How to grow your SA network the right way

When did you just go, you know what, I'm just going to record something and see how it goes.

Really? I started it because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I first got going as a holiday rental owner. I absolutely no idea. And I knew that I needed to learn Internet marketing as well as just relying on the OTAs. I knew I wanted some form of control of my business. So I delved into learning about Internet marketing and that was when I first found out about podcasting and, and I was like, this is amazing. This is obviously what I've got to do.

All right, so welcome everybody to the Boost Hospitality podcast, season six, episode five. In this episode we are going to talk about networking and more importantly, how to network the right way. The reason why I wanted to do this episode in particular is because I feel that if we can talk about networking and if we can sort of take away the spammy aspect of it, we can talk about the powerful aspect of it and how we can do it for good will be a great way of not only growing your network, your reach of people that you can reach out to to discuss about self service accommodation and growing the business, but it's also a great way to helping you grow your business and in service accommodation. Now this week I've decided to get on somebody that I've been wanting to chat to for a long time. It's Elaine Watt of the HLS podcast. Elaine got a Facebook group, she's got a fantastic website, she's got a fantastic community, she does monthly meetups, she goes to a lot of events and I couldn't think of anybody else better to speak to when it comes to talking about network. So without further ado, I am going to bring her onto the show. And, and Elaine, if you could do me a massive favor and just introduce yourself to the audience, let everybody know a little bit more about you and just how you got into this world of property and holiday. Let's please. Yeah.

Hey Mark, thanks for inviting me. It's so good to talk to you finally. So my name is Elaine Watt. As Mark has said, I am the host of the Holiday Let Success podcast. I got into hospitality coming up for five years ago now my original background was always property. My family have always done up properties, sales, network marketing and customer service and I think I never really knew exactly what it was that I wanted to do and I think I've managed to pull all of those things together and find all of that within the hospitality industry. So yeah, it all came together and here I am Five years later.

Amazing. So where are you based in the world?

I am in Worcester, in Worcestershire in the uk. So where Birmingham is.

And kind of left Birmingham and Heather left. Love it.

Yeah.

So when did you first venture into the world of property? As in, when did you start to run a rental business and whatnot? Like give, like a sort of a timescale when we're filming this July 2019. What's the sort of path that you've taken since venturing into it to where we are now.

Okay, so I started off, we moved, me and my husband and our four children. We moved to Worcester about nine years ago. And it took us ages to find somewhere we wanted somewhere we could do up. And we finally found this place we wanted to have as our forever home. We both moved around a lot. Tiny little place, it's just a little studio. And I really got started there. Just got started with Airbnb, really got the bug, started to grow and we had a place up in Sheffield and that place we moved from long term let to short term let. And that probably was about a year after. It took me a year, I would say, to start to feel confident that I could operate something from a distance. And since then I've now got another four places and I'll probably stick at four for now and focus on. On building up my bookings here, building up the Holiday Let Success podcast and hopefully sharing what I've learned so far before growing further.

I like how you segue onto the podcast. That was my next question. So when did you think about getting started with a podcast? What was the inspiration behind it?

Well, really I started it because I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I first got going as, as a holiday rental owner, I absolutely no idea. And I knew that I needed to learn Internet marketing as well as just relying on the OTAs. I knew I wanted some form of control of my business. So I delved into learning about Internet marketing. And that was when I first found out about podcasting. And I was like, this is amazing. This is obviously what I've got to do. So it gave, I thought, I can't be the only person who is in this situation thinking, I have no idea how to do this, I don't know what I'm doing. And I thought it would be great to share with other people that were in a similar situation to me to hopefully help them get the hang of it, take control of their business and grow and make it into something with longevity, with a future. And it gave me a really good excuse to speak to people that were doing this and to take some amazing advice. I had the opportunity to speak to just some absolutely incredible people across the industry.

Now, what was the first thing that you did when you wanted to start to get guests on the show? Because this is a. This is like really is sort of going back to what we were talking about as a topic. And the theme of this is about networking. So how did you a pluck up the courage to go and speak to somebody and say, hey, come on, my show is in my podcast. What did you do? How did you go about it? And yeah, just sort of share some gems in that, if you could, please.

