How to build sustainable success for your short-stay accommodation business - with Dino Tartaglia S7E10

I take a quick minute before I start this podcast episode to thank the sponsor of the Boostly podcast hostfully. H O-O-S-T F U-L-L-Y.com they create stunning digital guidebooks that will enhance your guest experience and will give you a fantastic tool in increasing your direct bookings. They link up to your pms. It's so simplistic to use. You can head over there right now and get two months free of their premium service. All you need to do is when you're going to check out, put in a coupon section boostly 2m. So b o o s t l y 2m and you get two months free. Okay, Enjoy this episode of the Boost Tali podcast and thanks again to our sponsors. Hostfully Podcast. We are in season seven, episode 10 and I am so excited for this episode because I have invited Dino Tatellia into the podcast to give us a breakdown of what makes a business successful. Dino is one of those guys that I've had in my world for a while now, part of the different Facebook groups that we're a part of and, and he is one half of the success engineers. Now what he has done over the year is he has been able to work with some of the most successful business owners that are around and he has broken down the tactics and the tools that they have done to get from A to B. They've just released a podcast between him and Simon, his co founder, and in the podcast what they do is that they look at businesses like Tinder, for example. We talk about it in the podcast how it went from an idea to now being a hugely successful business and they break down the methods and the tactics, etc. In this now for this episode, I wanted Dino to come in and I wanted him to share some of the successful traits and I also wanted him to share what he sees as seen some of the biggest mistakes that he sees business owners make. This is one not to miss. I have a massive thank you to Hostfully. Who are the podcast sponsors we talk about? Hostfully actually in this episode because I shared one of our mistakes and Dino went on to explain about an experience that he had, a hospitality business in Poland and how someone like Hostfully could have prevented that. So please go and check out hostfully.com please make sure you go check out Dino. And at the end of the call, at the end of his podcast, if you listen all the way to the end, he will share with you a link that you can go to where you can book in A clarity call with him where he will help break down where you are now, where you want to be and what you need to do to get on who you need to be talking about. Go and check out the show notes booster.co.uk, there's going to be lots of tactics and tips and things to talk about in this, but without further ado, let's jump on in and let's have a chat with Dino. What makes, in your opinion, a successful business sustainable and what threatens that most commonly?

