know, like. Or you've just got a place on Airbnb and you realize you've got to have a brand behind it. It really is a case of not worrying too much. It's get something which means something to yourself and you're more likely to. To market it well at the end of the day. So that's a really cool, cool story behind the name. When it comes down to the units that you manage. Sorry. Or you look after, are they management? Are these rent to rent. What sort of model do you go for?

So when we first started, we go. We went straight with the rent to essay model because when I started, I wanted to really understand the property market because it was completely different to anything that I knew. Because I was not born in the UK, I only came in the UK in 2009, so this was completely new to me as being in the uk. So just knowing the property, the areas where to invest, was something completely new to me. But also I was in the education sector, so I didn't know anything about property. So for me it was very important for me to get to know what I'm doing, but also feel comfortable. Because I think if you're doing a job for so long, like in my last job, I was there for like 10 years, you feel very confident because you know what you're doing and suddenly you've been put in a completely different situation. You're like, oh, I don't know if I'm very good at this. This is completely new to me. So I just felt I needed to invest in myself. I think that was mostly the best decision that I could take at that time was to invest in learning about service, accommodation, learning about property, to make sure that I knew which strategy will work for me. So I didn't just jump into service Accommodation. I tried to learn about different strategy before I decide to go for service accommodation. So that's kind of where I started.

Nice, nice.

And I just realized it did, it.

Did answer the question. So. So you rent to rent is started with and now is it management as well.

So we do a little bit of management. So we trying to get onto the lease model if we can. We do a bit. So we buy as well. We do a bit of joint venture and a little bit of management. For me, management is a small margin. And like we were saying earlier, would you prefer to have 10 guests or would you prefer to have 100 guests to deal at the same time? So for me, one of the reason not going down the route of the management is I'm getting only 20% of that business, but it's the same amount of guests that I will have for another property, for example, where I will be getting 100% of the profit. So on that basis I don't tend to. I mean, you know, everybody's different and everybody will have different preference. Some people will love the management model because it's less risk. I just like a business that works around what I do. I don't want to be feeling constrained. I mean, I left a very pressurized job to, to make this work around my family. So the last thing I wanted was to take a lot of unit and then find like a little bit too much to handle because let's face it, it's not always smooth in service accommodation. You know, there are days where you're like pulling your hair. Come on. You know, all this are happening at the same time. Just recently I went on holiday for five weeks, which I thought great, five weeks holiday, you know, and then while I was on holiday, one of my staff resigned and then the week I was coming back, a week before another staff resigned. So three of my support staff was. Two was out and then we came back and we had to let go the last one. So literally from having free customer service, there's like literally nobody. So it is a service accommodation is interesting and you rely on people. So for me I do rely on people, but I don't want to be leaving myself over reliant on people. So if I need to step into my business, I can. But if I scale it to a certain level, I think for me personally with service accommodation, I don't think that's why I could scale other businesses. So we're looking at other businesses and I think there's more room there to scale with this one because it's so reliant of having the good people around you and those who are willing to stick with you, it's much, much harder. So you can have a, I mean I've had really good staff but they get inspired with what you do and they want to go and do the same thing. And it's a pleasure to see that. I'm willing to do that. But the downside of it is your business suffer so but you want that kind of people because they are the one who really want to be part of what you're doing and they really enjoy it and that comes through how they deal with the customer because they're just happy to be there. So yes, there's wins, but there's definitely certain pains throughout the whole journey.

