How to Run Your Accommodation Business All From an iPhone With Ahmed Khan HIGHLIGHTS

So number one, what would it be your favorite business book that you've read in the past year? Something that you've read that you've taken on board and then put into your business. If you've got any ones, you can share on that.

So there's a book I read recently, it's called Measure what Matters. It's not the most exciting read, it's a bit of a dull read, but it's written by a person who actually built a management framework within Google. So it's a guy who was already high up in Silicon Valley and it's a book written by him, a billionaire guy. Now what's interesting about that book and the reason I like it is because, you know, as you know, a lot of people have great goals and they've got a big vision that this is what I want to achieve. But then in reality, most people have the vision, they've got the goals but they don't actually have a, and to get to that goal or they don't have a vision, you know, they don't have a step by step layout of how am I going to get there. So I feel a lot of people, they've got these amazing goals but they don't clear road path well, how am I going to get there with you know, with set deadlines, with set steps and if you, if you don't know how you're going to get there on a piece of paper, then it's, it's very unlikely you're going to get there in practice because you know, if you have no idea what you're doing on a day to day basis in order to get somewhere within the next 12 months or 18 months and you can't put that on a piece of paper and can't work out well, this is what I introduced. Step one, step two, step three, then how would you execute in the real world, right? How do you execute on a day to day if you can't execute on a piece of paper?

I welcome everybody to the Boost Hospitality podcast. This is season 6, episode 13 and today we are going to be talking about running your business, your service accommodation business all the time from an iPhone. We're going to give you some tactics and tips and some recommendation from today's guest. So welcome buddy. If you could just take a few minutes, just explaining a little bit more, delving into your story a little bit more from where you are, from where you are now and just take a few minutes just to say hi.

Firstly, thank you very much for having me in the first Place. I'll give you the long story short, which is I finished university a couple of years ago, September 2016. Now, when I finished university, I didn't want to get a job straight away. I wanted to try different things out. But one of the things I quickly realized was that I needed something which was going to make a lot of cash flow pretty, pretty fast. See, when I looked at the normal way of doing property, because that's one of the things I was interested in, it was great for making money if you had the time to wait 10, 20, 30 years and wait for the property prices to go up, wait for the. Wait for you to build up your portfolio and all those sort of things. Whereas I needed something which was going to make a lot of money now, as opposed to in 10, 20, 30 years time. And that's when I started looking at strategies within property, which was high cash flow, you know, which made a lot of cash fast. And one of them was service accommodation. Now, with service accommodation, what I'm typically doing is I'm not buying property, but I'm renting properties and then turning them into Airbnb type lets, right? So short lets. All the other thing I'm doing is I'm taking a property and I'm managing it for someone else, and I'm taking a fee for managing it again on Airbnb. So that's what I've done in the last couple of years. And one of the reasons I got started in this business was because when I did the initial research, I found there was quite a lot of different apps and systems and different things you can plug in, which could allow you to run the whole thing basically off an iPhone. And that's, you know, that's kind of the lifestyle I want to live, which is be able to do anything from anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection and an iPhone. And that's essentially where we are today.

So, number one, what would it be? Your favorite business book that you've read in the past year? Something that you've read that you've taken on board and then put into your business, if you've got any ones, you can share on that.

So there's a book I read recently, it's called Measure what Matters. It's not the most exciting read. It's a bit of a dull read, but it's written by a person who actually built a management framework within Google. So it's a guy who was already high up in Silicon Valley, and it's a book written by him, a billionaire guy. Now what's interesting about that book and the reason I like it is because as you know, a lot of people have great goals and they've got a big vision that this is what I want to achieve. But. But then in reality most people have the vision, they've got the goals, but they don't actually have a plan to get to that goal or they don't have a vision, you know, they don't have a step by step layout of how am I going to get there. So I feel a lot of people, they've got these amazing goals but they don't clear road path well, how am I going to get there with you know, with set deadlines, with set steps and if you, if you don't know how you're going to get there on a piece of paper, then it's very unlikely you're going to get that get there in practice because you know, if you have no idea what you're doing on a day to day basis in order to get somewhere within the next 12 months or 18 months and you can't put that on a piece of paper and can't work out well, this is what I introduced. Step one, step two, step three. Then how would you execute in the real world, right? How do you execute on a day to day if you can't execute on a piece of paper?

What about yourself? Is there any quotes that you've recently come across or is there any one same quote that you keep saying to your delegates or friends or people that are sort of, you're chatting to. Anything that you can sort of pass on and the meaning behind them is really important.