So there are a lot of attributes, if you like, and a lot of things that we've seen working with businesses that are as big as, you know, a couple of billion euros in turnover, right down to what I call kitchen table entrepreneurs. People literally running their business from the kitchen table doing 50, 60 grand a year. There's commonality. But what we tend to do, and probably best to just really talk just for a couple of secs about Simon and I, who run success engineering is Simon is a world class coach and sports psychology consultant and I'm an entrepreneur and business troubleshooter. So between us we've seen an awful lot of world class performers and actually Simon in particular has grown those in sport, which is where a lot of our thinking comes from. So we've seen what it takes to be world class, which is a sustainable performance metric, if you will. You can't be world class in, you know, just in fits and starts. It's over a long period of time. It's like being a Michelin star chef, for example, that just doesn't happen overnight. And also, particularly if you get to two Michelin star, there's a consistency element to that, if that makes sense. So when we talk about wildly successful and sustainable businesses, we're talking about getting your business to a level where you can maintain that quality if you like, and that robustness for the long term, if that makes sense. Now, one of the key things, Mark, that I think is worth mentioning to the guys listening is you can't develop world class business like this. A world class ethos, if you like thinking anything other than you're going for excellence. However, there is a continuum, there's a spectrum that people sit on from good enough to world class. And it's, in my view, and I know Simon shares, is perfectly acceptable to adopt some of the characteristics and the insights and the understanding and the practices of world class people and apply that to being good enough or to being excellent, which is further down the line. Perfectly okay. So I don't want any of the Guys thinking, oh, you know, I don't even. World class, that's not, that's not who I am. That's not the point of this. So with that said, as a backdrop to this, there are five characteristics that we found are common to the most wildly successful modern day entrepreneurs on the planet. And these are fundamentals, these are things that don't go away. So the first one is aligning your passion with a big valuable problem that you solve. And the reason that matters is because if you're just in it for the money and there's nothing else driving you, generally what we tend to find happen, and I'll get to this, because this is one of the other characteristics, is that when the big challenges come up, you tend to get demotivated because there's just nothing. Money ultimately is just a way of keeping score of your success, if you will. But that's all it is in my view. There needs to be something deeper about this. You need to be solving a problem that matters to you. For example, so what we found with studying and working with some highly successful entrepreneurs, and certainly studying some of the most successful modern day entrepreneurs like Sean Rad at Tinder, for example, or the guys like Neil Blumenthal at Warby Parker, the Spectacle company over in the States, these sort of companies find a problem that is hugely valuable if they solve it or if they improve or if they deliver a great service. But they have to be passionate about doing that, which means that they're interested in the user experience and in what the customer gets from it. And I think in your industry in particular, that's really, that's really important. So if that makes some sense, if you look at, for example, because it also kind of helps your thinking in terms of your problem solving. And I think that's one of the problems that we see. It doesn't matter whether you're in the short stay business or whether you're in, you're in the manufacturing business or some other service industry, it doesn't really matter. Again, these are fundamentals. If you look at Shawn Rad's story with Tinder, Sean was tremendously shy and really had a problem speaking, speaking to girls, but not actually getting a conversation going kind of. He was sitting one day thinking, what is this, this whole dating thing? How can I, you know, how do you, how do you get from, you know, first blush, if you like, you know, the first contact all the way through to, you know, having babies, getting divorced, wherever that whole deal finishes. Yeah. And it came to him that the problem that he was facing was just knowing whether a girl liked him. Rejection was his problem at the outset, but if you got a pitch in, if he found that he was, he could actually get a conversation going and be listened to. And then the girl said, well, you know what? I like you, but there's no chemistry, or whatever. Whatever the rejection was, he was okay with that. But just not getting off the first base, if you like, was a big issue. And that was, it turned out, one of the massive, massive issues shared by an awful lot of the world, guys in the world. And that's where Tinder came from, the idea for it. So he found that it was a huge, valuable problem and he was passionate about applying his skills and expertise, some of which he didn't have at that stage, to solving that problem. That makes sense. So we find that sustainable businesses come from that. There's a passion. People don't follow the passion and they don't just solve a problem. They bring the two together.

The takeaway that I'm getting so far is what so many business owners that we chat to do is just scratch your own itch. You know what I mean? They build something from a problem that they're having, like Tinder from a prime example. So it's really interesting. Like, that's the takeaway that I'm getting just listening to these shot examples. But, yeah, please, please continue.

Yeah, and that's a great way of describing it, actually. Yeah. But here's the key thing. It's understanding that everyone, a lot of other people have got that itch and they're in. It's uncomfortable or painful, and they'll pay to have it taken away big.

Just like a Tinder date, it goes wrong.

Do you know, for all I talk a lot about, about Tinder as one of the examples that we use. Never been on it, actually. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, actually. So the next thing is embracing the challenge. The guys listening may have heard the term, and I know you have fall in love with the process. I'm not a great fan of that language. It sounds a bit trite and kind of pseudo motivational. But the reality is you've got to build a process that you do love Wart and all. And the message really here, and probably one of the big takeaways, is about the shift from being destinational to becoming directional. And I kind of think of that more like you're building a SAT nav for your business strategically, that says, right, this is where I want to get to. But as with the sat nav, once you've programmed it in and the sat nav is building the root, which is your process to get there, you don't start thinking about, let's say you're going from. You're going from Newcastle, which is where I am at the minute, up in the north of England, down to London. Yeah. I'm not going to punch London and my destination into the sat nav and then start thinking as I'm driving about driving around London to get to my destination, I'm going to be following the process, following the route and embracing the challenge and being destined and being directional is all about that. What people tend to do is they focus on the outcome, they focus on the destination, they worry about all that sort of stuff instead of being in the moment and focusing on the process and their next step. And the next step quite often is a challenge. And if they are in a hurry to get to the destination and that's where the focus is, they're not focusing on what the challenges present and how they're going to deal with the challenge that comes up in the process, if that makes some sense. So what we find with, again, with wildly successful entrepreneurs is as they step into this world, they start developing processes that naturally create and bring up challenges and they embrace the challenge. They don't see it as a pain in the rear that they've got to dispatch. It's a problem to solve and it's something they embrace.

