Creating Valuable Guest Connections Using Great Experiences

Creating value by causing great connections and great experience with your guests is what we're going to be talking tonight about on the Boostly podcast. And we're going to be doing that with a successful short term rental host who we're going to ask questions of his business, we're going to find out his story and generally just all the tips that you as a host can learn from tonight. So welcome to the Boostly podcast. If you've not listened to this before, this is the podcast that gives hosts the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly the confidence so you can go out there and get more direct bookings. My name is Liam Carolan, I'm Mark Simpson's co host and today we're going behind the host with Alex De Camp and he's got an awesome short term rental company. It's based in around Detroit in the USA and he's got around about 30 listings which you can go and check out. His company's called Great Stay, which you can go and check out right now at Greatstay Co and you can go and check out his awesome website and go and see out so a little bit more about his business. But first let's find out how he is creating the connections with locals and how it's adding value to his guests who come and stay with us. So welcome along. Alex, thank you for joining us.

Hey Liam, thanks for having me here. I'm a big fan of Boostly and the podcast. It's great to be here.

Well, it's awesome to have you on and I know we've known each other from some of the trainings in the past and from Boostly websites and stuff like that. So it's great to have you on and get a chance to finally do this. So for everybody listening, can you just give an introduction to your business and introduce yourself?

Yeah, yeah. So, Alex De Camp, I'm here in Detroit, Michigan have roughly 26 properties right now and I'm onboarding another five. So right around that 30 unit count that you're talking about and really I've been in real estate for a while and over time we had folks that would rent from us and they actually operated our properties as short term rentals and I kind of cut the bug and I tested one out in one of my buildings and I fell in love with it. I actually traveled out to London for a conference and after I saw the technology that was coming along and the excitement that was in this community, I just fell in love and I've been growing my business ever since. I had a corporate position with a bank. I did a lot of great community development endeavors, worked on lending programs, nonprofit relationships and whatnot. And at the, there was a time where it made sense for me to kind of leave that position and, and I've been growing my company ever since.

That's cool. And the. You mentioned that you've done it in a couple of your buildings and that's how you got started. What sort of model do you use? Is this, is this ones that you own or do you do any rental arbitrage or management? What sort of models do you, do you use?

Everything I have is either I own it or I co host. So I will manage for, for other folks or you know, buildings that I own. If it's buildings that I own, it's multifamily. So for example, in one of our apartment buildings, which is three buildings, we've converted one of the buildings, seven units into basically a little mini hotel. Another building, and in a nice part of town, we have six units. And my business partner, he's actually operating or he's opening a cafe underneath in the, in the garden level unit. So we're really excited to have that, you know, that, that amenity there for the guests. And then I do co hosts for other folks, mostly single family homes. And it's funny because building this business, you know, it's important that you have a guest avatar. At least I feel it is. And I think a lot of people would agree with that because then you know who you're really marketing toward that then you know who you're building your product for and whatnot. So I've, I've always had this struggle where I'm like, well, do I want to have in my, my avatar is the business traveler. The, you know, the folks that are in town that they're here for business, but they also want to experience the local community. And that's when we'll talk about the, the small businesses. But you know, and I've struggled like well, why am I taking on these single family homes? And I've really kind of found that the business traveler are. They're also looking for that, but that's more for midterm stay. So that's a part where we're growing. But yeah, so I have multifamily and I have a single family that I manage.

Nice, nice. And that really gives us kind of idea of where your business is at at the moment. Take me back. What did you do before all of this, before you got into hospitality? You mentioned you were already in real estate. But is that, how far back is this?