You know, it's interesting to hear and this is, I think it's worth mentioning, like the different models that we talk about, especially here in the uk. I mean rent, serviced accommodation for the US listeners is rental arbitrage, but the different models and why, especially in my early days I didn't really understand and for me rent to service accommodation was kind of like something which I knew I could do without the worry of having to evict people if it all went wrong. You know, it seemed quite a safe option to my mind. And then as the business changes and you mentioned there like JV and leasing and buying and that side of things, you start to look at the business and certainly I've done this where I've got the management model now and like you say it is low margin, easy to scale, but super low margin and you might be hosting hundreds of guests quite quickly for only small percentage of the income. But then when you look at the control that any of the service accommodation business gives you, like you say you've got that choice of do you do rental arbitrage, rent to rent, do you do management, do you, do, you know, just a straight out purchase which might be a lot of cash up front but ultimately then you know the kind of yields you're going to get. You've got cheap management because it's your own company, you know, you're not having to pay a third party. And then that leasing model as well is, is kind of a great thing to look at, you know, sort of, or lease options, you know, like where you can purchase in the future. There's just so many different moving parts to, to this that you can do. And I, I get excited when I talk to people like yourself because it reminds me of all the cool models that you can do and you're not. It's your own business. And this is what we talked about before we went live is that nothing's more personable than creating your own business in the way that you want to create it. And that sounds like that's exactly what you're doing at the moment, you know, and I just want to touch on, you had a five week holiday as well, so that must mean you've got a team who I know, like you say, there's been, you know, some, a few people leaving, but who is on your team at the moment, who is in your business day to day.

So we've got a marketing director who also do the operation direct, who's also the operation director and then most of our marketing and support team are all from Philippines. So we have lovely ladies from Philippines that covers the whole customer service side. And then I have an awesome housekeeper, head housekeeper and she's amazing. She's like gold dust really. I think my business wouldn't run as well as it is at the moment if I didn't have her because she's very consistent and she's somebody you can rely on, which is what you need if you want to step away and not do the day to day running. It's very, very important to have people that you can trust. So that gives us the right balance. Obviously the operation director is from Philippines so they can control the hours there. And then the head housekeeper who needs to be the UK reflects the UK time, so that works really well.

That's really cool. So it's quite a fair size, sort of team of people or people around you in the ecosystem, which is really cool.

If you want to be able to step away, you need to have certain people. I mean, for us, in order to get the direct booking, we knew that we needed to invest in marketing so we went all in with the marketing. So instead of using a marketing agency, we went, we're recruiting our marketing team and creating our own branding, creating kind of our own marketing plan but also making it more focused to what we need because I think there's a lot of agency there. But they're very kind of a cookie cutter approach because that's how much they understand our service accommodation and that's how much they put out. Whereas, you know, if you have somebody who's in the business and working on it. So for example, recently we've been talking about, shall we put some incentive out for them to be able to earn an additional bonus every time they convert direct booking and stuff like that. Now these discussions wouldn't happen if you're using an agency because they're not in your business or we've noticed that by just tweaking something on our website, we've had more interest, but we also had more people leaving their details as well. And again, if you're working with agency, you wouldn't necessarily see all this because it's kind of almost remotely managed, but when you have it in house, you're able to see little thing that works and how can you make more out of that? So yeah, so you know, obviously like, you know, EASA approach you for the podcast and things like that. So these are the opportunity that gets created when you have your own team. But you do need to have a really good housekeeping team because without that you wouldn't be able to go anywhere. I think that's like the number one priority. Customer service also is very important. But I think the next important thing you need to focus is to have a really good maintenance or company that does all the maintenance. And I think if you hit those elements, you're kind of safe to be able to then step away and let them pretty much run with the business.

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It's insightful to hear the different kind of structures there and I'm a big fan of bringing stuff in house instead of. I've tried marketing agencies and the thing is there's, there's always lots of big promises, but ultimately only you know your business. Right. And this is why at Boostly we're talking to often hospitality owners who know their own business and just need to know the very basics of, you know, how do we do email marketing, how do you do all this stuff which how do you make your listing stand out? And this is how anybody listening to this can start at the very basics and do it yourself. But as soon as you're able to employ members of your team and of course more, better marketing means more guests, which means more money, which means you're able to employ more team. And this is why I think having an in house marketing team just makes sense.

