Fighting Back From The Corona Crisis With James Sinclair

Foreign.

To the Boosted Podcast, Season eight, Episode five Tonight we've got James Sinclair. James Sinclair is, I think he's the British version of Gary Vee. I've got a lot of time for James. I've got to know him quite well over the course of the last year and he has got multiple businesses in multiple industries and I think if there's anybody that I know that has faced a bigger hit, anybody else, it's James. Started on Monday 16th March. He had to make some super quick decisions, some very hard decisions in a very short space of time, which will save his business in the long run. James is recording this episode from his family home. He's on lockdown, his wife is pregnant, and obviously from the advice that's been passed on by the government, he needs to be at home right now. And for anybody who knows James, or as seen James or watched his documentary on YouTube or anything like that, you know that he likes to be out and about. This particular episode was recorded at 7.30pm UK and that's important on the 23rd of March. Why is it important at 8.30pm UK, Boris Johnson did his live broadcast at a press briefing a little bit later than usual. So whatever happens after that, then you'll know why. We talked about the Chancellor, we talked about insurance, we talked about proactive tips that people can be doing before, talked about diversifying, we talked about what he has done in the past week, how he has saved so much money and how. You should be having a conversation with your bank manager right now. Please take a minute to check it out and then please go and check out what he's doing online with the entrepreneurial network. It's his online training group that he started right now. He normally does it all in person, but obviously due to the current state of play, we have to do it online now. I've joined. It's £49amonth. If you put Boostly in the coupon code section, you get the first month. Half price is only, as far as I know, available to Boostly podcast listeners. Please do go check it out. All of the links are in the show notes, please also as well, go and say hi to him on LinkedIn, Instagram, make sure you came for him from the Boostly podcast and then just tag in@Boostly UK. All right, without further ado, want to thank the Boostly podcast sponsors, which is Hostfully. You can go get a free digital guidebook right now by going to hostfully.com one digital guidebook that you can pass on to your Guests to tell them about the places that you like to eat. You can also inform them about WI fi, how to use specific devices in your property, but also as well, you can tell them about the precautionary measures that you are taking around COVID 19, you know, cleaning, etc. And how they can be prepared to come and stay with you if you want to go get more than one guidebook. If you want to subscribe to their premium service, put Boostly 2M in the promo code. You get two months free. Right, without further ado, please, please, please listen, watch, learn and implement this episode into your business.

How you doing? Yes, I'm in lockdown. I'm here in isolation and for entrepreneur like me, it's bloody nightmare. But, you know, it is what it is. Let me tell you a bit about myself. I'm a man that employs 450 people, although they're all currently laid off right now, bar 100 of them that runs our day nursery operations. We've got 11 sites, visitor attractions, play centers, six day nurseries, and then I run a business training organization called James Sinclair's Entrepreneurs Network, where we train people, live, but now all online, you know, successfully running that. And I make podcasts. I used to speak on stages a lot, but now I'm not allowed to see anyone, so I don't speak on stages anymore. Until this. Well, I've now stopped calling it the coronavirus. I've called it the corona crisis, because those things are literally, you know, it's killing businesses.

The first question that I've had for you is that Monday 16th March, so a week ago today, we're filming this. On Monday 23rd March, we're obviously filming, filming this live on Facebook and there'll be a lot of people wondering, why are we jumping in a little bit early to do this? Everybody will know in the UK that in 45 minutes there's going to be a press briefing by Boris. So we're jumping on early so we can get all of this out the way and then we can tune in to see what they do. So obviously this is before today's announcement, this is before tomorrow's announcements, which is going to be obviously a big one as well. We're in a pre lockdown world right now. But on Monday 16th March, when you woke up after having a bit of a briefing with like, your FD and your team, where was your mindset at right then? Like, how were you feeling seeing that you knew what you were going to have to do? Very Quickly over the course of the coming days I could.

So basically everyone that works in hospitality, one of their biggest costs is walks on two legs their labor costs. And they were, you know, I get sent a daily income sheet from all of our sites and one of our key KPIs is to we are three average customer value, labor to turnover ratio, monthly profit and loss. And they're the three things that we track. And really that monthly profit and loss is tracked daily through our daily income sheet. And I was seeing our labor percentages went to 575% higher than our turnover and we want to be 25% of turnover maximum 30%. Sometimes on off peak days it's gone to 35%. I've seen some 50% in some really hot weather, rainy days, whatever the attraction is that's killed it to see 575%, 4% on that Monday. I decided that Monday evening, the evening of the 16th of March that we had to close our business because every day that we dithered and delayed on this, we would lose £30,000 a day. And I was not prepared to make that decision. So we closed probably a week ahead of everyone else. But that decision saved us quarter of a million pounds in wasted revenue and we got ahead of the game. And I feel really strong that we made the right decision because when we come back from this, we're a business that won't be, you know, borrowing loads of money to pay back our debts, etc. Etc. So we'll still be around.

