Elaine Watt explained the importance of offline meetups

Okay, so taking it from the world of online to the world of offline now, you host monthly meetups in your local area. You attend events and conferences. When did you decide to do it? Why did you decide to do it? And what benefits have you seen for not only the HLS podcast, but for the rental business?

Yeah, I have seen a lot of benefits. There's two sides to my networking, really, and one side is for the holiday let's Experience Success podcast. And that's really the meetups on a monthly basis. And I think it's building. What I wanted to do was build a community, a place where people can meet in person and see there are other people that are doing this because it's quite a lonely industry to be in. If you're an individual owner, you, you, you are faced with your computer day in, day out, and of course, your guests. But aside from that, you haven't always got somewhere where you can go to. To talk through issues and niggles. What's working, what's not working, and how to overcome those bumps in the road that we all have. When we're learning, when we're getting set up, and certainly when we're past learning and setting up, there's always something happening. There's always going to be a bump in the road. And just to be able to share that and find out what someone else might have done in that instance, I mean, that's been brilliant for me as a business owner, given me the chance to talk to humans. So that's been really good. Not just sitting behind my computer. Great.

Yeah. I was gonna say, how did you go about creating it? How did you go about spreading the word? And. Yeah, just sort of. Just how did you get it going? And what would be your advice to anybody who's watching this? Thinking I could do with a bit of humanization, speaking to somebody else, I might create something similar or what some bits of tips and advice would you pass on to that?

I would say keep it casual to get started with and meet somewhere that's got parking and that is easy to get to because I've learned from another event that I organize, a Toastmasters meeting where I learned to public speak. One of the biggest things that made our club such success was the fact that it was very easy for people to get there. And so I really learned a lot from setting that up. And I just duplicated that for holiday homeowners. I was like, why aren't I doing this meeting for. For holiday homeowners? And one of the most. The biggest successes I'VE had is with meetup.com and that is a great online tool. You can also. There's also an app. Meetup shares any event that is going on in your area. You can go to meetup.com and you can search my area within however many miles about whatever your subject is and everything. All the meetups under that subject within that distance of your area will pop up on there. So I knew there were people searching for this, so I was straight onto meetup.com I've also talked about it a lot on social media, but meetup.com hugely successful. I also use Eventbrite.

There you go. Eventbrite, yes.

Got there in the end.

I was going to ask about Eventbrite, but yeah, definitely, Eventbrite is a real good place for advertising. Anything like meetup.com fantastic. So those are some good little tools and tips, especially like the parking takeaway from that. That's a very good bit of advice. You don't want people rocking up, complaining that they've had to walk for 20 minutes just to.

Or indeed not coming at all because it's a barrier. People are gonna have an opportunity to. I want it easy. I want them to be able to come and enjoy it and, yeah, want it to come back again.

So it's a really interesting journey that you've gone down. Like you say, you've started up with the property or properties and pretty much straight away you've created the podcast and you've used it as a way to meet people. You've used it as a way to more insight to your business, which has helped you, which has been fantastic. And now you've sort of transitioned again to where you've got the Facebook group, you've got the training website, you're doing all these sort of extra things now where you're sort of coaching and helping other rental owners. What was the transition to that like? What made you do it and what have you found to be the benefits of doing?

So what I wanted to do was just help people who were where I was a few years ago, and people could be struggling along, not knowing that there's other people out there feeling the same. So I wanted to imagine if I was back there, where I was, that there was somebody like me that I could have reached out to that was just a little bit further down the road than I was, just to share everything that occurred and just help them through it.