How to grow and scale your business

All right, welcome everybody. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, welcome to the Boostly podcast. And I've got some very, very, very special lined up today. If and when you are tuning in live, leave a hashtag live in the comments and let us know where you are in your hosting journey. How many properties do you have now and where do you want to go? Leave that in the comments. Even if you're watching on the replay, leave a hashtag replay. And again, the same question to you. This episode is a very special one off. It's called Masters of Scale, where we are streaming live all over the channels and I want to get as many people involved as possible. We've got four people on the call with me and all four people are at different stages of their hosting journey and we're going to pluck out the tools, the tactics and the tips that they can pass on to you so that will help you grow. All right, let's get started. All right, everybody, as you can see, is on the screen. We've got four amazing guests with me today. We're going to start with Liam, then go Ryan, Daniela and. And Josh. So, Liam, can you give us a couple of minutes or just a minute just to give a quick introduction to who you are, where you are in the world and how many properties you've got and then we'll dig into some questions.

Sure. So I'm Liam, I'm from Norwich in the UK. My business, Ginger and Gold Ltd. Started about three years ago, started with Rent to Rent and moved on to management and gradually grew to 15 properties. So anybody here in the east of England, please reach out to me and say hello.

Amazing. Right, right, moving on to yourself. It's just a quick intro. Please let us everybody know about yourself.

Yeah, Ryan Luke from the Luke Capital Group. I turn my Hunter property late 2018, early 2019, currently have in excess of 300 units and operating in multiple countries now as well. So spend a lot of time in Dubai, which is kind of where the main hub is, and and then obviously spend time in the UK as well.

Amazing. Daniela.

Hi, my name is Daniela, I'm Italian and I live in Marbella. We have 88 properties located in the Skol Apartments Marbella on Marbella beachfront. And I run the business together with my husband Vincenzo and we've not great scaling plans at the moment.

Amazing, thank you very much. And we've got fresh newbie right down there with us. Josh, welcome. Just a quick introduction to who you are and why you got into this industry. More, more importantly, please thank you very much so.

My name is Joshua. I've joined Luke Capital Group. My background was predominantly in the motor trade for a number of years, and I just basically wanted to free up a lot of time, get a bit more balance and stability in my life. So I took this opportunity with Ryan, Luke, and now I have my own franchise as well. So exciting stuff going ahead.

Nice. Brilliant. And this is this right in thinking this is your first podcast interview, Josh?

It is indeed.

And he found out about it three minutes ago. So thank you very much for being part of it to get you involved. Okay, so what we're gonna do, we're gonna do, it's like a roundtable. So I'm gonna ask questions and we'll go to different people from different hosts in their journey just to sort of give answers, because the answers that Josh gives will be different to what Liam or Daniela or even Ryan will do. We've got somebody at all different scales of their hospitality journey. And like I say, the goal of this podcast is to get tweak out the tactics and the tools, but most importantly, the tips. So, Liam, we'll start with you first, buddy. What I would love for you to do first and foremost with your. Your journey. So you 15 properties in. Can you just tell me the markup of what you've got? For example, how many of those are rent to rent? How many of those are on the management model? Do you have any buy to? Let's. Like, what's the sort of makeup of your portfolio that you have?

So it's about 50. 50. We've got seven of ours are rent to rent and the eight are management. And yeah, we just sort of scaled a little bit at a time, so we didn't want to put all of our eggs in one basket for rent to rent, because as you get those, obviously, you know, the opportunity goes up, but so does the costs. So balancing up with some management just made sense, and we aim to continue to grow that way.

Amazing. Lovely. So, Daniela, you've got 88 down over there in Spain in Marbella. How does. What's the makeup of your portfolio? Again, same sort of question, but to yourself.

We started off back in 98 as real estate brokers, and holiday rentals has always been part of normal real estate here in Marbella. Whatever you had left empty in the holidays, you would rent. Then in 2009, with the other crisis, we took over 15 units that were purely for holiday rentals. And from 15, we grew to 30 in a year, all in the same building by word of mouth. And then in 2013, another agent decided to retire and gave us his 40 properties. So overnight we had 70 properties. Those were the worst six months of our life because we nearly got crazy and nearly divorced over that. But then bit by bit we started bringing in software and we then gradually scaled up to the 88 properties we have at the moment.

Amazing. Okay, Ryan, moving to yourself, Obviously with over 300 properties it's going to be hard to break down the full portfolio. But what was like your journey coming into it? So the first sort of load of properties that you got and then how did it grow and scale to where you are today?

Yeah, so I actually initially the first deal was a lease option that I pulled off by chance. I didn't really know much about it, but I managed to pull that off. And then I bought a couple of properties using investor money on the sort of buy refurbished refinance method. But it was falling into rental arbitrage that really exploded the portfolio because I could see how quickly you could move with that strategy. Acquired 21 properties in the first seven months using that strategy alone and then basically put a lot of systems and processes in place to, you know, scale that even further. But I think now I've got, I do have quite a lot of buy lets and I do have some HMOs as well. Slowly but surely I'm coming out of them, I'm getting rid of the tenants and I'm turning them into short term rentals. I think around 20, 20 Covid time I put a lot of them into rentals just because we had no idea what was going to happen on March 26th. So I took a decision and, and I'm trying to get those back into the short term rental portfolio. So we've got a nice mix. But predominantly I would say 80, 80% of the portfolio now is short term, short term rentals. A bit of a scary start for some people. My rent roll is well over a million quid a year. So you know, when you're looking at kind of the rental arbitrage model, that's that kind of gives you a bit of an idea of where we stand right now.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. So this is where I throw open the, the question to the people that are tuning in live with us right now. So if you're live or on the replay, let us know. Where are you in your journey? Are you starting out like Joshua down here or are you got 2, 3, 4, 5. Watch the makeup, which is more importantly of, of your portfolio. Okay, so next coming down the so the next things that I want to dig into is the tools that you're using behind the scenes, because the tools that, say, Joshua is going to be using may be different to. To Liam, et cetera. So, Josh, seeing that you're fresh and you're just starting out, what have you implemented into your business in terms of the tech stack, the tools that you're using behind the scenes? Because it'd be interesting to see what somebody starting out has compared to the others that are in the room.