You acted really quickly and I think that again there's so many business owners who are watching this, obviously hospitality, but I know we're going to have people from all walks of life or business watching this. What is the one bit of advice that you could give to everybody that is watching right now who is got a business? Let's just say everybody has a business. You know they're going to be, let's just say a bed and breakfast owner in the uk. Obviously bed and breakfast owner in the UK hasn't yet closed and they haven't called the bank manager, they haven't done anything with current loans or anything like that. What's the one bit of advice that you would say just go and do after this? You've listened to this. The first thing that they should be.

Doing, well, it's about protection of cash and making sure you've got something, that you've got something to come back to. There is no point in just trading for the sake of trading if your income is turned off. Close your business down and look to save the money, lay your staff off until you know more about this 80% thing, because there's still no details from the government at the time of recording this into the reality of what that means. What does Furlong mean? We don't know yet, and I'm sure we will know in the coming days. It's all about communicating with your team, your customers and your bank managers and finance partners and indeed any other stakeholders. Told us, stop paying everything. We stopped paying hmrc, we've stopped paying all of our bills. But we communicated with every single one of those and told them what we was going to be doing. And we are building a war chest up. Luckily for us, we, we don't owe, I mean, HMRC owe us a lot of money right now. And so we're in a good position. We won't be going back into this with a lot of debt. And those are the measures that we took. And we, you know, closed our business down within 72 hours to make sure we're ready for this. This is going to be a tough time for businesses to come back, see the way the way business works and your listeners will know this is the regularity of cash flow. Tomorrow's forward food order or tomorrow's rent bill or tomorrow's labor bill is paid by the most recent trade. Now where that trade has been decimated, it's being killed completely. You need to make sure that you have a starting fund. You know, you might have, you know, all your food, you got to refill a kitchen that might be 5, 10, 15 grand. Like for us, for all of our sites to fill up all of our 11 sites with starting stock in six months time, if this is how long it takes, could be £75,000. Boom. You know, you might have your landlord's rent to come in and usually your rent is paid a month in advance or quarter in advance. And cash flow has generated that money. Well, that's all gone now. So you're going to need cash to start the business again. Marketing, you're going to have to market the things to let people know that you're back and everyone's going to be doing that. So you're going to have to market far smarter than you've ever done before. All of these things were playing in my head and I thought, right, we need to create this war chest. It's the most important thing to do. And that's what you guys have got to do. You've got to have a war chest. And the bigger business is the more locations you've got, the more that you need to think about that we aren't one bed and breakfast that can be a bit more nimble, that can be in and out of situations. If I was a bed and breakfast, I would be contacting the local NHS and saying, I know you've got doctors that might be scared of going home. We could rent all of our buildings out to you. I know there's loads of hotels, you know, had the NHS come and take them over. Audi supermarkets will be looking to do that as well. To find people that want to completely self isolate from their home. There are some opportunities for the people that want to do the research and development to find out where the new money is flowing. You know, money flows in different directions and it's decided to go in, you know, the hands of, you know, people that sell PPE equipment, that sell food in supermarkets and Those B and Bs and hotels that service this new need. Because I know that doctors and nurses are not going home and they're looking for hotel stays. They're the people that could be doing well out of this.

Okay, so you have somehow, bizarrely, because of what you do on YouTube, you know, you provide tons of content on there, you've become a business agony ant over the course of the past week and you've obviously spoken to a lot of people, a lot of people have contacted you and through all the various means of social media, what have you found is the most common pain point or the most common fear that they are having right now, but doesn't necessarily mean money, you know, because money is always a pain point, money is always a fear. Everybody's worrying about money. But what has been the sort of the most common pain point that they have shared with you or what's the one that stands out massively from one of the conversations that you've had?

They don't know when their business is going to be allowed to reopen and retrade. If they're in leisure sector like me, restaurants, bars and family attractions like us, we don't know when we can retrade the next one. That is fear of, you know, just nothing to do. And then thirdly, people are worried about losing all their staff and how they started. But the unknown of is, you know, wraps that all up really. People are in an unknown situation. It's not like, right, this will all go back to normal on the 1st of June. People don't know. And so when you don't know, it's very hard to plan, plan you Must.