Oh, wow. So, so, you know, I studied, I studied at a, have a degree in urban planning, real estate development. I've been like, I was mentioning, I was with a bank for a long time after I got my graduate degree. I was like, I want to be in the city of Detroit. I have family history here. I, there's so many things to love about and if you've never been here, I highly recommend visiting. It's, it's. I think I mentioned to you earlier, you know, I was, I was with some travel writers last night and they were just amazed at the city. It's, it's, it wasn't what they were expecting. It was all the first time here. But. So I came to the city and I worked on lending programs. My background is lending with financial institutions and I, I had an amazing position where I was working with a growing bank and we worked on, you know, lending programs, investment programs, just basically we worked with all the groups in the city who were working to improve the infrastructure, improve the amenities. And you know, we, we kind of did that. But my, the people that ran the bank I was close with and they also knew that I like to develop. So it was great. They gave me the freedom and I acquired property and I developed property. We have some mixed use buildings where we have restaurants and bars and other retail businesses with apartments above. And that's where, you know, some folks started running from us and turning them into short term rentals because they, they like the fact that we basically built walkable, you know, we had walkable buildings where folks wanted to visit. And then from there this, this is kind of where this idea grew.

You know, that's what I love about this is that you've actually created your own ecosystem of why people come and visit. Because a lot of the times people are saying, hey, which areas work for short term rentals and you know, there's got to be a reason they want to come and visit. And then is that area nice? And you're helping to make it nice through these successful businesses close by. Let's talk more about that and the, you know, the actionable stuff that you're doing in the, in the business. So when it comes down to these local businesses, Talk me through how it's working at the moment and what you're doing, which is pretty special for great stays.

Yes. Yeah. So one of the advantages, I was very lucky when I was at the bank that I got to work with a lot of small businesses. And when I, you Know, I mentioned, I talked, I worked on community projects, but really these small businesses, so many folks that want. They had an idea and needed lending. I, I was always the guy was like, yeah, why not? And you know, it's, it's always easy when somebody else's money. Right? But. And I worked with a lot of these small businesses and over time just got to know him. And I would say, you know, acquaintances, friends. And since then, now that I have this business, you know, I basically, I know how difficult it can be for small businesses to get, to get customers. And you know, they're really, when somebody's in town, when somebody's visiting in town, they're. They don't really know about some of these great places. They'll know about the things that are kind of, you know, maybe down, you know, downtown or whatnot, but they don't know to, they don't always know at least the places I really appreciate. So what we do is we work with local businesses to kind of showcase them. Like for example, there's been a couple of gyms that we've worked with who will offer, you know, our guests stay for maybe four days or maybe two weeks. They don't necessarily want to buy a month membership for a gym, so these gyms will offer them a week membership. And the gym loves it because obviously they're getting business that they want to have. And then the guests love it because they can, you know, they can now work out. It's just like they do at home. And what's really great about going back to the avatar, you know, our avatar is a person that appreciates that they appreciate the amenities. They want to be able to be comfortable where they're at. Same thing with local restaurants. You know, there are local restaurants that, and people ask this all the time. I mean, all hosts get asked these questions, but the thing that we are can provide with some restaurants and hopefully this grows, are discounts. You know, what can we do to give them? Why don't you go to this coffee shop, you'll get a free cup of coffee. Now that works for the. We have two, we're above two cafes and both cafes. I'm sorry, we have two locations above two separate cafes. And both of those cafes have agreed to, you know, to work with us. Discounted coffee, whatnot, places to hang out. And, and actually it helps for like when they have to wait for the, you know, to come to the room and whatnot. But so those partnerships really are what we're, what we're developing. And it's Great for a couple reasons. You know, first it enhances the guest experience. They can come in, they, they see these recommendations and not only that, they might, you know, they might get a discount for going there. And then on top of that, you know, helps us, the small business, we talked about that. The small businesses, it's tough enough and so if they can get more people to come in, you know, it really helps. And then also it's, you know, we all know that regulatory, there can be, you know, regulatory restrictions on short term rentals. And I've worked with like local city council and other, you know, policymakers before and this can showcase like, look at, we're, we're not just, you know, trying, we're not just hosting these folks to make money for ourselves. Like, we're actually trying to impact and invest in the small business community and, and, and like you said, build our own ecosystem. You know, I mean, you know, we work with local cleaners, we work with local folks with the gig economy for instacart and whatnot. You know, there's, that's one side of it. But then also the guests here, we have this captured captive audience and they're looking to eat, they're looking to work out, you know, they're looking to be entertained.