So my quote, well it's not my quote but the quote I like, it's actually kind of in line with the book that we just talking about. And there's a quote which is something like if you chase two rabbits, you won't catch either one. And you know, again it ties back to the whole conversation we just had which is a lot of the time you're trying to do so many different things at the same time that you're all over the place. And you know, like the quote says, if you try taste two rabbits, you're not going to catch other one. And happens all the time. You know, I do it all the time, a lot of people do it all the time, which is you get an opportunity and you want to go after every single one and you end up taking too much on. And you know what happens is now you're giving everything 10% of your attention as opposed to maybe 50 or 60%. And obviously if you spend less time doing that one thing, it's going to take you a lot longer to get good at that one thing. And, you know, it's. I think in business, if you're very, very good at some aspects, that's probably better than being okay at a whole bunch of things. That's kind of my take.

Who do you look up to? Who do you follow? Who do you try and replicate, I guess in everything that you're doing in the business?

Purely from a business point of view, I think Gary Vaynerchuk is probably one of the best. I don't know if you follow Gary Vaynerchuk or not because see, a lot of people, a lot of business people who are good in social media, they were already famous and then they also do social media. Gary Vaynerchuk is one of those people where he made himself from social media so he wasn't already famous and then he jumped on social media. It's like he built himself, he made himself famous using social media.

What I wanted to do and I did sort of give you a precursor, I asked for free app recommendations that you use pretty much on the daily or regular enough that you can pass on. A lot of these will probably be ones that a lot of people know of, but there may be one or two little bit of goals from this. So we'll start with the first one. An app that you use that is really important for your business to succeed and grow.

You only really need one big one which can do a lot of things. And then these add on ones. It helps like it helps to have the add on. So if someone's going to just learn one and just take away one, I would say the talent manager. And the one I use is called Guesty. I don't know if you're familiar with Guesty or not. This is a very common question, which is, you know, what's the best talent manager to use? I don't know if you get that a lot as well. And people ask all the time, what's the best one? And in my opinion, there isn't really a best one. It's more. So what features are you looking for? You know, it's kind of like a car. You know what cars are best, right? One's faster, one's more comfortable, one has more seats, one has two seats. You know, it's like there isn't a number one ranked car. It's based on your preference and based on what your needs are.

Again, it's a very Very, very common question, who should I have as a channel manager or whatever? I've even done a blog on it. Booster.co.uk PMS. There's a ton of them in there. And yeah, Guesty is obviously one that's just come on the radar, but that was a very, very good recommendation of it. And obviously you're not an affiliate. You should be. If Guesty are watching, nobody should. So delve into Guesty a little bit more then, does it? Yeah, I totally see what you mean. I like to dig into Guesty a little bit more. So is it just an Airbnb model or does it a channel manager that links into all of the online travel.

Agents it currently links into? Airbnb booking.com, links into a few others, but what they do is because it doesn't link to every single one. You know how there's hundreds of them, right, like in across Europe and Asia and all those sort of things. If you sign up to Guesty, they give you a free membership to a thing called Rentals United, which is also kind of like a pms. And through Rentals United, you can connect to hundreds and hundreds and you get Rentals United free. Through Guesty, you had one property and.

Then you grew IT to over 40, whatever the number may be. What would you say was the deciding factor from you from going from, say, 1 to 3, from 3 to 5 to 5 to 10? What were you doing that you see others not doing when you were growing, what were you doing in your business to help enable you to grow?

Kind of like I mentioned slightly earlier, which is once I had the automation framework built, Guest, it was up and running. The whole thing was being automated. There was no limitation from an operations point of view. Whether I had one or whether I had 100, it didn't matter because I was simply just plugging another one in. And it was the same system again and again.

So if you were somebody, say, in Manchester or Birmingham, Newcastle, not in the sort of the big bit of like London and the south bit there, do you find that SA agencies would work with you or is it really just depend on the different agencies like Silver Door? Is that mostly predominantly London?

Silverdoor is global. Silver Doors globally is huge. But yeah, Manchester, Birmingham, you know, people travel all over the place for work, right? People go to Birmingham for work and Manchester, Liverpool, Insurance cases in every town, right? There's relocation in every town. So, you know, I get inquiries from Silver Door in very, very small towns. This town doesn't even have a big hotel. And I Get inquiries there because it's next to a GSK GlaxoSmithKline, which is like this pharmaceutical thing. A lot of contractors obviously go to the GSK for work reasons. Town doesn't even have a big hotel. They've got a whole bunch of these tiny kind of like, you know, family owned hotels. It's not a big town. Population is probably like 30,000 people or something. But I get a ton of inquiries there because of what is there, which is, you know, with business. Tsk.