Perfect. So we've gone through quite a lot there now. We've talked about what people are doing well to sustain now. I wanted to sort of flip it to the biggest mistakes that you see that business owners make. Now you work with a lot of business owners, you know, you coach and teach and, you know, advise and obviously there's going to be a lot of people. Doesn't matter whether it's massively successful or, you know, kitchen table, like you said at the start. But what's the most common mistake that you see that people are making that you work with, specifically those business owners?

Okay, so there are five, what we call fatal mistakes if they're not trapped. The first one is obsession. And that is nobody likes to be told that their baby's ugly. Yeah. So if you've got an idea, and again, this could be the itch that you've decided to scratch because you think you've got a great idea and it worked for you and it made a difference. So you make a business out of it and the market just isn't Interested or that isn't interested in the way that you present it. And you get obsessed with actually pushing this because you think you've got a great idea and you don't test it. That's that way lies madness and failure. So being open to feedback and proper constructive feedback that says you know what, you want to look at this maybe differently or have a different perspective, have different inputs. That's the first of the five that tend to be fatal if you don't deal with them on time. So obsession is kind of key, not, not being open minded and open to constructive feedback, shall we say, about your idea. The second is just being in a hurry. We call it the need for speed. There's this kind of modern phenomenon that I call the microwave mindset. People want to press a bloody button and have things happen. And sometimes there's a cycle, sales cycle or customer cycle, whatever it is, doesn't matter. There's that expression that you can't be half pregnant. And you certainly can't be. And pregnancy has a term. It takes time. You can't just press a button and have the baby pop out. Yeah. So thus it is in business as it is in life. Things take. Some things take time. Now that doesn't excuse you from not having a sense of urgency, but there's a difference between having a sense of urgency and being in a hurry. Kind of makes sense. So the need for speed generally creates an awful lot of problems because people try and force an outcome. And there's an, there's a Newtonian law of physics that says force creates counterforce. If you push, something will push back. Yep. The smart thing to do in terms of dealing with the need for speed and this is probably something for the guys to take note of or write down, is to remove the limitations. Find out what's limiting your speed and your growth and go after that. And look at how you can remove that, the block or the obstacle instead of just pushing harder. You wouldn't do that in life, you probably know, because there'd be something physical that was pushing back. You would see it, you would feel it, you would try and remove the resistance. But that's not how people operate in business. They just push harder. And by doing that, sometimes you stand back from the problem. You can actually get a better perspective and you can understand how to eliminate some of the issues. So you'll teach this a lot of boostly in terms of attracting bookings and making sales. People will miss things because they're pushing harder to do something that frankly isn't Working because they're in a hurry.

Yeah.

But if you've got a sense of urgency but also perspective, sometimes you can get that faster by standing back and looking at the issue and cracking the issue, removing the limitation or the problem and then that unblocks and then, then you can apply some effort and you're going to get a lot, a lot more kind of bang for your buck, if that makes some sense. Yeah. So the third thing is what Alan Greenspan, who was the chairman of the Fed, called in the 90s, irrational exuberance. We call it the thrill of the chase. And that's where something's working really well and you go chasing it. We saw that. You see it with sort of traders. That's what was happening in the 90s before the bubble and everything burst, because they were one dimensional and they were chasing one thing in their business that they thought was going to solve everything. So, for example, if the guys listening are chasing sales but they haven't got the costs nailed down, more sales might actually take them out of business because it's going to create a profit, ish, a profit vacuum, if you like, or perhaps even the cash flow vacuum which we're going to talk about. So it's being mindful, if you like, of the broader perspective that your business sits in and not just chasing one thing and amplifying that. That's what the thrill of chase is all about, if that makes sense.