That's very cool indeed. And what I'd like everybody listening to this podcast to really think about is when we first take on properties, we are looking at the location and we're looking at all these cool things about why people come and come and stay. And then once we've got the property, we're often just looking internally, which is looking, looking at what we can do internally to enhance their experience. But I'd encourage that, especially because there's a lot to think about with hospitality. The hosts out there who have got your listing just live do go and visit your local coffee shop, go and visit the local gym and do some of these things that Alex here is doing. Because ultimately by enhancing that guests, what's the word? Experience, when they're actually in, in place, they're going to always think of you as the host and your property as their overall experience. So when they're likely to review, they're likely to review higher based on the entire package. You're adding value without actually having to give away cost, you know, which is so important. You know, how do we add value? How do we stand out from our competition?

Quick break from the podcast to let you know that the two boostly books that we brought out, the Book Direct Playbook and the Book Direct Blueprint are two of the top rated and the best selling in the hospitality category on Amazon for just two pounds. You can grab both of those books right now. The foundations and the structures that you need to put in place is in the blueprint. And then for 101 marketing tactics, that is in the Playbook. So go and grab a copy on Amazon. Now just type in Book Direct Playbook or the Book Direct Blueprint and we'll see you on the other side.

What I'd love to know is how do you showcase these, how do you inform guests of these perks? Like what. What is the. What is the way that they'd find out about some of these awesome things that you do?

So that's all tech. It's, you know, my dream is that I will get to the point where I can have a couple hours of uninterrupted work time every morning. And really the dream is just to wake up earlier and do it. And so I can work on the tech. And the tech. We work with one software called Enzo Connect. Enzo Connect has guidebooks. We have links in there where we talk about everything. There's also host co which will actually work with Enzo Connect. We're figuring that one out as well. And then my kind of on the ground ops manager, he, he is, he comes from hospitality. He's a general manager of a restaurant. You know, between him and myself, where we just tell people everywhere to go and work with them all the time. They see us a lot. Obviously that's difficult to scale, but it's really what we want to do is be able to have our team says, I have some virtual assistants that we work with and just to be able to use the tech that we have and then get to the guests.

And that's so important isn't having that local knowledge. Even though we want to automate as much as we can, that personal touch where somebody like the general manager who can suggest the restaurant when they ask and you know, where they've got access. And Enzo Connect, I just want to bring everyone's attention to. Enzo Connect is a great thing to look into. If you haven't googled Enzo Connect, go and have a look into it. Digital guidebooks and more. And it's just very good to. It does feature in the blueprint, Mark Simpson's book, the book Direct Blueprint as well. Enzo Connect have got chapter so really great company to go and check out. So while we're on the subject of tech, Alex, is there any other tech in your business that you like to use or something which has really helped you on your journey.

Yeah. So I have three pillars for my team. The three pillars are, you know, make sure codes, locks work, make sure that cleanings are done and then make sure guest communications are done. And this is in, in the business itself. So my PMS is Hostway. I use Breezeway for cleaning management and then I use remote lock currently for locks. I'm always exploring. I love Breezeway. I've actually decided my PMS based on that because the one, the ones I was looking at didn't integrate with it at the time and I, and I went there. But really like, I feel like if you have those fundamentals down then you can, you can create like that's the baseline for your product. You should always have a clean property for guests, you should always answer messages and you should always make sure that they can access property. Like if you're not doing that, then you shouldn't be in this business. Right. And then from there, internally with the company, I use Slack and Asana. So Asana for task management and Slack for communications with the team and then something that I really want to get into and that I'm, you know, in that two hour free time in the morning, it's airtable and zapier and because automations, I feel they're the automations. And then with the introduction of AI, of course, you know, that's where we're going to go with this business and I feel like we can connect so many things and you're right, you have to have the personal knowledge, you have to have the local knowledge, you have to have the personal touch. But we can, we can do a lot with the tech that's out there right now to not just put us at that, that base level of the fundamentals I mentioned earlier, but also beyond that to enhance the experience and almost predict, you know, which questions are going to come in and whatnot and try to answer those before they even ask them. And then from there we can add the human touch when it's needed and when we see that as necessary.