Well, the honest answer is sort of pigging back off the back of the franchise model. You see. So all those systems are in place already in terms of actual operational aspects of the business. So that's kind of been taken away from me. So I can, you know, solely focus on scaling now. You know, getting out there on viewings, putting in offers, you know, subsequently getting them accepted, and then, of course, you know, staging the properties and getting them live. So, you know, mine's more purely actually just scaling, getting the right properties, you know, focusing on staging them in a timely manner, and then, of course, getting them live. And then the operational procedures will be handed over to the Ops team via the franchise model. So I don't have any of the problems that typical people might have should they have gone at it. They at their own sort of pace, you know, from the ground up. I've kind of got that foundation already, so that's. That's kind of alleviated a lot of the responsibility from myself.

Nice. Let's just keep it back with yourself for a second. So, obviously, like, coming into the industry and there's so many different ways to do so, obviously, we'll talk about. Rye will explain about the franchise model later on in the chat. But for yourself, coming into it, you could have gone it yourself, but what was the appeal of coming in on board as part of a franchise that is already set up compared to, like, say, doing this yourself?

Yeah. So I've been an employee of Ryan's for a number of months now, and I've been, you know, heavily involved in the management acquisition side of the business. So I've seen how. How much goes on, and again, there's quite a lot of pressure that can come with that, and it can be overwhelming at times, you know, especially when I'm sort of the direct contact between the sort of owner and Ops. So I think when I sort of witnessed that sort of overwhelm, that kind of kind of got me thinking, oh, maybe the franchise model is the best route. And again, that will facilitate growth exponentially. And I'll still be able to remain focused on, on the company's vision as a whole as well. So that's what, what sort of appealed to me.

Amazing. Thank you very much for that. Okay, Liam, we'll come to yourself. So obviously you've been doing this for, for a while now. 15 properties on board. And this will be interesting to anybody who say more, maybe more than five or ten properties that are, that are watching or tuning in. What have you implemented behind the scenes that has made your life easier? So the tools, the tech stack, what have you got that's there that's really helping you?

So specifically, obviously you start off with maybe on the channels like booking.com and Airbnb. For me, I had to get a channel manager in straight away from sort of two properties to get channel manager in. But the difference when you get to sort of five or six, the key bits of tech that we now rely on are things like breezeway. So that's the kind of operations management of the day to day cleans, the maintenance and just getting messages to people. So things like Slack works a lot better. When we first started, we was using things like WhatsApp and just phoning people. As soon as you've got more than a few properties, that starts to get more difficult. So having Slack and the correct channels for each property really, really make a difference. I mean, other than that, the time that you may have got at the start or the time that I had, certainly at the start of checking prices and doing some of the day to day routines, you start to rely more heavily on software. So automated messages via the channel manager, that is really helpful. And one other thing which is really helped is dynamic pricing. It just means that the headache of having to forecast and to change prices, that has been a big game changer to allow us to concentrate more on properties and, you know, guest experience and scaling.

So one thing that's interesting to me, especially about doing this style of podcast, is that we've got Liam in the uk, based out of uk and obviously he's using all these tools and tactics and whatnot. Now, when it comes Daniela to Spain and the tools that are available to you as being a host in a total different country, I mean, I've lived in Spain and I've seen it firsthand at how different it operates on a hospitality level or just on a business level compared to other areas of the world. What have you able to put into practice? When we talk dynamic pricing, is that available to you in Marbella or like all the other things Like Liam was talking about with Breezeway and stuff. What, what tools have you implemented into your business that is helping you on a day to day? And what do you not have access to?

We have access to all the tools we have, like Breezeway, rdna, beyond pricing, all these companies operate in Spain because most of them have their offices in Barcelona. But down here, we do hospitality in a different way. Everything is much more personal, especially in a small town like Marbella. So, for example, of the 88 properties we have, I know all the owners on a personal level as well as on a business level. And I know, let's say 50% of my clients on a personal basis. So what we use is PMS and Channel Manager, a brand new website that is being built to boost our direct bookings. From a guy, I can't remember whose name it was. Oh, yes, that was Bootleaf.

It's right here.

And.