Yes.

And then there are two other things to pick up. I'll actually pick the last one first because I've just kind of alluded to it and that is, we call it no spare toilet roll. It's a situation no one wants to be in and it just literally means running out of cash. It's a cash flow problem. That expression that turnover is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is king. It's a massive thing to take into business, particularly small in the short stay industries, small businesses, where these things are the lifeblood of the business. Right. So just making sure the cash continues to flow is kind of key. The final thing we call, with a dutiful nod to Wallace and Gromit, we call the wrong trousers. And that is showing up as the wrong personality or job type for your business. Your business needs. I don't know if any of the guys have read Michael Gerber's Emyth or Emyth Revisited. Yeah, great book. I was very privileged to see Mike deliver that in Sydney when he launched Emyth way, way, way back in the 90s. Great, great book. But one of the things that Michael left out of that was leadership. There are four key personalities that your business needs. It needs a leader, it needs an entrepreneur, which is kind of key. It needs a manager to take care of the day to day and it needs a technician. Guess what? Most people turn up as in the business, they turn up as the technician because that's what they do and that's what they're comfortable with. But running a team, you need leadership and you need to be the manager coming up with creative ideas and solving problems. You need to be the entrepreneur or you need to bring that in. And most people avoid that kind of stuff like the plague. A bit like having program thinking time, if you like to solve problems in a business. So the wrong trousers is all about showing up as the technician doing the thing. And that's actually in the short stay business. I saw this with a small business up in Glasgow in Scotland a while back and it was a couple of girls who got themselves into the habit of cleaning the property themselves when their time was a lot more valuable than that because it allowed them to have. It made them feel like they were useful, but they avoided things like doing the books, for example. Yeah, and you must see this a lot. That's a very, very small illustration, but it's very, very common. That's the wrong trousers. So they're the five kind of key things that we see going wrong in businesses of all sizes, to be fair, that if not trapped, can take somebody out of business or kind of create a, what I might call a lingering death. The business doesn't actually die, but the owner does it just a little bit every day because the business just isn't making enough.

Yeah, I think you definitely see that a lot. And I think it's not, again, not just hospitality, short stay. I think business owners in general. I think the example that you gave in the story of the girls in Glasgow who were just putting off doing the books and we just thought if we did the cleaning, then the business is fine because we're doing the work and we're not doing that. So it's okay. We'll sort of bury our head in the sand and do some elsewhere. You're right. You got to figure out what trousers you're going to wear. And in a couple of weeks time we're going to have a guy called James Sinclair on the podcast. And I really want to focus on the exact same type of talk where he has a real good thing where he explains it as the ox, the sheep and the eagle. And we're going to delve into that. But that's exactly the same thing we're talking about here. Making sure you're wearing the right trousers to take the business forward, don't get stuck working in the wrong one. And the lingering deafness. And I just want to sort of go on to. And this question I sent to you before, I really wanted to sort of go into this and I think it's going to be a key part of this chat. But before I give you the question, I just want to explain the story behind why I sent the question over. And it's something that we've experienced at our family business, the Grainery. So anybody who is listening to this and haven't got a clue what I'm talking about, go and Google the granary in Scarborough. That's our family business is in the middle of rural North Yorkshire. And because of our location, there are certain things that we don't have the privileges of if we were in, say, a city centre. So the wi fi isn't the best. It's getting better, but it isn't the best. And also the water situation. And this all stems from a one star review that we got on TripAdvisor a long time ago and it was simply because of. Of something that we could have done systematically to make sure that it didn't happen, but we didn't. And what I would love, whilst I've got you on here, to sort of get your feedback on what you would do differently. So we had a one star review and it was simply because of the water. Depending on what floor you're on, the water is at different levels and the top floor is where we suffered the most. It's the way that they build. The building was created, it was due to where things are being placed. But basically when you are in the shower, it's either extremely hot or it's freezing cold or it's a trickle. And again, it's. If anybody was to go onto our reviews on TripAdvisor, we do very well because of our location, because of who we attract. It's very family friendly, we get a lot of really nice reviews. And I think that our problem was, is that we took our eye off the ball. We sort of just masked that water problem. So when it came along and we got a one star review and we had a really upset guest, we didn't really know how to react. Now, I'd like to think that we've got things in place now, but we do pre warn people staying in these rooms about the wall. But I'd be really interested. For all of your experience and what you've done over the years, how would you have sort of put that proposition to the guests before they booked or made it clear that they were getting.