That's a cool tech stack. I mean there's going to be people listening to this whole are going, what, what, what do these do? But you know, you've got your host away, which is an amazing pms. If anybody wants to go and Google them, they can go and check them out. Breezeway, which handles the cleaning operations, the maintenance operations and more now as well, they've started doing guidebooks, they've started doing, you've got sub tasks and things like that you can do as well. Inspections can be handled on it as well. And then obviously having things like remote lock just means that you can operate your locks without the worry that somebody's going to go and clone key or, you know, go and get access when they shouldn't do using. So remote lock is a really cool app as well. So thank you for sharing those with us. Alex. It sounds like things are going really well. I'd love to know, has there been any challenges along the journey so far?

Oh, yeah, I mean, I mean, things are well, but, you know, I was at a property hanging a curtain today like, like, you know, I was, I was at a property the other day cleaning up after a guy. He made a mess. It was our first guest at a new property. Things that are, you know, should be delegated and whatnot. But I'm still, I still do that. I still put out fires all the time. But really what it is though, in, in all my businesses, I look at it, it's a lot of this stuff falls on me. And it's, it's, you know, yes, somebody did something that they shouldn't have done, yes, this happened. But, you know, at the end of the day, we can prepare for a lot of this, and as long as we do the stuff that we know we have to do, take care of it right away, then we're good. So the challenges, I would say, is for me to get out of my own way. You know, it falls on me. But hey, if I'm, if something, if I'm, you know, something happens and I quickly jump in and I quickly take care of it, well, then I'm not letting anybody on my team do that. And I do that a lot because, you know, it's my business, it's my baby. I think I'm the best at it. And truth is, you know, I'm just the most experienced at it. And because it's of my own business, I mean, and I need to let somebody else take that on if I want to grow and be at the level that I want to be at, which is, you know, more hands off in that regard when I can focus more on, on growth and, and company culture and, and everything like that. So I would say the challenge is really, it's, you know, it's, it's growth, it's. It's believing in yourself. It's, you know, I look at this and it's funny. I, you know, I just see myself as a small company and, and, and I don't really think, you know, I, I Never really thought too much. And then I, I gave my first presentation a little while back and they, the, the people that hosted it told me it was like one of the longest presentations at not long. It's like bad but like, because people were asking questions and most appreciated afterwards and you kind of realize, like, wow, you really build up a wealth of knowledge. So I, I think it's time for me to, you know, put the systems in place, delegate and automate. Automate, delegate. Eliminate the things that don't need and, and let the company run. And then I can focus on, you know, really using that knowledge and to grow in the ways that we, that we want to.

Sounds good. And I'm sure there's so many people, me included, who relate to that. One of my mentors say you've got to let go to grow and you don't want anything to get broken along the way. But it is, it's that moment of handing it over to somebody when the time comes, isn't it? So a very, a good challenge to be overcoming at the moment. Let's switch it around then. So what has been your biggest wow moment so far of your hospitality journey?

A big wow moment, really. It's, you know, I, I don't want to repeat, but it was, it was realizing like speaking with people in the industry, especially people getting started, and we just, you know, I, I, I haven't been in this industry too long, but a few years now, but realizing how much knowledge was, has been amassed like, like the, my operations manager, he, he has a few properties and he was, he was going out and delivering keys to every guest and he was like, I didn't realize that there were, you know, there's, you could change lock boxes or lock door codes, you know, and it's like taking a step back and then kind of looking at it and seeing that you do, you know, we do have all these cleaners and we do have this, this, our own little ecosystem, these businesses we work with. Like, wow, this is, this is pretty cool. You know, we've got a good thing going on here. And I also, you know, I love it with, I get myself pulled back in for customer service sometimes. I love talking to guests. Of course, I love talking to guests when it's going well, you know, who doesn't like that? But that sometimes this is more about the city of Detroit itself. But sometimes when guests come here and it's their first time and they just, they write me this big letter afterwards, talking about what they did and what they saw and they said thank you so much. This was a launching point and like, it's cool. It feels really good to be able to be a part of that, to be a part of that experience for people. So I think, wow was, was, you know, seeing that we're, we're a little further along than we thought. But the joy comes from, you know, from the guests and when they have a great time visiting.