So obviously we've gone through all of the, all of the shit times that are happening right now. Let's try and see what we can maybe gather from all of this. Now, obviously the Chancellor on Friday the 20th came out and laid out some form of plans and obviously he's going to hopefully come back one night this week and explain more of that. But there's going to be relief, there's going to be aid out there. From what you've seen, from what you've gathered, from what the conversations that you've had, how did you personally break down what the Chancellor explained on Friday the 20th and how have you put any, if anything into your business from Friday to today?

So the business rates was a great thing for me because that's worth about 600 grand to us in business rate savings. However, I've seen some stuff today that they're only doing it for one location per limited company. I really hope that's not the case and I think there's some confusion around this. Local authorities, a lot there is. You know, I'm assuming that the business rate savings will be for every business not allowed to trade for a year or even if it happens for three months. We need all that savings to go back into the business for all the last revenue, the VAT deferment for three months. I mean, all these loans and stuff like that. I mean, I'm not a big fan because I don't think they're going to be as simple and as easy as everyone's making out. I don't think people will be able to get this into their business, as everyone is saying. I just don't think it's going to be that easy. And I've spoken to a couple of banks today. It says grabbing and the grants, your local authority comes to you when they're ready to do that. But the time to pay no penalties and no interest on all the, on the HMRC payments, that's great. That's going to help businesses. Businesses need to create genuine cash flow right now. That's what they've got to aim to do so that they've got that war chest, like I keep saying, for when they reopen.

Businesses up and down the country are going to be able to pay their staff, the ones that they've still got on the books. You know, the 80% up to 80% of their, of their, of their staff are going to be able to get their wage. How have you viewed that as in far as building up a war chest, as far as like chatting to Potential people. How have you seen that situation? How can you possibly, who do you think could possibly benefit from that? I'm thinking like the online retailers, for example. There could be. People are going to be stuck in their house, they're going to be bored, they're obviously going to be potentially being paid to be just sat in their homes. Like, what did you take from that? And like how you sort of planning on getting in front of their eyeliner.

The situation is, Mark, no one knows the details of that and how that's going to be implemented. And until we know the details, you know, we can't comment on that. All they've said is that they will provide this 80% for furlonged workers. But that's not a word that's been used in HR professionally in this country is an American term on their HR stuff. It's in effect you get paid for gardening leave, I believe that the government are proposing, but there is no finite details on that, on exactly what that means. So therefore business owners and employees are getting confused on this. And you know, all of my employers been going, oh, can I go and get another job? Will I still get the 80%? It's a real, it's a real catalogue of errors and we need to see the detail. If it is, as they said, as the Chancellor said that, that we'll be able to get this package of support, then great, we'll be able to do it. But until we see it, we don't know tonight.

We don't know what's going to happen tonight. Obviously that's coming up in 30 minutes time. For those of you watching this back on the replay, this has been filmed, you know, a bit earlier than the normal on one of these podcasts. Hopefully tonight and this week we will find out more. I watched your webinar last week and we're going to talk about the webinar. We're going to talk about em. We're going to finish on the Entrepreneur Network and just sort of talk about that on the webinar. You obviously talked about getting cash rich, which is your war chest, which is what you mentioned about tonight. But you also explained that businesses cannot go dark, as in when you're talking about marketing, talking about keeping front of mind, even if you can't take bookings or earn money right now, cannot go silent because if you go dark, your customers will forget about you. So what proactive tips have you got? Have you been thinking about that you have been maybe potentially putting into, you know, Marsh Farm and all of the things that you're doing or what can you share for small businesses that they. What they can be doing right now?

Carry on emailing your customers and let them know that you're still there. That's really important. Even if it's just, you know, for us, a marsh farm, we've been saying what we've been doing at the animals. Yeah, all of that stuff. Really, really important. You know, if you're a hospitality business, maybe you've got a restaurant. I would be sending your chef or your head chef, if you've still got some recip. And show them cooking in the kitchen and how they prepare meals and show them how they can go and do that stuff. Simple recipes that you can do with the stuff that's difficult to get at home. Just stuff that creates communication. You got to do it a lot. You got to do a lot of this stuff. People are on social media, looking at their screens more than ever now, and that's an opportunity. So, you know, I'm going live on Facebook and live and I'm getting, you know, I've just done a live on Facebook and Instagram and at the same time, within minutes, I had 60 people watching, which is, you know, Facebook is hard to get now. You know, I've got a lot of stuff on there, but people are looking, they stand around, they're commenting. People that never usually would do that stuff before because they're at home. So you've got to create social content. And can you pivot, can you pivot your audience into buying any other stuff? Because they probably want to support you. Here's an interesting thing. We've got direct debit membership to come to our venues and loads of our customers have said that carry on taking our direct debit seats even though you closed so that you can stay in business. And I thought, wow, people are looking to be kind and they're the opportunities that you need to snap up in your marketing.