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, certainly my experience of. There's two bits to this. Yep. I think what, what I'm probably going to do is talk about a concept that will kind of open up the conversation a little bit at the back end of this. But a direct, a direct approach which is looking at the processes and setting expectations, which is kind of key because whilst people aren't sheep necessarily, they can be directed and you can set expectations but also understand where the expectation needs to be set so that it kind of matches. So I was staying in Dansk in the north of Poland a while back and I hired a. Through booking.com, i had a short stay for five days cracking little place, little two bed, just off the center of the town. And it wasn't exactly the same, but there was an issue with the boiler charging up the water and getting it hot for the shower. So in Polish and in English on the shower and on the doors, I came in and on the instructions, which I never read when I, when I check in at short stay was a little notice saying, listen, if you get in the shower, here's what's going to happen. Yeah. And because I knew that I was absolutely fine with it and yeah, maybe somebody else wouldn't have been, but in terms of my expectations, I was all right to follow that direction because I've been told had I stumbled across that, yeah, I might be leaving a one star review as well. Yeah. So what this leads nicely into is what we call the value equation. So for the mathematically minded amongst the listeners, what that is, is value equals benefit over cost. And if you look at the mathematical relationship between benefit divided by cost, the lower the cost is, the bigger the benefit is and therefore the bigger the value is if somebody, any of the guys want to draw that out. But cost has two components and this is the bit really that I want to try and get across to the guys is cost is not just price, but it's also effort. An effort quite often is a function of expectation. So there's a great book actually. I mean, not really probably necessarily for the guys listening to go off and read because it's a bit of a tone, but it's used a lot by call centers that, for the odd one that gets it actually right, it works really well. It's by the CEB Chief Executive Board. And it's called the Effortless experience. And there's actually a world class standard for this. You can be measured at a world class level, just like a manufacturer can, but in the service business, and there's a rating that you can get, they put you in world class for the. For the experience, the effortless experience, or the degree of effort that is not needed for a process for a customer. So if a customer calls into a call center and very few of them get the, you know, as we'll all know, very few get this, get this, right, the degree of heavy lifting the customer has to do has to be reduced so that their experience flows and is frictionless. And if that happens, then the effortless experience rating goes up and you start to move towards world class, if that makes some sense. So by setting my expectations at this place in Gdansk in Poland, the guy that, the host, the guy that owned this place, hospitality owner, essentially moved my expectations more in line. Therefore, my perception of value, because value is in the mind of the beholder categorically, you don't set the value. And I think this is something that we see. It's not just hospitality. We see this in all businesses. People talk about this a lot. Just to go off on a slight tangent, Mark, people talk about delivering massive value. How the hell do you know? That's for the customer to decide. Now, if you've got an RC customer, we can talk about the semantics of all of that all day long, but at the end of the day, if they're a guest or a customer or a client, they're setting that. So it falls on us as business owners, particularly if we want to become sustainably successful and really build processes and systems that deliver high standards continuously, which is kind of key. One of the things to do is applying the value equation is understanding what they expect, adjusting that so that you both end up with the same lens through which you see value and the same ruler through which you measure value. So you bring them closer to you, you move closer to them, if that's necessary, and align it so that when they come to stay, they get the experience that you want for them, which hopefully is a brilliant experience, and they report accordingly on TripAdvisor or wherever else that makes sense. Have I explained that well enough?