So yeah, that's the reason why we use Boostie as well. So we tend to think Boostie is an extension of our team as well because Boostly website is obviously what brings the traffic in. So it's very important for us as well. And again, we have the same principle. If you're going for somebody who's going to be designing your website, go with somebody who's running service accommodation. They're more likely to understand it in more detail than a cookie cutter approach where somebody is just designing a website for this industry, that industry and that industry and just come up with something. And I'm not, I'm not saying that there's no agency there who cannot do what, you know, people experience. Like we see are doing like, you know, like yourself and like we were doing. But I think where we are with a service that we have, which is so unique, I mean I started seven years ago and literally at the time I remember when I started, there's not even a training called Rent usa. There wasn't. And I remember I was asked to create a training called Rent usa. At that time I was with Progressive, so I remember that very well. Now you expect somebody in marketing now to know this and still be able to market it. Now it is a bit too much to ask I think because they don't really understand it is a completely new industry. You are still looking, you know, although we're expanding Massively. But when you think we are the one inside it that expanding massively. But when you look at the support around it, your housekeeping keeping team, your marketing team, everything like maintenance, this company are not so familiar with. Yes, they're getting to know service accommodation, but they're not. So even they having to learn the process of okay, you know, this is not a normal rental. If something goes wrong, I have to be there, you know, I have to be there within so many hours. So one of the things that we have, we have within our team. So for example, we have a plumber, we have electrician, we have so our plumber. We on their priority list if anything happens, we are priority, we get seen as quickly as possible. Usually the same day we are, we have a priority list on the electric side we have, we have even got a locksmith which have us as a priority. Sometimes you pay a retainer fee and you pay a premium, little premium for that. But if you want to give a good service and if you want to step away sometimes you have to invest in that. And the same thing happens with the handyman or the maintenance person that we have. We are on the priority list if something, I mean if we call them today, we need them, they need to be out today.

That's a really good way of looking at it. And a great tip. I mean to have a retainer, especially if there's depend on the level of business that you've got and if you are a small business you can always pair up with other local places and all put towards that say hey, if our places come up then you know, like make it a priority as a retainer to pay them to keep them on the books and keep them coming out to you first. Because at the end of the day when you've got a guest and they've got that problem at that time you just need somebody outright. So yeah, that makes sense. One of the questions I'd love to ask is your staff. You mentioned you've got some virtual assistants. Just briefly, can you give any tips as to how you'd hire a virtual assistant? Because I know there's going to be people listening to this, going to, you know what sounds good, where do I start?

Right? That's a really good question. So when we first started we went to the basic recruitment which is having your list of question, asking them about themselves, how good they are as a virtual assistant, asking them about all the general question you'll ask for any assistance. Over the time I've learned, forget about all this, this you can make them do. What you can't get them to do is to be able to be proactive given the situation you're in. So we have a couple of situation, which is like the worst situation that's happened or worse, but situation that's happened and you have to really think and we just throw them into it and, and we just say, hey look, you've got a guess. This, this, this will happen. How would you deal with it? Because the ability to be able to be proactive so they can serve the guests is what you really want, not everything else, because everything else you can train them, you can, you can educate them, you can support them, you can encourage them to learn new things. What you can't change is their ability to be able to think very quickly and practically come up with solutions. So my best tip after so many years of recruiting is now we just go straight into it. Okay, we ask you a few questions first just to warm them up, you don't want to throw them straight in. And then we say we're going to ask you a few questions which is just scenario based and just give us your best answer. It doesn't have to be right or wrong. We just want to assess how you're going to be able to deal with situation like this when it happens. And that's it. And then we go through different things that you know, just to see, okay, what do, what are they thinking, what, what are they thinking they should do next? So for example, if the heating is not working and you've called a plumber, what happened next, that type of thing. So you know, we, we put them into different. One of my typical one is say, okay, the guest contacted us, the heating is turning on and off and you're on shift, what would you do? And obviously they'll be saying, I'm calling the plumber and try and get the plumber to come out. And so the issue, I said, okay, what next? And keep digging until they find out that okay, it's on and off. Does the guest have enough heating? Have you asked the question? And that's what you're looking for? Because it's not about a standard procedure. Because one of the things that I've noticed with virtual assistant, they're so used to have a manual, they're so used to have an SOP. Like we've got an SOP and I think we are about 70 pages. I could fill in up to about 150 to be an SUV. There's so many processes that we have to update all the time. And I'm thinking. But as I'm creating it, I'm saying to the ops director, I don't think I want to do this because that is just them relying on it. And I don't want that. I want them to think for themselves. So I am reluctant to put too much information because virtual assistant tend to work from a script. They like everything to be scripted. But you know that and I know that when you're dealing with guests, you can't script every single situation that you're going to be. I'm still learning some time.