If you're struggling on how to get direct bookings and overwhelmed on where to start, then I recommend you go and book in a call with Boostly and our team right now. We can walk you through exactly what we're offering, how we can help you and give you a portfolio of websites that we have worked with that are matching not only on niche, but could be in your location as well. Boostly has helped over 2000 hospitality businesses all over the world increase their diet bookings. And if you are interested, then all you need to do is go to boostly. B O-O-S-T-L y.co.uk call and book in an appointment with one of our sales team.

And that's the beauty of this industry, is that we're actually helping people have some of the best experiences and truthfully, this sounds corny, but of their lives. When it comes down to it, a lot of the times when people are on holiday, I was listening to a podcast the other day and they said that they realized that all of their best memories and best photographs usually came from photographs on vacation. So the what we're doing when people are coming to stay with us, especially if they're here for leisure. Obviously a lot of us host midterm and workers as well, but especially the ones for leisure. When you do get those letters of appreciation or those emails which says, hey, I really enjoyed the city, you do feel a sense of pride, rightfully so, for introducing not only to a nice stay, but actually introducing them to the area. And who knows, without your properties being available, perhaps they would have picked somewhere else, you know, maybe not come to the city altogether. So it's a really great wow moment and yeah, really resonates certainly with me and I'm sure with people listening. What does the future look like, Alex?

Well, so the future, I need to do a better job with marketing and I'm very, very excited to have my Boostly website. I've, you know, we've worked on that for a little while. It took me a little while to get the info over. We finally got finish line a while back and I think it was a Boostie podcast that I was listening to and it was about, yeah, it was, it was the Instagram marketing one. And it was about how, you know, how do we use social, which I never did until I hired an ops person. We still have to kind of revamp it. But how do we use social to get folks to book our properties, to get our avatar to book our properties, and then after that, how do we capture them for direct bookings and really showcase the amenities for those folks? And I realized that there's this whole, like, there's this. There has to be a system to it and there has to be a process to it. You can't just rely on, you know, the marketing that you get with the OTAs. OTAs are great and everything and they're obviously huge, you know, marketing sources. But let's be honest, if we really want to be the companies that we want to be, we have to be able to, to, to manage our properties like as they are as their own business and not rely on, on, you know, a rating system and a. Basically, you know, be beholden to some of these other rules. So that I think is, that I know is what we're focusing on. So I, I've got to get through this weekend. It's a big weekend with Taylor Swift coming. All my units are booked. You know, we, we had a meeting this morning prepping ourselves to make sure that we're good. But I really think that it's, you know, using the marketing to create and maintain our, our direct booking clientele. And then from there, great Stays is looking to grow into boutique hotels.

Nice. I'm really excited for you, Alex. I mean, that is what great thing to be focusing on. And thank you for, for mentioning the website as well. I mean, when it comes down to it, like you say, there's everybody who's listening to this can take some action to increase the number of stays, which are more likely to book direct. And social media, being a free platform is such a big, big part of that. So as we get towards the end of these podcasts, Alex, we'd love to just ask a couple of fun questions. And the first question I'll ask yourself, you mentioned you briefly touched on it. What does your morning or daily routine look like?

All right, what do I want it to look like or what does it look like? So the big fan of the 5am club trying to get there. So wake up in the morning, I feed my cat and then really I, I try to do something physical to get the blood flowing and then I hop into the business. I Hop into the business and basically go through my check, my checklist and whatnot. And really I let the day kind of flow after that. But I try to knock out all the big things in the morning and then throughout the day I kind of work more towards kind of, you know, incoming messages. I want to change that though. I want to, like I said, have get up a little bit earlier and do uninterrupted time working on some of the automations whatnot.

Nice, nice. Who is the celebrity or somebody famous who you'd love to meet, somebody you'd love to sit down, have dinner with?

I would say, you know, it's funny, I'm going to say Taylor Swift just because this whole city's going wild right now.

You've got a chance to meet her.