There's so many opportunities that people can be doing right now. I mean, for example, if and when this lockdown does come in in the uk, you're going to be sat at home a lot. How many of you watching this have wanted to all year, but not at the time sell your shit on ebay. The stuff that, you know, the things that you got for Christmas, that was from an aunt, which you're just never going to use. You can bring in revenue at time when you, when you just. You don't expect it. Like this week we tried to put in an order on Tesco Delivery and we tried to do it for my mother in law in Middlesbrough. Today was the last day that you could order for this week and that was nothing for the next few weeks. Now I don't know how this may potentially work with a lockdown, but there's an opportunity right now for you to go and put an offer out on the Facebook marketplace. Facebook marketplace for sale groups in your local area and just say, listen, if you can't get to your local Tesco, wherever supermarket of your choice, I'll go get it for you. Give me your list. You can put a mark up on it, you can do 20 quid for a delivery. Not everybody's gonna need it. You know, you may get some snarky comments on the thing that. But you don't need 99% of them, you know that Bob who's just having too much time on his hand, you don't need them. But that 1%, that one person who could really do with that and that extra income that you've got coming in, like I say, how you could get around that with a lockdown, I'm not sure. But there are so many ways that you could be earning revenue and if you need it the most, you're just gonna have to suck it up and go to your supermarket because they're hiring if you're struggling and if you're sat there bitching whinge and complaining that there is no income coming in, you're just not looking hard enough. You just gotta think a little bit creatively like Georgina, like so many of us are doing. So I say, I just wanted to tell everybody that there are definitely things that you could be doing. Now obviously email is a great way people have built an email list. This is a fantastic tool to do. So obviously you're everywhere on social media with what you're doing. Let's talk about something that you're doing. Obviously you love the face to face training. It's what you've done for years now. But obviously with everything that's going on, you've decided to bring it online. Now I've joined, just explain in a little bit of detail what is going to be coming up, who should join, why you should join and again, just to just break it down a little bit and if anybody wants to find out more, obviously they can send you a direct message or they can go to a website. But yeah, just spend a couple of minutes, just tell us about it and I'll tell you why I joined after.

What frustrates me about business owners is they. So there's three Stages of business ownership. I call this the entrepreneur's pyramid. Stage one, you build a profitable job and this is someone that does the same day in, day out and wait for it to happen if it ever happens. Stage two is building a profitable business. This is a business and you become the managing director of your business. You know, after a period of decades, you've built something. Maybe you've got a few properties from it and you've got something that's good, but it's a business. What you really want to aim to do is build a profitable investment that's someone that wants to buy your business. In effect, you end up building a profitable enterprise that works without you in it. Day to day, you become a 100% shareholder of your business or part shareholder and you become a chairman or chairwoman of your business and it operates without you. When someone comes on my online training program over a period of time every week, I teach you a lesson that you can do indoors from the office. And it's broken down into the fundamentals of brilliant marketing, brilliant business ownership. The KPIs getting your teams to be more profitable, how to increase average customer value, how to build a profitable investment rather than a profitable job. So most people are turning under £200,000 and they think they've got a business and no one wants to buy that. You've got to build it. So it's a hands off investment that's building something that does that takes a number of years to do. You know, you don't just build a profitable investment overnight, it takes time to do it. And I want to take people from those three stages that the solopreneur into entrepreneur into investopreneur. Being a solopreneur is great if you just want to bring an income, but I really want to get people to be investopreneurs that have things that they can sell so that they can enjoy their retirement when that happens. And you know the fundamentals of all of my methodology, you know, E F equals S. So entrepreneurship plus management equals success. And what does a great team look like? You know how to do great personal development, but purely for entrepreneurs and business owners. So if you decide one of the early modules is working out what size of business that you want to build and working out what your PBA looks like and your PBA is your personal bank account number. What do you actually want to have in your personal bank account at retirement, on an annual basis, on a monthly basis, then we reverse engineer the business to build around that. Most people don't know this stuff. What Entrepreneurs do and business owners do is they fight battles without a war plan. And the entrepreneurs University helps you work out your war plan and then it helps you fight the right battles that will help you win that war. And what I find out with entrepreneurs is they just fight the same old battles day after day. They're basically doing what I call World War I mentality. You know, they're taking a bit of land, they're losing a bit of land, they're taking a bit of land, they're losing, losing a bit of land. And no one really knows why they're fighting this war. What I want business owners do is World War II mentality, right, we've got a dodgy bloke in Germany, he's got a funny moustache, we all can get behind it, we know why we want to get rid of him and there's a much better vision, an end in mind for while we're doing the thing. Successful people just think better like that. They know what they're doing it for and they know what they want their outcome to be. And that's what I work with people and when I've coached people who on a one to one basis and I'm expensive to work with me on that, so this allows people to do it for £50amonth, they can be part of a community. If they have a 999 moment, they're like, oh my God, I'm really struggling here. Then they're allowed to call one of our coaches and speak to them to help them through a pickle, no extra charge. We don't encourage that to happen all the time and most of our members are pretty respectful of that because all the online training is pretty spectacular and it's me delivering it. So, you know, it's all the stuff that I've picked up to build my 12 million pound business that ended up employing 450 people. And there's a bit of property stuff in there if you're interested in property. So there's all my fundamentals into modules that come to you every week to get serious success.

