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

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'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, having a blast, gonna.

Get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee Cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes don't write it, just do it loosely if you want my respect you'll better butt direct.

Mmm.

Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

Welcome back to the Boost Lee 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, bless 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 into 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.

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 looking 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, in our area. And that works really well for us because we have got the demand for that.

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 but once they're there in, in the area itself. So that's very important. What's also worked very well for us, 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 your photos. If you've got a picture, we normally edit the photo. So if you've got a big frame in the back 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 repeat business booking. So. 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 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.

Why kvm? What, what, what's the story behind the name?

So K is my husband for Kailash. V. Sorry, K is for my daughter because it was my daughter first. So my daughter is Kyra V, which is my husband home name which is Vick 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 speak to hosts all the time and if you're one of these hosts listening to this right now, just going, I don't know what to call my, 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 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, 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, you know, 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.

Who is on your team at the moment? Who is in your business day to day?

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 because 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 well.

Thank you too 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 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 bye.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard on the tea is loose making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.