It'S going to be launched next week. Just in time for the shortest award. We're both nominated to. And for communication with staff. I love WhatsApp. I find WhatsApp amazing. We have a WhatsApp group. Vincenzo and I do the thinking and the running. I do more the booking side, customer relations, and he does the operational side. But to communicate to the cleaner with the maintenance, everything is done in the WhatsApp group. A client asks me something, give me extra linen, I put it in the group, what cleaner will pick it up and just reply, done. So we know that everything is done and everything is being taken care of. And also with clients, I use a lot WhatsApp and Facebook messenger. They are great for communicating and it's quick. And people have an idea that if they communicate with you on these channels, their relationship is much more personal. They feel they're special, they feel they're more looked after, they feel, than if they get an automatic message. We use automatic message, of course, for when they pay the balance or they pay the deposit, or we send one out two days before to remind them that they have to come on holiday and if they want to book like a transfer, a day trip or something else. And then another automatic message two days after they leave to us for the. These are the only automatic messages I send.

Amazing. So very quickly then, Daniel, back to yourself. How many members of staff do you have and how many members of staff are in that WhatsApp group? This is something that I am intrigued with.

Okay, That's Vincenzo and I doing the thinking and the management. Then we have five cleaners, four maintenance guys and my mother, who is the Queen of everything.

Yes.

So everything is very familiar. Very. And the member of the staff have been with us for ages. We take very good care of them. But I think we have a section to talk about that later.

Yeah, definitely. Okay, so we've gone from 12 members of staff, 88 properties, WhatsApp group.

Right.

How does your model look? Obviously, with over 300 properties, I assume you're not all in WhatsApp groups. Like, what's, like what's the sort of the makeup of where you're at?

No, Yeah. I mean, WhatsApp actually became a massive headache for our business early on, probably around the 50 property mark, because we felt messages were getting lost. You know, WhatsApp groups can get quite busy and important stuff was getting lost. So we have a multitude of systems that link up from, you know, channel managers to sort of guest apps, into payment processes, cleaning apps and, and then obviously your communication channels as well. So all of that combines and then it limits the amount of people I need on behind the scenes to operate them, although I still have, you know, quite, quite a team of people. And it makes it easier for us to be able to, to focus on, you know, scaling and, and still delivering that message. I mean, it would be nigh and impossible for us to do the personal touch on every single guest in the portfolio. But I also think, you know, down in Marbella's, it's a different type of, of guest than your regular stay through the week, for example, that they just want to check in, check out, they don't really want bother. And so the old automated side of things works quite nicely for us. And, you know, same in Dubai. Dubai is probably a bit different. That is probably more like the sort of Marbella holiday guest. In the main, there's a side of Dubai which we run without using any of the booking channels and that's a different market altogether. But for the tourists, again, the way that it's, it operates with people dropping in the night with flights and things like that, we seem to get quite good reviews on the whole automated process of getting them in, getting them out. I think the main thing for us is making sure that everything's protected and verified, which is where we spend a lot of our time. So we make sure that the guests are all what we call pre checked in before they stay. So we've got IDs, we've got deposits, we've got contracts signed, they get access to their guest app. We know they're going to get the code, guidebooks and the information. So the whole process is it's quite seamless. I think the only time we really hear from a guest is when they actually check in and there's a problem. So, you know, the boiler's not working or aircon's not working or something like that. In the main, we don't really hear from them if everything. If everything's pretty smooth and there's no problems. And that's where the kind of guest team come in.

So what, what guidebook, what app are you using behind the scenes there?

So going back to Get Dove, so I've plugged that back in. I used it a long time ago and then I moved away from it and then we came. We've come back to that this year. So it gives you a pretty nice fascia and it does a lot of stuff behind the scenes, which, which keeps it fairly seamless for us, which is good.

So do for those who don't know. D U V E used to be called Wishbox way back when and then they rebranded. I've been on both ends of it. I've used it as. As a host and I've used it as a guest and I, I do, I do like it. I definitely want to get the team back on for another call. We did a call with one of their team way back when. So that's. That's Get Dove. So, Liam, let's move on to yourself. First and foremost, we've got 88 properties, 12 members of staff. What's. What's your setup of the business with. With. With 15 properties. What's. What's your. What's the makeup of your staff and how do they break down?

Yeah, so at the moment there's me, my business partner, we've got a team of cleaners, we've got somebody who does our social media and we've. Admin virtual assistant as well. We've got a new virtual assistant about to start who is going to be doing guest communication and kind of take over on the operation side. So that's, that's kind of our setup. But. And I know Ryan's going to like this and I know you like it as well. We read Clockwork not too long ago and really we're looking at the business in four sections. One is awareness and marketing, which is really Donatus. He's a photographer by trade and he does all the marketing conversions, which is really the sales. How do we talk to guests? You know, the ones who call up and. Or need big contracts. That side of things, which is myself, delivery, which really is where our team of cleaners you know, the maintenance people and that side of things covers and then the cash flow at the end, which we class really is admin, which where we're doing the reports for all of the owners and that sort of things. We're trying to get one person in each one of those roles to be able to grow the company as we go. And that certainly helped a lot both with sorting stuff, which comes in tasks in your head. A lot of tasks come in being in hospitality and certainly short term rental. And that's really helped with sorting those tasks into boxes and yeah, it's kept things really smooth, really. I mean there's, there's always bumps in the road, but we know which area we always need to fortify at any one time.

Amazing. Okay, so we've got lots of different styles and tools and things in place and I think the one thing that I want to delve into next is the day to day. So now that, you know, we've got obviously Ryan has got team members and staff and like everybody's got staff members, obviously. Josh, starting out, you're at the very beginning of your journey. So I want to start with you. Josh. What, what is your day to day looking like at the moment? You've got the one property on board. Obviously it's a little bit different because obviously you put part of a franchise model. So a lot of things have been sort of plugged in for you. But what, what does your day to day look like at the moment? And then we'll, we'll move around the room.