Yeah, sure. So to pluck up the courage, I literally just decided I'm going to have to do this. Now. I've written it down. It's a goal. It's got to happen. It's on the list. So it's got to be ticked off. So I found people that I thought were super interesting in the industry and I found people that I thought I would be able to reach out to via email and I tried to attempt to talk to them from a way of, how can I help you? Rather than going in to say, what can I get from you? And just going in, going, this is my business. This is what I'm doing. Trying to sell myself and trying to sell my business. I went in from a different position of can I help you share what it is you're doing with the holiday homeowners via a podcast?

Just a quick one. When is this in the sort of timescale? What year is this about?

Coming up for five years, Horribly coming up for five years ago. I don't know where that time has flown by. So, yeah, it was really quick because I just thought, I've got to learn. I need to know what I'm doing.

That's amazing. I need to know what I like about that is. Well, number one, the reason why I think that it has worked so well is five years ago, podcasts were still kind of new. Now you can get podcasts readily and you can start a podcast so easy, literally, if you've got an anchor account, you can just record some on your phone, put it on there, and it's a podcast. So who did you remember the first person you ever reached out to to be a guest on the show?

Yes, I do. It was. I'll never forget because I was so nervous when I did the recording and I was. I was dreading hearing my voice back. It was Phil Schofield, not of Breakfast Television fame. But Phil Schofield of Schofield's Insurance, um, they provide, they provide holiday home insurance. So he was a great one to start with because again, that was an area I needed to know about quickly. And he helped me.

I. What I like about that is that a, you're, you're speaking to an expert in the field and you're doing it on a platform where you can learn, but you're obviously then going to help others learn at the same time. Another way to look at it, and this is what I like, what lady called Janet Murray does is Janet Murray. If you've ever listened to her earlier podcast, and I've listened to a lot of her podcasts, she's, I think she's an award winning podcaster. She's fantastic at what she does. But in the earlier podcast she was doing exactly the same. She was building up her business and bringing in experts. And it was pretty much like a free coaching call, but where everybody could listen to because you're asking the experts, you're getting advice and you can pretty much tailor the questions. Where it's like, so what would you do in this situation? It's like a friend is asking this question, you know, my friend, but really it's like writing all the notes down. I'm gonna put this into practice straight away afterwards. Great stuff. So how can you network without being spammy? This is a great way. Elena's touched upon some really good little bits and I've been writing this down. So number one, don't just go straight in bombarding with messages. Follow on social media, find people that you find interesting, find out a little bit more about them, and then when you're confident at that point, put together an email, find the real email address and send them an email. Don't try and do it on a platform where they've got so much noise. Like, for example, Twitter is a good example. You know, five years ago everybody was using the Twitter and if you were to send maybe a direct message on that platform, it would be lost in all the other hundreds of people be sending direct messages, trying to get their time, take a bit of time, craft out something and send them an email. So when you reached out to Phil, was it kind of easy to explain what a podcast was? And did it take a little bit of time to explain what was going on? Were they quite receptive to it?

Do you know? I've never had a problem with people not knowing what a podcast was. And I've actually only out of so many guests that I've Invited. I've only ever had one person turn that down. It was because his English was his second language and he was a little nervous about doing the full podcast. But aside from that, anybody I've spoken to, they jump at the chance to be able to share what it is that they're doing.

So we quickly mentioned Twitter there and there's something that you have started up if you'd like to just segue into talking about BookDirect Hour and how that came about and how it all works and more importantly, how people can join in.

Sure. So Book Direct hour is something that I've started on Twitter. Takes place LSPOD on Twitter every Friday at 12 UK time. The reason I started it was because Twitter, as you just touched on, is such a noisy place. And it's when you're using Twitter, you want to be on Twitter, but you can start feeling like you're just slinging. What I wanted to do was to try to give people who are time poor when it comes to marketing on Twitter a way to concentrate those marketing efforts into a single hour per week and really just get everybody's eyes on this one section. If we all power up during that hour using hashtag bookdirect Hour, we're all focused on the same thing and that's sharing, first of all, how good it is to book direct. And I hope that it supports the book Direct movement, which has started brilliantly by Amy. Amy High notes over in America. I really hope that it supports that and it supports all of us as individual holiday homeowners share the message that people can book direct. They don't automatically have to go to the OTAs and they can get better stuff coming direct us.