Yeah, no, definitely. I think setting that guest expectation is key. And it's very interesting that you said that you never read the information that's on the back podcast sponsor hostfully just to segue this in. They've got digital guidebooks that you can create to send to your guests before they arrive on the phone. So then people like Dina, when they are arriving, they're literally on the phone and they're going, right, WI fi is here. That is like a major solution around it. So go and check out hostleu.com to check out those digital guidebooks. But you're 100% right on setting the guest expectations. So just to give you a little bit of a. What we've done since is we now make sure that when we're checking in guests and we're taking them to the room and we have this on the email before, we sort of let them know what's going to happen when they arrive. And we've got different emails going out to different rooms. But the specific rooms that have the water problems, we just say, listen, the room that you've booked, just to let you know that there is a slightly, because of geographical locations, the water is slightly different to what you may be expecting in your usual home. It still works, but this da, da, da, da. So we were sort of letting them know before they arrived instead of them like trying to say we've got a five star experience, which clearly isn't. But we never try and say that we're not trying to sell them a five star experience. What we're selling them is the farmstead experience. It's escape from the towns and cities, come out to the rural areas, you know, come and, you know, relax. You don't have to, you don't have to always be on here. This is like one of the cool things about being out on the farm is that you've got all of this to look forward to. So. And again, it's part of what we're doing as far as now is setting the expectations before they arrive. And I think it falls in nicely with what we've explained in the biggest mistakes that you've seen. You know, all those, those key points that you focus on, you know, what makes a successful business sustainable, you know, is how that not only do you build things to last, how you can learn from your mistakes, but also as well, when you've got a guest, a customer or a client, doesn't matter what you do, it's how you set that expectations and how you deliver on what you're setting out or even a case of over delivering. You know what I mean?

Yeah, very much. I think one of the words to use is gap. If a gap is created because of the lack of that on your part or something that you've missed in terms of the customer's expectations or how they, how they view value, they've then got to bridge that gap to get the experience that they think they've paid for that they want. And if you don't provide, if you don't either bring the expectations closer and the delivery closer so that there is no gap, or it's a very, very small gap, they're going to put effort in. And we're back to the value equation again, because if they put in more effort, their cost goes up, the benefit comes down and the value reduces. That's what happens. It's a cause and effect thing. So by closing that gap in terms of what you did with the Scarborough experience, by eliminating the gap and you align that and you just said, I think very beautifully there, Mark, about it's not a five star experience. That's not what it's a farm state. That's what it is. By doing that, their expectation might be over on the far right. You bring them close to the center, you then make damn certain that what you deliver delivers exactly that. But you set the expectation, you eliminate the gap. There's no effort on their part to experience what they're expecting and everything goes really, really well. And that's a big takeaway, I think.

And I think in an industry like no other, we 100% rely on those reviews. We rely on reviews for algorithms, we rely on reviews for social proof. We rely on reviews to get more guests and customers coming through our doors. And if you can do that, then you're more likely to experience getting those really good reviews that is then going to help you move forward in the business. Now, Dina, there are so many routes we could go down with this, but I think the best thing to do, you told me off air that you've actually got a podcast. I think that it'd be great if you could just let people know. How can they find a podcast and just tell us a little bit more about what you are going to be discussing on this and sort of. And what you're trying to achieve with it.

Yeah, good question. So because of the experience that we've got with world class performers and understanding how sustainably successful businesses and entrepreneurs function, whatever walk of life they come from, and how people go, particularly working with Olympic athletes, how you go from being ordinary, as is the case with many of them, to being extraordinary, we're kind of keen to give those insights to people and not just let them sit there like more shelf development, if you will. So called, this is about how do you Take those insights and adopt them in your business so your business gets better and so that you get more life from the business rather than taking it from you, which is what happens with a lot of people. Yeah, because people get into business to get more life generally. That's, that's the idea. And it isn't what, it isn't really what goes on. So the podcast is called Back Bedroom to Big Business and we look at companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn and Tinder and Slack and Doe, which is really interesting one and many, many more. Brewdog would be a case in point, but have started in the literally a back bedroom or a small garage and then they've grown into something enormous. And the question generally for us, between Simon and I, because it's just us chatting away about the insights we've got, is what was it that created that? What are the key characteristics we can pull out from a personal development point of view? Character development for the individual who grew from running a business that was a few thousand quid a year at the outset to maybe a billion dollar business, how do you go through that transformation? Because the lesson there, Mark, for everybody is, well, who do I need to become? What do I need to understand? What do I need to do to run a half million pound business or a million pound business as opposed to a £50,000 or £100,000 a year business? Because there are shifts in understanding that you've got to go through. But a lot of that isn't just business acumen, it's you as a person. How do you develop to become somebody who meets those challenges and tackles those challenges and overcomes those challenges? So we look at the individual growth and we look at the business growth and we take those insights and we try and help people on the podcast and to understand how to bring that home and adopt that for themselves. So they tailor it and create their own, if you like, their own blueprint for success.