I was going to say a lot of renovation work on that first project, to be honest. I was fully consumed at first to the extent of actually physically being involved in the renovation work, which was a massive mistake. But apart from that, I told them so.

I told them so, but they don't listen.

It did indeed. It did indeed. And the best, the best decision we ever made was, you know, employ laborers, you know, respective painters and decorators to actually get involved and again, we can just focus on scaling. So I would say my day to day routine would be, you know, getting up in the morning, you know, first thing around about half five. And then I would focus on our business, certain aspects of that initially, then go to work and then it's my time to actually be focused to Luke Capital Group as a whole. And then in the evening, I do try to again sort of, you know, designate around about an hour to two hours on the business again. And again it's just a case of, you know, moving it forward, forward, you know, in the case of this last property, you know, it was imperative to get it live as soon as possible. You know, every day is a potential cash flow day. So we're at the point where, you know, WI fi has been delayed. We need to get a dongle and that sort of thing. So plenty of hurdles and, you know, learning curves from that. But yes, I would say that would be my typical working day.

Amazing. Okay, we'll move to, to back to Liam C. And then we'll go Daniela and Ryan. So Liam, what does a, what does your day to day look like at the moment? Obviously with the business and obviously trying to clockwork your way out of it and all your things you're doing. How does like a typical day to day look for yourself now?

So day to day for me is really depends on the day, to be honest. It depends. As long as nothing goes wrong, then it pretty much starts with check the messages in the morning, set up the team, make sure, you know, the days are okay. And then I take my little boy to school every day, which is quite cool. It's one of the reasons that I left my full time job. So I get to spend some time with him. And then after that, really it depends on which day the busiest days is Monday and Friday. Other than that, a lot of the time then it's not really being so much hands on unless we're onboarding a new property. It really just depends on the, the day I would say. So certainly, certainly it's nice to have some freedom and it does mean we can concentrate on actually, you know, designing systems within the business and, you know, doing that side of things. Now we're a big enough stage to have some people to, to cover the day to day messages and then at other times something will go wrong and that's me who goes out and, and sorts it. Whether that's a, you know, sort of property like you say with a boiler problem or something like that. I'm in the business now. I'm far enough away from, you know, the day to day, but if something goes wrong, then definitely get involved, basically.

Okay, lovely. Right, Daniela, moving down to yourself. And obviously every business is different and everybody works in different ways. But what is your sort of day to day involvement now into the property, it looks like 12 members of staff. But how's your day to day looking?

I wake up in the morning and I open the laptop and see what life throws at me. WhatsApp calls, messages, I reply to all the emails. A lot of people, some people book direct on the website but the majority of people, they write an email. Daniela, what do you have for these dates? Or I want to come on holiday. What do you have? What do you suggest? Again it's very, very different. Then I try this computer work is 7:30 till 9, then I'll try to do an hour and a half of yoga. Then I prepare the envelope with the keys for the day. We have in order of between 5 and 15 check in every day. So we have a 24 hour reception, manned reception. So we prepare envelopes, keys with welcome letters. People go to reception, register themselves and then check themselves in. And I usually see them either the same day or the following day because usually they have to pay the balance and I want to see them all anyway personally. Either I see them in the apartment or I see them around the pool. Then I go around the pool, I have a coffee in the pool bar and I talk to people. For example, today I have this and then in the afternoon I will go back there and see the people that arrived now at midday. And all throughout the day I check my emails, I check my messages, I reply to people by mobile phone or I sit down and open the laptop on one of the study balconies if there is one empty for me, which is not at the moment. So I end up sitting in coffee shops.

Here we are. And here we are. We have you on this, which is really interesting to me and you know, I think be interesting to Ryan as well. So we're going to come to you next. So like Obviously now over 300 properties, you haven't got the opportunity to go and sit with your guests in by the pool and whatnot because there's so, so many. So how, and what does a day look like for yourself? Have you been able to properly clockwork your way out the business or do you still get, get dug in and stuck in as much as possible?