Yeah, I completely agree. And ultimately having virtual assistants, what I call that is situational competencies. Because if you're putting them in situations hypothetically and as to what they do, you really start to see what are they thinking? Are they thinking about the guest or are they panicking? Or are they, you know, are they just thinking about, hey, this is the process, and do they forget to go back and update the guest? You know, you really want them to get all of that stuff in there, don't you? And that's a great tip and thank you for sharing that. Is it. Where do you get your VAs from? Is it upwork, the fiverr, those sort of places? Or is there a particular agency that you.

So we started initially from upworks. So that's where we started. And then we moved on from there to. Because one of the things that I noticed with Upworks is they already kind of flooded with other requests or people contact them, so they. They don't stay very long with you because for them, they could get another project. They know the system and they go for it. So that was one thing I struggled with. So then I went for an agency. I use an agency. But then the problem I found with the agency is that when you're using a third party, sometimes there's not a clear information shared in terms of what exactly the role will be and what is expected. There's a little bit of kind of coding from the agency because they want you to recruit that person. They try and get them ready for you. So they almost try and prep them. So I didn't like this. I just didn't like this. And then once I had my director from there, then I got her to start recruiting and just recruit directly on. She's quite active on social media, so she has a lot of followers and she has a lot of active Facebook group that she's part on, part of. And anytime we need anybody, we just advertise. And usually we get at least 10 candidates applying but what we tend to get more by doing it this way is people who are transitioning between like a full time job into a virtual assistant and they're willing to then invest more time and learn and stay with you. But they're also not almost brainwash. Being with brainwash being a virtual assistant, kind of always relying on a manual need an SOP right next to them going off a script because that's what they're used to. Whereas if you have people who are actively full time workers, they're more likely to be more thinking on their feet.

Which is what I completely get that. And ultimately like so anything can happen in SA and in short term rentals. So is having people who aren't like the, I don't know, the Internet provider ones, which they just go in through that standard procedure. And you know, as a virtual assistant.

I mean that's more of a question we always ask them if you have a power cut or you know, what are your backups, we always ask them to an interview, give a couple of backups, otherwise you can see clearly it's not going to work.

Exactly. That's a great question. I want to dive into your tech stack briefly. What do you use to help you with your business? Is there any particular piece of tech that you absolutely love and why?

I would say definitely Avivo, Asana and Magic Plan. These are like the three most important one for me, Asana just because from a task, management, from a follow up. So if you have a team of three people all servicing the kind of the same service which is servicing guests, you have them on different shifts and they need to be able to know what they need to follow up on what's happened and what hasn't happened. So for me, Asana works really well as a tracker. So it's like an extension of your PMS or your channel manager. And it also ensure that I have visibility on what's happening. So at any point of the day, if I go on Asana, I know exactly what are the things that's happening in the business without me having to be there and listening to it. Because all the tasks that's not been completed will be there. Those who are closed will be there. So Asana definitely Magic Plan. Why? It just saved me massive amount of time. So once I go for viewing, I use Magic Plan and I set it all up and if I'm going forward, I do all the planning from there so I don't have to view the property again, I don't have to do much. I can literally plan Everything on the floor plan without having to step into the property and the size of the bed, the size of the furniture and everything else. So for me, absolutely love that. Although they're playing up recently, but absolutely love that. Then the next one is Aviva. Aviva. Because it took us so, so much time in listing optimization compared to what we were doing before. So before going to Aviva we were with Tokyo and every time you had a listing and you were doing listing optimization, you have to do it across all the different platform and it takes time. Whereas the reason why I love Avivo and again, I think PMS is like you, like we said with your business, it's what works for you, for you. Some people like PMS because they just want a very user friendly app. You know, some people are using it because they want it for the functionality of it. So they want it, want it to do a lot more stuff for them. Some people are using it just for diary management. That's what they want it for. Obviously there's a lot more that they can work from. So really what, what is your trying. So anybody who asks me what channel manager that I'm going for, I always say look at what you want to be able to, to achieve by using this channel manager, what do you want in your business first and then decide from, from there because absolutely somebody who's just starting to go into Aviva because it's slightly more expensive, they're a cheaper one out there when you're starting. So you might want to use for a while. I mean, I started with two kids and I think we had them for at least three years, I think before we moved. I think so, yeah. But for me one of the, obviously again the strategy for the long term booking was to be able to optimize your listing and at least do it once a week or more. And as you grow in number of units, your optimization take more time. Now having it done through Avivo on just one listing and then being published on all the online travel agent was a lot of time saving for us. So that's like one of the things that I absolutely love and I don't think I could move to another PMS just for that reason.

