Guesting on What's Key with Sarah G - How Boostly Came to be

I've already said this and I'll repeat it just in case they missed it the first time around is that pick out one thing from this, from this interview, this nearly two hour interview and what I want for you to do is pick one thing and action it.

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 better butt Direct M are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

I think that the reason why people now calling me the direct booking guy is that since 2016-2017-2018-2019, nobody cared because there wasn't a pandemic. There's never been a Covid before. And a problem that I have with a lot of property courses that are out there that happen over a weekend or whatnot, is that they show you how to get started, they show you how to approach an estate agent. Excuse me, I've been doing a lot of talking today. They show you how to approach an estate, they told you how to get the keys, they show you all these things. But when it comes to marketing, it's like the last thing that they show and they just say, ah, just get on booking.com and Airbnb and you'll be fine. And if you think about our industry, it's true, we are very fortunate. I can't think of any other career or industry out there that you can list your business on and you can pretty much guarantee that you're going to get income coming in. You can't, you know, if you're an E commerce, yeah, you can list on Amazon. You can't guarantee, pretty much guarantee that you're going to get bookings. We're in hospitality. Hospitality is. There's not enough properties. You can get to a point and you know, you can get to a certain point in a calendar, whether it's an event on or whatever, you've literally got people that are fully booked. The whole town or city is sold out. You know what I mean? I flew into England on 11 March for the short Stay show, which was in London at the xl and for the Shorties Awards because I won the best use of social media. I was speaking on 12th March at the sorted State show and it was coming out of the Excel center at 5pm I was walking with a couple of people that I knew from the world of property and service accommodation. And we're just Being frog marched out of the Excel and we didn't really know what was going on at the time. Turns out that the Excel then got turned into one of the emergency hospitals that they needed in London and all of those things. But as walking out and obviously coronavirus is, is there and you know that it's obviously in China and whatnot was hit in Italy at the time and Spain where I live. And I said to somebody, I said there's going to be one phrase that's going to be banded around when all of this gets back to normal and it's going to be staycation. You're just going to hear tourism boards and everybody's like, if you said staycation in March, if you type staycation in in March on a Google search next to no results or clicks on it, you do it now and it's everywhere. The cool thing about the lockdown right now of where we are recording this on the 10th of November and anybody in England, you've got this four week lockdown, right, is that we've got a playbook to go by, is that unlike March where we didn't know what we were doing, you can simply just go back to March and go, right, I've got these properties, they need to be filled. And we've got a little bit more hope because business guests can still travel, you can still travel for work. So it's a case of doing the same tactics and tips, tapping into that network, tapping into Facebook groups, putting it out there that you can, you can do it. And again, this is what people are doing and they have pivoted their business. They have, you know, they have done so well in so many different ways. And for the first time in the four years of me doing this, people are marketing their businesses like never before because they've realized that they cannot just rely on a third party to bring in their bookings. They have to take responsibility. Which is phenomenal for me. For I've been talking about this non stop for four years to finally see it in action. And I see it every single day from members of the Bouchlee Academy yourself content creator website. I see it in the hospitality community Facebook group. I see in the essay groups that I'm part of. More and more people now are talking about direct booking because my goal in all of this is that I want to get the OTAs to reduce their commission costs. I think the problem with a lot of people is that they get into this and they realize that, you know, maybe property managers or whatever, they think the property people or whatever you want to do, and then they get into it and they try and automate their whole life, their whole business. But the problem with that is that you lose that human touch. And if this has shown one thing is that the power of being, that having that human touch is everything. Being able to reach out and to communicate with people, being able to chat to people, being able to just text or whatever is going back to old school methods, which is working massively. This time last year I could just give generic advice and everybody in the northern hemisphere could use it. Southern hemisphere, not so much because it's there, it's there coming into their summer now, where I was talking about winter, shoulder season. So I, I had to maybe pivot sometimes for that. But right now, as you said, Wales is different to Scotland is different to England. And when the whole tier thing was going on, it was insane. But then I live in Spain and in Spain we, we have lockdowns in our county, in our area. I mean, I can still walk around, I just have to wear a mask, the boostly mask. Gotta wear a mask at all times. And you know, and then it's different to what's in Italy, in America. Yeah. Christ, God knows what they're doing in America. Everybody's having a great time. Like it's never happened. And then you've got Canada and, but like, and again, you've got different states in all these areas. Bali, you know, I've, you know, got a lot of friends in Bali and, and, and they're not allowed anybody in or out. And in Australia, again, it's, it's, it's so different everywhere. So, you know, the, the advice you give and the, the generic advice that I can give to everybody is that, number one, make sure that your systems are in place. You've got a website, you've got a pms, you've got your email list and you've got your social media. And like you said, consistency is everything. And it was. The one big advice that I was giving out during lockdown was don't go dark, don't disappear. Post on Facebook, post on Instagram, use this as a time to start doing Instagram stories or Facebook stories and sort of document your day.

Staycations and workcations. Is there like a difference between sort of a workcation and a staycation and, and how that can help sort of hospitality owners, service, accommodation, etc.

Yeah, so. And I like how it's come up on the screen. Very nicely done. Thank you. So work cation. So basically it's Just a play on words. Staycation, workation. I was even calling it in Australia state cation because out of lockdown they couldn't leave their state. But work cation is a new trend and it's one that everybody doesn't matter when you listen to this, whether you're listening to this in November, December or even 2021, it's a trend you have to get ready for. And if anybody has ever listened to anything on Novel, Ravicant and Tim Ferriss the podcast, then you will know what I'm talking about right now is that we're coming into an age and a time in our human existence where this nine to five in an office is slowly edging away. Google have still got a massive travel ban. Google have still got where people are remote. Twitter are now 100% remote. Dropbox are 100% remote. And these are some of the biggest companies in in the world. Booking.com 100 remote. They are all working from home now. What does that tell you is that they have got people that are not having to go into an office to work. When I first started as so many people in that room that had run their guest house of their business for 10 plus years, if you think about it, Facebook didn't really get started properly in the UK 2007. So they've had their business longer than Facebook's actually ever been around. So for a lot of people when I came in and started talking about these things, it was so new and you know, it was exactly why my parents asked us to come back into the business is that they didn't want to figure it out themselves. They wanted somebody that they could just pop in and I was there and, and it was, it was, you know, it was the start of everything. And you know, I don't know what it is. Maybe it was my coaching background that meant I could, I knew that I could teach it and coach it and explain it and I could put it into words that was explained, easy to understand. But the main frustration to me was that there was nobody doing it online.