I have a chance. You never know. You never know. But it's actually, it's actually funny. The reason I say that though is because, you know, she, she's popping up all over the place in the news. She's here. My friend who is part of the tourism bureau, you know, they, he, he's asked about her every day in the podcast. But the more I see, I wasn't always familiar with who she was until recently. Like, I didn't know, but like real estate, endorsements, all this stuff, it's not just music. Like, she's actually an extremely successful business person and I would love to just pick her brain and be like, how is it that here you are, you know, you're making these moves and you. And she's been doing it since she was a teenager. I don't know if it's out there, but I'm going to. My guess is there's probably some college courses that focus on her and the way that she's navigated the business world. And I just think it's fascinating, 100%.

I think she's often. She's not given the credit she deserves a lot of the time for that business mind that she's got, because ultimately to go from hit and all of the sound investments she makes is amazing. So great, great shout on the answer for that one. What is one motto or mantra that really resonates with you?

I say this more than I want to, but it's. The buck stops here. And I mentioned this earlier, it's everything I do. A lot of things happen. And sometimes I see people, they, you know, something happens and they're like, oh, well, so and so did this or so and so did this. But the truth was they, they didn't have themselves in a ready position to deal with it. And, and so that's what I'm. A lot of times when something goes wrong, I find it's because I didn't. Either I can learn from it and prepare for the next time, or it's because there probably was something that I should have taken care of that I didn't take care of and it built up. So actually from, you know, from Legends X, I kind of love this. It's one of the core values that Eric mentioned. But it was, you know, it's not the. If some, if a mistake happens, it's usually a failure in the system. It's not a failure in the person. If it happens again, then, you know, you deal with that and KPIs. But like, really it's, it's because you didn't have something in place to take care of it and everything's a learning experience. So it's very difficult for me to sit here and blame people. At the end of the day, it's like, oh, you know what? I can. It comes back to me, what am I going to do to make sure that doesn't happen again or in the future? And then we'll move from there. And I think that it's allowed me to kind of look at growth in a different way and also go through some of the, like, you know, hardships or the, the, the blows that you dealt in a different way as well.

That's, that's a great answer. And when it comes down to that ultimate. I think he called it extreme ownership. That was obviously Eric and Jasper wasn't extreme ownership. It's something which I always now, when, when something does go wrong, you do look inwardly as opposed to. It's not always that person's fault. You can actually go, well, hang on, I didn't write down the system or I didn't tell that person or I didn't, you know, I could have marketed that better or, you know, whatever it is, it is, it's very true. So what a great way to bring things to a close. Alex. How can people get in touch with you? How can they follow you? How can they find out more?

So the website, it's a great. Stays with AN S. So www.greatstays. cO. I don't have that dot com. I don't know how to get it. And social is great. Understays underscore on Instagram. So that's the. But we're building that now and I'm probably going to lean on folks like yourself and the folks in my masterminds to kind of help me do more on social. But yeah, and then if they want to email me, it's just Alex at Greatstays co well, we will add those.

I think we suffered a bit of breakup on there, but we will add those to the show notes as well. For anybody who wants to go and check out obviously the awesome website, the, the Instagram and to watch your journey grow because it's really enjoyable to watch and obviously I'm glad you come on here and shared your story. So I know there'll be people listening to this who's got value from it. And if you listen to this on the Boostly podcast or watching on the Live, if you think there's somebody else you know who would get value from this, please make sure to share this. Do direct them to the Boostly podcast because we do love to have hosts. Awesome hosts Alex, on where I mean we've learned about the different tech, we've learned about how you scale and the challenges. All of that cool stuff which, which helps. And the one thing, there's two things I'm going to take away from this podcast, Alex, which is the first of all, I didn't know you had the background in loan banking and that side of things. And I pictured when you were talking about that I was pitching like. Yes. I don't know if you've seen the film. Yes, man, where you're approving lots of loans and stuff like that, but also the fact that having that community and actually promoting not just your own business, but the local area, the local cafes, the local gyms, you know, all that cool stuff and that's something which I will take away and put into my business. So hopefully others listening will do the same. So thank you very much. Was there anything we missed along the way before we bring it to a close?

No, this has been great. I just want to say thanks again for having me here.

It's our pleasure and thanks again. I'm sure people come and check out the business, but that's bye for now. We'll see you on the next one.