No, that's cool. Thank you. I mean, I love Magic Plan. I literally forgot that I have Magic Plan and it is just so great to do the floor plans. And when it comes down to pms, I completely agree with you that it's, it's very much based on what you need. So ask those questions, have a demo and try Them. And I think with Avivo, I do. I always think of Avivo as, first of all, they're uk, I think, based. Are they uk, European based. And it's one of the best dashboards you'll ever see looking at your information. So if you want a really, like, I don't know why there's balloons going up my screen. If you do want information on what is happening in your business, just at a glance, then that dashboard, I can remember being absolutely awesome. So, yeah, great, great little tech stack there. Really good. And thank you for, for sharing that, Manisha. So, couple more questions just before we find out how we can get in touch with you and find out more, what does the future of business look like?

So we are looking at going slightly different way this year. So although I say the main target market that we've been focusing on the last seven years has been contractors so far this year we're looking at going down the luxury market. So one of the property that we're working on is a grade two listed building. And the reason for that, again, is just monitoring what's happening in the market and see how you can find. I mean, I think. I think for any service accommodation provider who's starting, they really need to look in the market, in their own market, where they want to be, and just find out what niche is not being covered and what can. Can you focus on? Because if you have that, then that is one good way to achieve high profit. Because nobody else is doing what you're doing doesn't mean that everybody would not copy what you're doing, because that happens as well. I've seen it a lot. But it does mean that you can start and you can start with a high income. So one of the things that we want to start this year also with the fact that there's been a lot more trying for a lot more people now to use Airbnb, the uk, so there's definitely more of an awareness now. And also for us as a family as well, you know, it's nice to be able to just get out with family and if you've got your own essay, you do any time and that's quite good as well. So, again, what you want to create for your business is, you know, for me, it's my family and if I can create something that is get used, for us, it's great. So we're looking at going into Dubai, so that's one thing that we've got already for this year. We're looking at scaling the coaching side of kbm coaching. So that's, that's one of the other thing that we have for this year and we would like to be able to go more down the route of commercial conversion so just complete something slightly different to service accommodation. I know steel property and it might end up turning into a service accommodation but it's a different strategy and a different approach. But almost, I guess one of the things that we've learned from COVID is to make sure we have got diversification in our business. And last year we started with that and this year we want to take it to the next level where we completely go in different business. So that's one of them. There's another one as well that's coming up. So we, we are looking at doing something completely away from property itself just to build that diversification.

Nice, nice. It sounds really exciting. And then I know there's going to be people you mentioned coach in there who are going to want to get in touch. So do we're going to be sharing your details but if you could just go back to the start. We've looked at obviously your business now, we've looked at future. If you could go back to the start, what would you tell yourself? You mentioned, you know, you came here 2009 and the business started 2014, was that right? Something like that.

2001. I came here as a student in 2001, 2001.

So ultimately what would you do? If you could go back and just give yourself some advice, what would you say to yourself?