As a personal fan, I love the podcast, such as Master of Scale and How I Built this. So I'll definitely be getting that on with my fret, with my walks with Frankie when I'm trying to get him to sleep. So, yeah, definitely look out for that one. And I mentioned to Dino before the call, before we got started, is there any way that anybody can reach out to you if they want to speak to you a little bit more? So chatting about these things, mindset and whatnot, and you said that there is a link that people can go to. Can you just explain a little bit more where someone can Jump on a call and how they can go about doing so, please.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I run a series of clarity calls. I kind of restrict them in a week. So I'll do anywhere between sort of half a dozen and a dozen. But I'm opening that up so that the function of that mark is for anybody that's just literally got problems in their business. I'm an engineer by profession, so I'm a troubleshooter and the coach and a mentor, and I try and blend that up. So the idea on the call is anybody who's got stuff that they just can't solve in the business and they don't really understand necessarily where the problem is coming from. So there's a root cause causing a surface issue. Yeah, it might just be. You'll do this all the time. Not enough inquiries coming in. In your business, you will know that the person that presents that to you probably is looking in the wrong place where the solution for that is, because they haven't got to the root cause. It's the same. So it could be an individual issue. It could be a team issue. They've got a couple of, you know, a couple of three people in a team. It could be financial. It simply could be a sales focus or a marketing issue. My job on the call is not to give the solution, but to identify the root cause of the problem and what the steps are to solving it so that a professional can then come in and do the thing. It might be a marketing issue. I don't do marketing, but I understand it well enough to go. That's where your problem is. So on the call to make this succinct, on the call, we get clarity. Why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you focused on that? What is it you're trying to do? What are your aspirations? What are your biggest challenges? Okay, where do you think the problem is coming from? Let's go have a look at it, and let's get a bit of clarity. That's what the call does. Nice.

And what I'll do, because the link is a tricky one to spell out. So what I'll do is I'll write it in the show notes. I'll put it in, into all the videos and the content that we produce on the back of this. So if anybody wants to jump on a call with Dino, then you'll have the links to do. So just want to say, finally, thank you so much for doing this, Dino. I learned something new every time about business. And as always, it's a pleasure for doing this. Have you got any final remarks that you would like to leave the podcast with?

Other than that, thank you and it's been an absolute pleasure. I just hope that it has. Mindful of what I said about the value equation, I'm kind of hopeful that the listeners get a lot of value from this. The podcast will go into this in a lot more depth and elicit these things. But if any of the guys have got any questions about this or how they take an insight and actually use it in their business, I'm very open to answering that as well where I can. But I thoroughly enjoyed talking to you.

Brilliant. And as always, every podcast guest gets a full mini bio on the show, notes on the blog post so you can go and check that out@boostlead. You are looking for season 7, episode 10. If this is the first time that you've tuned in, please make sure you go and check out the full back catalog. You've got six other seasons that you can check out with and in this season what I am looking to do is interview experts and business owners from all over the world that can help other short stay accommodation owners get more bookings, get more clarity in their business and figure out what they need to be doing. Okay, my name is me, Mark Simpson, founder of Boost Lee helping shots their accommodation owners boost their direct bookings. Thank you so much for tuning in. Please make sure you go and rate, review and subscribe and I'll be back with episode 11 very soon.