I think I, I don't look in with ops and I don't get stuck in with acquisitions to, you know, I'm not doing viewings, I haven't viewed a property in a few years now. I would say I'm kind of the numbers guy and the work on the business guy now and I've kind of made it that way because I think that's the only way you can truly scale. So I get up at 4:35 still and kind of do a bit of, you know, working on myself a bit. I like to learn something new every day so I kind of do that and then I'll look at the numbers very much in, in sort of the accounts and looking at the numbers all the time, looking at what bookings have come in overnight and just having a general look around the business financials. And then I go to the gym for a couple of hours. I love getting my health and fitness in and then depending where I'm at, it depends whether, you know, I'm in Dubai or I'm in the uk, I tend to get in the office and then I'm more just in the office doing my own thing, but allowing the team to just crack on. And I like to just. I do like the idea of the clockwork approach, but at the same time I like to keep my finger on the pulse and I think you've got to be in the business a bit to do that. So whilst I don't actually do the op side of it, acquisition side of it, you know, or the account side of anything like that, I will be, you know, asking questions. I spend fair bit of time in the marketing department. I do like marketing and I spend a fair bit of time in there just again, creating ideas, thinking of how we can generate more leads, looking at the Facebook ads, all that sort of stuff, and naturally just trying to work on the business and push it forward. But, you know, I could quite easily go away for six weeks and turn my phone off. And I know that every department would move forward. I wouldn't, you know, I'd come back to a business that has grown and I think that's a great place to be in. I still like to verify all the numbers on the acquisitions, especially the assets purchased, the rental stuff. I think the team have got a pretty good handle based on the training that I do with them on that side, because that is one thing I do do. I do a lot of training wherever I am in the office. I've got whiteboards all around and I'll, you know, be training the staff and the same in Dubai. When I go there. I'll do, you know, half an hour, an hour here and just training the staff all the time. And then on the, on the asset side, I like to have my spreadsheet filled out and what they want to offer and where the data has come from. And then I'll give it a once over and say, yep, okay, we can, we can offer that. And, and that works quite well. So all in all, I've, I've learned the hard way from trying to do it all myself and running around like a headless chicken. And I think one thing I've seen off, you know, coaching people over the last few years as well is they do tend to get that 10:15 mark a bit where Liam is now. And if they're not careful and they don't move themselves out the business, they'll probably never scale much further. They really need to put other people in play so that they can then focus on working on the business and growing it, systemizing it and moving it forward and coming up with new ideas and new revenue streams and just trying to be more efficient with either your costs or also, you know, how you can, you know, we're putting a lot of time and effort in now. Last year we've been putting a lot of time into SEO, our website, our development of that because that's the long term game for the business. So I kind of, that, that's my day to day really. And the fact that I've got my amazing team looking after the day to day of what most people would have as a short term rental business, that's taken care of so I can spend my time, you know, growing the business.

Nice. Okay, let's bring it right back to number one and we're going to start with Josh and then we'll, we'll move around the room. So the first property, now obviously this is fresh for you because it's recently just happened. How did you come about it? What was the conversation? How did you go down that route? Was it straight to landlord fire and staging? What was the, what was the process? How did you get it and you know, and just sort of share, share that journey, if you don't mind.

Of course, no problem at all. So I initially built a relationship with this landlord sort of towards the back end of last year, sort of messaged him on Gumtree initially and then I viewed a few of his properties, namely in Sunderland and Gateshead areas. Now Ryan's standards of course improved since he started in, in this industry so of course his properties just weren't up to standard so I was unable to sort of make any offers or of course the rent free periods are just simply too long for him and that sort of thing. So anyway, I thought, okay, now that I've got this franchise, let's, let's approach this guy again, see what he's got, you know, just to try and establish that relationship. So anyway, he referred me to a property in South Shields, had a look and I saw the property potential of the property, the area, did our due diligence in terms of, you know, you know, the amount of other Airbnbs in the area and that sort of thing. You Know, the recycling plants, a regeneration project taking place, that sort of thing. But then we thought, okay, right, let's just, you know, try to get a couple of months rent free, period. Although it's going to probably cost us more than that. But the thing is, this landlord's actually got in excess of 200 properties so it was worthwhile establishing that relationship so I can get some more of the prime stock from him potentially. So then we went and of course our initial analysis, well, it's quite a massive shortfall, we thought it would probably cost around about two and a half to three grand, ended up being sort of towards the 6,000 pound mark. So it did cost us quite a lot more than we would have wanted. But the most important thing is he's genuinely pleased as to the amount of value we've added. You can see how professional we are. And of course now he's going to be recommending other properties to go and view in due course now that we actually going to get this one live officially. So, yeah, that's sort of how it started, how it came about and where we are today and hopefully get a lot more properties on boarded from this landlord going forward.

Nice. Well, I definitely want to come back to that in a second but Liam. So move all the way back to like the first property. How did that come about? Was it, was it a friend of a friend recommendation? How did you sort of get started on this journey?

So we went into agents, actually. I'm a firm believer in getting educated and finding somebody who's done it before so you can walk in their footsteps. And I got myself a mentor. She came down to Norwich for a day and we just went around all the agents, learned the right thing to say to the agents and from there we got one who it was actually his mum's property, which was fantastic. He kind of understood what we were doing and it's still one of our best performers now. So we, we got a, you know, sort of a rental arbitrage or rent to rent deal through the agent and we didn't get any of the tricks that the industry often uses, which is a month free rent, we paid the full upfront deposit, we paid the full first month and I've got to be honest, we, we were a little bit lucky, I'd say, because it was in the right area. Probably what I didn't fully understand was the entire area and how important that is to, to, you know, get a property which is going to be in high demand, which this one is. And yeah, since then it's really helped us to have a leg up. One thing which I think I did do right, and I didn't know at the time was I got a really good value property. So it was lower than the average rent and the property had recently been refurbished. So that was two things which is, you know, important long term really is keeping your costs down and also making sure that the, the internal of the property isn't, you know, is somewhere where people would like to spend time, basically.

Lovely. Okay, we're definitely going to come back to that as well. Daniela. So moving all the way back to number one, all those 87 properties ago, like how did it come about? Obviously you're Italian in Spain. Like how, what was the first conversation? How did it, how did it come about? Were you just in the apartments one day and you just sort of said, oh, I'll take that. Like what was like your journey?