I think it's working. I saw a news article this week and again this is being recorded in July 2019 for everybody that when you come to listen to it, you already know you've had an email this week from booking.com where they are just adjusting how we as property owners can market our properties. And this is definitely because I believe that there are more people talking about it. When I mean people, I mean hospitality owners and property owners are talking about book direct. The benefits of doing so. People are becoming more wiser to why they should book direct. And I honestly believe it's because of groups and online Facebook groups and Twitter support and all the things that have just been going on where we've been educating the owners to educate the guests. And I think that we are starting to see a nice little shift. Okay, so taking it from the World of online to the world of offline now. You host monthly meetups in your local area, you attend events and conferences. When did you decide to do it, why did you decide to do it? And what benefits have you seen for not only the HLS podcast, but for the rental business?

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

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

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

There you go. Eventbrite, yes.

Got there in the end.

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

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

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

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

It's like you've transitioned and created a third part to the business. And over the last couple of years, since doing that, have you got A favorite failure. What I mean by this is something that you've done, something that's gone wrong, and you've absolutely flipped it from a negative into a positive, and where you can look back at it now and go, that was something that's gone wrong. But we fixed it, we created it, and it's. And it's turned out all the better for it.

I hate this question because there is so many things I did wrong. There's so many to choose from. And I think what I did, that was the biggest, actually. I thought I was moving forwards quickly and actually I probably slowed myself down purely by not having enough systems in place to know exactly what to do in every situation without first having all the systems in place from already having three set up. So I move very quickly from three to five. And I know there's people out there that they're taking on loads and loads of properties and they're growing like crazy, but for me, I needed the framework 100% complete. And because I then I had to then focus on building up these two new properties, I hadn't really finished off exactly what it was, exactly how I was going to market these properties and who it was I was marketing to. And because I didn't finish that off, my message wasn't clear and I didn't get enough bookings in straight away. So I had to step back, systemize, decide who it was I was talking to, and really hone my message. And then I started to build everything up again and really start moving forwards.

And I guarantee that you will not be the only one at all scaling and growing a business, but then not having the systems and the structure in place, I can guarantee that 80% of the people that listening or watching this back will be like nodding ahead, going, yep, absolutely. Because it is something. And it's. And it's again, it's another thing that doesn't really mentioned enough, I think. And thankfully now there are a lot of people out there that have started businesses which are helping other businesses to system and scale in the world of hospitality, which is. Which is good to see. We had Amanda and David in episode three of this podcast and they've got a business called SA Angels, which, you know, we spoke about that, about building a system, building a structure, outsourcing your business to mean that you can look after the more important tasks. So that is very good. So we have talked about it a little bit. We talked about the podcast and the coaching business and whatnot. Could you just give people a little bit of more of an idea. If they wanted to find the podcast, if they wanted to find out more about you, if they wanted to attend any events that you're running, what's the best way for people right now to go and do so?

Absolutely. If you want to take a listen to the podcast, you can go to the itunes store and search in holiday Let success and you will find us there. We're also on anywhere that you get your podcast. You will find us. Alternatively, you can head to the website, which is hlspod.com podcast and you can listen there too. If you wanted to have a chat with me, I would love to have a chat with you. Even if it's just to vent something or share something that you. You've struggled with or even if it's something just to share something that's been going great. Head to hlspod.com zoom and book a 20 minute call with me. I'd love to chat to you.

Amazing. Well, thank you very much for this. I really hope that everybody tuning in goes and checks out the podcast. There are a ton of episodes, loads of episodes. Like you can literally scroll down and pick out anything that you want from all sides of aspects of a business, which I have done, you know, which is, which has been really good for me. Just to find out more about the industry, about more about how all these other little things work. It's a really good little tool to do so and I encourage everybody. Doesn't matter whether you a guest house owner, a hotel owner, a rental owner, obviously, but it's for everybody in the world of hospitality because there's so much tactics and tips in there. Elaine, thank you very much for being my pleasure show and thank you everybody for tuning in. So as you can tell, this is season six of the Boost Hospitality podcast. That means you've got five more seasons that you can go and check out right now. Again, just go to boostleague.co.uk podcast. Each season has been packaged up to talk about different topics. The first season talks about how you can increase your direct bookings in just five steps. We even interview other hospitality owners about their biggest tactics and tips for boosting their direct bookings. All the way up to last season where I show you how to run a Facebook competition step by step and you can tune in and you can just follow those steps. So thank you very much for listening to this. Please go and check out. The rest are available like we said on itunes and thanks to Anchor. They literally put us everywhere, Spotify, you name it. But before you do leave, please head over to itunes. This is where I want you to go. And go leave one of those lovely five star reviews to get more people aware of it. And if you want to find out anything else about Boostly, just go to B-O-Ostly.co.uk thank you very much. And we'll be back for another episode. Very, very.