I joined because, well, basically you above anybody else that I followed on, say, YouTube or social media have given me a lot of insight on the next steps of being a business owner. I have grown this from help from people like Jessica Lorimer and Dan Meredith and Danny Clark. There's loads of amazing coaches out there that have sort of helped and guided me along the way from growing Boost Lee and obviously the family business as well. But I think now more than ever I think what you're doing really, really well is on a day to day basis, every day you're documenting what you're doing and you're taking on board the press briefings that we're going to edit soon so we can go check tonight's out. And you're sort of breaking it down in layman's terms for everybody can understand and more importantly what you're doing to put it into your business, which at a time like this and it's only a small group at the Moment it's like 20 to 30 people, but that will obviously grow. But everybody in there is on the same path at the same level and it's good to be in, you know, and like I said, the modules are there, but the modules for me are a bonus. I mean just to have in a little community where you can go in and tight knit group. And I think just the advice in there is really good and I think for right now I recommend everybody just to at least check it out. You know, I know James Burt is obviously doing this with you. Like I say, there is so much going on right now and every single night we're going to be coming on and we're going to be doing these free podcasts, these free live videos just to give you updates and most importantly how you can fight back. People from all over the world that are watching this, whether you're BNB hotel, serviced apartments, short stay accommodation, multiple single units. There's going to be something in here that will help you every single night. I hoped and we had booked in booking.com come on a senior manager from booking.com, but they've had to pull out today. So I've managed to get a very good guest to come on somebody who is an Italian who is living in Barcelona right now, living it, breathing it, doing all the things coronavirus and also as well trying to run a hospitality business and helping Italian hospitality owners to come back from all of this. So that's going to be Wednesday. We've got summit on every night and on Friday is a big one. We're going to do Friday drinks again. We've got Damien Fogg coming on who's going to help you how to cut out those extra spends that you don't need to be spending right now. But finally I just want to say James, thank you so much. Really, really, really appreciate it and keep on doing what you're doing, keep sharing and everybody that's the business broadcast podcast. I just put James Sinclair on Google.

And it'll yeah, we're doing one a day on that. There's a really good one that you guys should listen to on insurance.

One final thing before we, before we go. There was a little tip last week shared with people about contacting the hospital trusts. Those are the people that are in charge of making sure that doctors, nurses and people that are working in the NHS get rooms, accommodation and like I say, use may be still open, you may still be able to take bookings. Right now, those are the people that you should be reaching out to. And who knows, there may be a family member, a friend, a friend of a friend, you know, somebody that might work in there. Instead of just having to do a cold call, you can get a name and you can get your information, your property, your potential bookings and potential revenue. You are going to have to heavily discount. Let's not be about the bush here. When you work with the hospital trust, you do have to give a discount, but you, I think right now more than ever, if you can get the accommodation, get the bookings, build the relationship, build the trust, and further down the line, it will, like, say when the upturn comes, and it will come, it will, it will stem you in good stead. So gonna let you go. Everybody, thank you so much for tuning in. If you're watching this back on the replay, please do me a massive favor, let us know what you're doing to be proactive. Everybody that is watching live, please just take a second just to thank James for doing this. You can go and find James Sinclair everywhere just by typing in James Sinclair in Google. If you want to join the en, the entrepreneurial network again, the link will be in the post above and below. If you put in Boostly in the coupon code, the first month is half price and that, by the sounds of it, is just for Boostly listeners at the present moment in time. All right, thank you very much. I'm going to let you go. We're going to go listen to good old Boris and whatever that may bring. We'll be back tomorrow, speak to you all very soon.