Well, really, as I said, we started off in real estate back in 1998 when we arrived in Marbella, we could. I couldn't speak any Spanish. Vincenzo just spoke some Spanish. So I went to work for an English real estate and I learned the trade of both real estate, normal real estate, which is selling. We used to do a lot of investment property or buy to let or just holiday rentals basically, or holiday properties, second homes. And then we decided to establish ourselves because we didn't really like to work with other people. So we started to do this real estate brokerage. We opened our Italian Cafe in 2000 and all the clients used to either come to the cafe to pay us the rent or to see us. And we started to be known in the neighborhood which is very small, it's like four street by four streets. And people started to like us and they would give us their properties to sell to, rent. And then when the big crisis came and everything was empty, there was this lady that was about to retire and she had 15 properties in the school apartments. She was really overworked and she said, daniela, can you give me a hand? And I said, and I said, of course, I'll help you. And I started with this 15 property to basically help her out going into retirement. And I started to like it very much. Just working with tourists, no hassle with people that wouldn't buy the rent or the real estate market in Marbella here is very dirty, so people really stab you in the back for a commission. So we really started to concentrate on holiday rentals and giving the tourists a very nice service incorporating like transfer day trips, excursion or giving them advices on where to go in Marbella, where to eat, where to shop. And this grew. We started to really get a very good word of mouth business. And for 15, we went to 30 properties in, in two years. And then because we were doing it so well, these are the guys that also wanted to retire. Can to see us and say, do you want to take this as well? And now all the properties that come, they really resonate with us. These owners are really people that understand our way of doing business, our vision. And those that don't understand, we've lost property. We let property go. We said over the years, sorry, do it yourself. Because you don't resonate with us. Our vision is completely different than yours. There are some people that we say, we also do refurbishment and project management for the owners. You have to do up your apartment. You have to put a little bit more of effort because people pay good money to come here. So they want a good bed, a nice sofa. Oh, no, no, this is just for rent. We don't want to do it. Okay, here are your keys. Thank you very much. And I did that with a girl just last week. She just wanted crappy furniture and stuff. Sorry, my client don't want that. So we've now come to a site that the 88 owners are really people that understand our vision. They keep investing into their apartment and the more they invest, the more client they get and the more, the more money they get at the end of the year. Basically. Yes. This is.

I was gonna say, it's funny you say that because we've been recently doing it on our bootcamp. We've been talking about the customer avatar or the guest avatar, but what's coming on the back of it is that not only do we have a guest or a customer avatar, not only do you have a client avatar, just like you're talking about, but you have a property avatar as well.

Absolutely.

And when you fit all three in, it just makes life so much, so much easier. And it's interesting that you've gone, you've gone through that. Right? Right. So yourself, I mean, if very quickly just talk about that, that first property. But then what I want to do after you've told us about that first property that came on board, I want to ask the final question. And we'll start with yourself and we'll work, work our way down. But so the second question is, the second part is, what's a belief or a stance that's changed your opinion since starting your business? So something that you thought right at the very start. This is it, this is me. This is, I'm not going to change my opinion in this but something that's actually changed your mind over since starting your business. So we'll start with the first property and then just pivot into that, please.

Okay. First property was a lease option deal I saw again on Gumtree. I, I saw property advertised for sale on for Rent and for me that's a massive red flag that someone's got problems. So I open conversation, ended up having about five or six meetings with them and, and did it. I did a lease option deal on, on the property and, and moved in, fell in Airbnb by accident because I couldn't get it rented as a tenant. That's what I was going to do initially, but I couldn't after about five or six view and sort of put it in an Airbnb and got loads of bookings and that was me hooked. So that probably also got me into the short term rental game. And yeah, it was. Well, she was a funny character and it took a lot of. You know, I talk about this a lot, building trust. You know, at the end of the day, a lot of these landlords are accidental landlords. They've more than likely like in her case, inherited from her family who passed on. So she was emotionally connected to the property. I had to break those connections down and ultimately make sure she fully trusted that I was going to look after it. She just had a bad tenant, didn't pay rent. So all of the negative things had happened. So you've got to then build that trust up that you're the right company, that that won't be you. You will honor what you say you're doing. And, and that's what I had to do over quite a number of meetings. It wasn't, it wasn't a quick, okay, great viewing, job done, let's sign contracts. It was, you know, over and over and over again. But I think lease options are a bit like that versus kind of rental arbitrage.

So.

But ultimately it comes down to trust and the rent. To rent games exactly the same as well. You've got to build the trust whether it's with the agents, with, with the landlords because a lot of people just don't understand the value of what we actually can offer. So that's that. That was my first deal and that got me started. And in terms of beliefs, I've got quite a few. So I think one is you will be a successful entrepreneur and CEO if you use other people. I think we have this mindset at the beginning that if we're not doing it, we're not being successful. Well, me trying to run 21 properties put me in hospital, and the nurse stood on my bed and said, what's going on here? Your vitals are pretty much dead. So I explained what I've been doing. She was like, you've got to stop doing that. So that was my biggest shock. But then that got me to believe that staff are actually an investment. So just like we buy a property for an investment and for a return, every staff member that works for me, I get an ROI on. And that's the way that I look at them. I know I don't. I don't look at them now as, oh, that's two grand a month on the wage bill. I look at it as like, okay, the roi, and that's X, Y or Z, and. And then it's up to me to train and manage those people. I am fully responsible for everything that goes on in my business. That's another belief. I used to like to blame people when shit didn't happen and. And ultimately look for excuses. Now it's no matter what happens, whether it's here, Dubai, a cleaner, anything, I am fully responsible for that mistake. And when you start taking ownership of stuff, then I think not only do you create a better working environment, but it also levels your game up a bit. So I say that they're probably the two main things. I also think, and this is probably a big hurdle a lot of people have got to get over. You know, a lot of people think that a job's secure. Well, there's a lot of companies go bust and you can work for a company for 20, 30 years and it can go bust. So there is real no security in any job. So you might as well try and do something on your own that might just get you somewhere and, and risk doing it all. And taking that big leap of faith is. Was another big mental block for me, which I jump forward with.