So I came here as a student and I spent a lot of money as an international, international student on my education. I think it was like 25, 27 grand just on the tuition fee, apart from all the cost of living. And I did my first degree and then I went and did an mba. If I were to change thing, I would go straight into property and not spend that money. I'm not saying it didn't do me any disservice. It has helped me a lot. It's given me a lot of confidence. It's given me the confidence that I can deal with different situation. One of the reason I think that I felt so confident doing what I was doing is because I knew I've done some, I've run somebody else business and I made it successful, I can do it for myself. And obviously that came with me doing my MBA and then finding a job that allowed me to be able to do that. So if I didn't have that, I can see how it might have been slightly different to what it is now. But it was a huge investment and I think one of the things that I've learned. So, for example, I always felt they have to do a bachelor degree, but now my feeling has absolutely changed and I say they do whatever they want as long as something that they're passionate about and they're actually going to make them some money. So it's been a shift in my mindset as well for the seven years. But yes, I would definitely focus more in doing something that I would enjoy and give me the flexibility that I want rather than going down the route of getting a really good degree and then finding a job.

And then that's great, great advice. And yeah, this has been so much fun. So how can we find out more? How can we come and get coach or find out about your business?

Yeah, so you can email us if you want to on Nisha at KVM coaching. So that's K for Kilo, V for Big Twitter and for Mike. Or just find us on Facebook under Nisha Lador or even KVM stays and we'll be more than happy to have a chat.

Awesome. And of course we'll share those socials around. However, you as the listener are consuming this content in the show notes. So thank you so much for, for this, Manisha. It's been so much fun. Really enjoyed this. Like, first of all, getting up to speed with what's going on in your world after not seeing you for a little while. And also just the amount of experience is obvious and I would be surprised if there's not many people listening to this who will want to get in touch with you. Because like I said when we first jumped on this, I've always looked at your business as a real, hey, this is just what we do. Because this is, you know, this is, this is us and this is how I do it. And this is how you could do it too. You know, it's very upfront, which is, which is cool. So I think people will really resonate with that, that style of training. And yeah, thank you very much.

Thank you so much for having me. Just one thing I would like to add. It's not a training. We want to be able to coach you. So we, we don't do a training where you just learn about service accommodation. We really want to be that support system that is missing sometime when you do a training and you don't know what to do. So it's more of an accountability course than just a course that you sit down and do. And I think that is something that is different And I wanted to just take one minute to explain that. But thank you so much for having me. It was lovely catching it with you after quite a while. But, you know, I always see you and I always see you online. I still, you know, follow some of the stuff that you're doing, but it's been amazing just having a few minutes to just catch up. So thank you.

No worries. So before we go, the way we like to end these is just. Is there a mantra or a motto which has helped you over the years or one which resonates with you?

It's one that I remembered a while back after doing some reflection, but it was since I was very, very young, so I can't remember. I must have been about 10 years old or something like that at that time. Everybody used to have a diary where their friend will write something about them and you keep it forever. And I remember I wanted my mom to write something about me and she wrote something and then at the end she said, if there's a. If there's a will, there's always a way. And I remember reading it maybe at the time didn't really click, but it is something that I've always followed as a principle that if there's a will, there's always a way to make it happen. And if it didn't happen, that means that you just not reach it yet. So you just need to keep going and keep going. And I try and make sure that, you know, like my kids also follow that rule that if there's a will, there's always a way. And if it doesn't happen the first time, that's fine. If it doesn't happen the second, third time, that's also fine. You just need to keep going until you can achieve your bit.

Thank you so much, Venetian. And one which resonates with me and I know will resonate with the listeners as well. So thank you two for listening to this on the Boostly Podcast. If there's somebody you know who's going to get value from this, please do share the Boostly podcast with them. You can come and continue the conversation in the Facebook group, the hospitality community. You'll find myself, Manisha, and many of the other experts in there as well. So thank you so much for listening. We'll see you on the next one. That's it for now.

Thank you for having me. Bye.