Yeah, amazing, amazing advice, Liam. We'll come to you. And then. And then Daniela. So, Liam, like, since starting your business journey, is there a belief or a stance or opinion that you've had that's been changed since. Since doing all this of this?

I feel quite inspired by what Ryan's just said, to be honest, that. That really, really inspired me because generally the. The thing that, when I started my business was I thought there was a way that you'd have to do things. You know, you have to. You know, people look at guests like just pound signs and that sort of thing. And certainly the company which I was trained with, you know, they were very heavily focused on, on just looking at the monetary side of things. Whereas the thing that's really changed for me is realizing that we've got such a, a vehicle here where we've got people who come and stay with us and build life experiences. And often, you know, people save hard for holidays. They come and stay in our places and they create family memories which last a lifetime. You know, this is the thing that we're actually impacting people's lives. We impact in the landlord's lives by giving them, you know, good service and doing exactly what we said we were going to do. As Ryan says, we impact on our guests by giving them good service and giving them good memories. And it was one of the things where when I started, I hadn't really banked on that side of things. So that's one thing. And the other thing is that there's nothing more personal than building your own business. So if you do want to, you know, build a business which is mainly, you know, sort of, you know, focusing towards one avatar, you can do that. If you want to focus towards another avatar, say workers, you can do that. You can grow as fast as you like, you can go as slow as you like, you can put the systems in that you like. And I hadn't banked on that. Coming from a, a background of just being in a job all my life, I hadn't realized the level of creativity that you can have and how much freedom it gives you having having a business in short term rental.

Amazing.

Daniela, we'll come to yourself. What about you soon.

Well, Liam, you've been inspiration as well, as well as Ryan, of course. Well, as Vincenzo said, we sell happiness, we make owner happy by making them money on their assets and we make client happy by giving them an unforgettable holiday. The phrase both owner and client say to us is how easy it is to deal with us, how easy it is to make a booking, to know that they come to a safe place, what to expect, and even if something goes wrong, they always know we'll be here for them. We have old people, sometimes they need medical assistance, sometimes they just need somebody to talk to for five minutes. We make them feel secure and we make all the process very busy and easy. Last week we sold an apartment to a gentleman that lives 15,000 kilometers from here and said, I invested in this apartment because of you guys, because you make me feel secure and you will make us money. Another thing is the staff of Course, the staff is invaluable because you have to rely on them. You have to rely on them to turn up for the job every day. Cleaning an apartment is not an easy walk down on the beach. It's scrubbing sheets, basically. So we need to make them feel valued, we need to thank them for the job, we need to make them feel important. That job is very important for the whole of the business because another thing we really believe in is that alone you can go far, but together you can go better. So scaling a business on relationship. I think that what has really, really worked for us, relationship with clients, relationship with owners, and relationships with our staff that has become part of the family.

What I love about this episode is that it's not just something that a short term rental host can tune into. Our management company can tune in any business, doesn't matter what the niche. You can listen to this and you can pick up some tips and advice. Relationships, you know, beliefs and all Those amazing things 100% come into any business, whether you're looking, looking to scale. And Josh, I know you're right at the very start and I would ask you the same question, but I think I've come up with four little letters that you can take on board. Wwrd. What would Ryan do?

You.

It's pretty much like the, any question that comes into your mind seeing that he's up there. But. All right, let's just very quickly before we wrap up. Ryan, obviously Joshua has talked about this franchise idea, this franchise thing that you jumped on board with. Can you just tell, just for a couple of minutes, speak to a couple minutes about it, what the idea was and how have you implemented, how have you put into practice?

Yeah. So I think ultimately my vision was is, is to scale massively and, and go worldwide. Especially after I got the confidence of moving over to Dubai and sett there. So I wanted to push the brand out further or I figured out how can I do it. So one option was to employ loads of staff in loads of different countries and cities. But then I, I thought about, you know, the, the deployment of that, the hr, the training and everything like that. So I thought, how else could I do it? And I kid you not, I was doing lap pull downs in the gym. I'll never forget it. And I had this, this franchise in my mind. The founder movie popped into my head. I literally stopped my gym workout, which is very unusual for me, went home, put it on and watched it in a different light and just sort of thought, how can I make this into using my business model. And then one thing that I find with a lot of, and I've already touched base on it with a lot of short term mental hosts and you know, I think you and I have had the conversation that 85, 90 of them have actually got less than 15 units is because they can't scale efficiently because they don't have basically their together on the back end to be able to move it forward. And they end up getting so involved in ops that they lose time on viewings and acquisitions and building the relationships with agents and all the stuff that they do at the beginning of their journey en masse because they've got to get going and they don't have the ops problem. So rather than burden, I was actually speaking with my mentor and he said, well, what's the biggest time sucking task in your business? I said, the ops department by far, that's the biggest, you know, staff cost and everything. And he said, well, you're expecting your franchisees to sort of solve that problem as well. And I know you're good at training and this, that and the other, but why don't you take that headache away from them and just keep them scaling on the front end. So I, it was almost like a light bulb went off in my head and I was like that that's just genius because then they're never going to have the hurdle of having to run the ops. So they're just constantly out deal sourcing all the time. And then once it's done, they then plug it into my ops business and the master business, which is, is us, we then grow that ops team out for everybody. So that was the idea. And then there's also the, the kind of purchasing power. So we're looking at blocks of flats, 20, 30 units. And rather than me take them on as I would, we're basically saying to the franchisees like, who wants some? So some might say, I'll have, I'll have three, I'll have four, I'll have two. And then we run the whole block as like the Luke stays block and everybody shares in the wealth of it all. So the idea is to, I want to get to 5, 000 units worldwide by the end of 2024. And I, I genuinely think that's possible. I know it sounds mental, but I do think it's, I do think it's very possible given the structure that we've got and the traction that we're starting to, to get.

Amazing. Crazy but amazing. So Joshua, you are in, you're in one of the early people involved. So good luck with it, buddy. Thank you very much for coming onto this podcast. We'll start with Liam and then we'll go Daniela and then Ryan. So if anybody wants to check out more about the business that you've created, maybe follow some socials. Where's the, where's the best place for people to go? Start with Liam and then we'll go, we'll go down the room.

Okay. So best place to find me, if you want to follow me personally is flow.com page Liam Carolan and you'll find all my socials on there if you do want to take a look at the business. And my Boostly website is at www.gingergoldlimited.co.uk.

Amazing little plug there as well for Boost. Lee. It's always good. Daniela, where can people find out more about what you're doing?

Well, the website is skolapartmentsmarbella.com and from next week it'll be a brand new, flashy Boostly website. And in the meantime, I'm on Instagram where I'm really active because I love it. Arbella holidays. Or you can just email me hellocollapartmentsmarbella.com I'm always open for a conversation. As you've heard, I like people.

Yeah, they're very much so brilliant. And Ry, we'll finish with yourself. So if anybody wants to find out more about the franchise or just find out more about what you're doing, where's the best place?

Yeah, It's. I mean, luccapitalgroup.com is the main website and most of my handles on social are official. Ryan, Luke, one thing I do want to say is, you know, we've been working with Mark and Boostie now for several years and I think a lot of people don't give enough credit to the backend functionality that Mark's working on with his team and the API feeds that hook into all of the, you know, various channel managers. And I know, you know, he's always trying to create these connections which will allow the functionality of the website. A lot of people like the shiny penny syndrome of a website, but really it's the functionality behind the scenes that make it work, especially when you start going into things like SEO and driving more and more people at the website. So, you know, I've seen it a few times where people are choosing other websites that, you know and dumbing your own Boostly website. But great, but this and all, it looks better, but it's the functionality behind the scenes and it's API feeds, not ICAR links that make a business tick a lot better as you scale. So all credit to Mark. I do have to say that because I don't think I've publicly sort of give you enough credit for that over the time. But, you know, it's been great working with Bruce Lee and we're continuing to talk behind the scenes with his team to push our website further and further as we were scaling and adding more stuff on there. And it's been a godsend for our business. So thank you, Mark.

My absolute pleasure. And one thing I will say on this topic of scaling is that I've been very fortunate to grow and scale a hospitality business. And now growing and scaling what is like an agency business, it's everything that we've talked about. You put it into practice into whatever business. Like I right now could not do 99.9% of the things that I do if we hadn't have hired superstars, a level superstars to get us to that next place, whether it's API or whatever. And relationships has definitely helped on that. So from me to everybody here and for everybody tuning in, I just want to give you one of these. Thank you very much for being part of it. And everybody that has tuned in, I know I can see the chat coming in, whether you're watching on LinkedIn, whether you're on the Facebook or in the groups, I can see it saying, thank you very much, very interesting conversation. And this is just something that I wanted to do a little bit different, a little bit different from the norm. We wanted to get a group of people together at different stages of their hospitality journey and just to see the tactics, the tools, the tips that they are doing that they can put into practice and that you can take on board. So I hope that everybody has got something from that. I hope that you all have an amazing day, amazing week wherever you are in the world. And we will be back very soon with another episode of the Boostly podcast, Mr. Liam Carolan, who is obviously on this episode with us today, he is starting up a new little sub series of the Boostly podcast called behind the Host. So you'll be able to find out more about that, make sure that you are tuned in to the YouTube, the Spotify, all of the places that you get your podcasts, because there's going to be more of Liam on Boost Lee very, very soon. Thank you so much for checking out today's podcast episode. Now, before you head and go anywhere else, before you click to the next episode, before you do that, do me one big favor and go check out boostly.co.uk trust IPRAC are the sponsors of all of the Boostly content and the reason why I work with them and the reason why we spread the message of IPRAC is that when a host or a company is looking to get more into DIA bookings, the main question they have is around trust. As in will a guest trust that I am a true and real business? Well, IPRAC take care of all of that and they've got a special offer that is only available to Boostly people. But to do that you need to go to Boostly which is B o o s t l y.co.uk trust you can find out all the information there. You can book in a demo, book in a call and then you will get your super special offer that is only available to Boostly peoples. Thank you again for tuning in. Do go check out iprac. We'll be back again very shortly with another podcast episode, but until then we'll see you all very soon. Take care of.