Yeah.

So it's, it's not a case of, well, I'm not in London, it's not really gonna work for me. It's just a case of why would someone come to your area? If there's no reason for someone to come to your area because you're in the middle of nowhere and you've got no business and you've got nothing, well then it's gonna be a bit hard facilitator to put someone there. There's no one there.

Do they plug straight in to guesty or do you have to have some form of manual?

It's a bit manual because with these agencies they normally send you an email saying, you know, we're looking for two months, we're looking for three months and then you have a look at your availability and then you let them know and if you can get them in, you would then manually put that booking into your channel manager and then it was sort of run like normal but you would have to manually adjust that in rather than them automatically booking because there's a bit of a back and forth in terms of availability and number of guests and those sort of things.

You've obviously then starting to grow your business, your own personal brand business and now you're obviously hiring your own VA's so you've got guesting and whatnot. So how would you say that your business breaks down from the people that you hire to automation? Would you say like it's a 70, 30 split from automation to people that you actually hire? Or is it a little bit more 50, 50? Where are you right now with what you're doing to grow your business as well as your personal brand?

Even within Guesty there's a lot of automation. You know, even within Guesty, I've seen other people guesty accounts and they're completely different to mine because it's, you know, guest is a platform but it's kind of like the, you know, the analogy I use is friends of mine, they work in banks and stuff, right. And if you Give them Excel. The amount of stuff they can do in Excel is, like, ridiculous. Like, they do some, like, crazy shit with Excel, whereas all I know to do with Excel is sum and average. That's all I can do with Excel. I know how you can add it, I know how you can divide it by the thing. But some people do some crazy shit with Excel. It's like, you know, you press a button and 5 million things happen at the same time. Guesty is kind of like that. Or any talent manager is kind of like that, that you can customize it to how you want it. So my VAs spend hardly any time doing service accommodation stuff. You know, I'm tempted to say I don't know the exact time, but it's hardly any time. It's the only time they already spend is if I get a call from an agency and they have to get something booked in. That's pretty much the only real thing they do because there's a lot of automation. And we'll speak a bit more about the systems as well, because you can do some very, very small things which will save you a ton of time.

What would you say to somebody who goes, ahmed, I do my own laundry. So guest house owner, rental owner, I don't care. I do my own laundry to keep the cost down. What would you. What would your comeback be to them, to sort of sway them otherwise?

The reason a lot of people do their own laundry is because of this whole cost issue, right, which is, well, I don't want to pay that much money. If you start hiring linen, the problem is if you've only got one unit, and I'm going to make the assumption that if someone's asked this question, they have few units, but I don't have that many. Maybe one or two. Yeah. I don't know if I'm correct or not, but that's what I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that fair to say? Yeah, because when you have one or two, you have higher cost. Because if you're gonna get someone to deliver their linen, then they, you know, it's kind of like Amazon, right? You only get free delivery if you order more than £40. If you order £2 by the stuff, they don't give you free delivery because it's not worth them delivering for free. So here's my thing, which is a lot of things in business get easier as you grow, as you take more and more properties on and you have more money coming in, linen over multiple units gets cheaper, right? You'll start the cost spreads because now You've got one person managing 10 as opposed to one person managing one. My focus would be hire the linen. You're going to make less profit right now in the short term, but spend your time building up the business. Because if you can take more unison, and that is your ambition. If that person said, well, I only want one, I don't want more than one, I'm happy with one, well, then, carry on doing the linen. But if you have the ambition of actually building a business here, give up the short term. In the short term, give the money up.

Final, final question. I ask everybody this. What is the one mistake that you see people when they come into rental accommodation, service accommodation, what's the one big mistake that you see people make?

Trying to do everything themselves? I think even from a system point of view, those sort of things, just doing everything yourself. And it's, you know, I always say that, let's say you're making a thousand pound a month, but it's taking you 10 hours a day, suddenly that thousand pound a month is not very good. Whereas if you're making a thousand pound a month and it's taking you half an hour a day, that's very, very good.

Perfect way to end, seeing that it is all about the diary, bookings and all about building your list, doing the things that you can do to capture the email, start to nurture your guest and do whatever you need. And if you want to get more tips, if you are watching this about direct bookings, then just head over to Bruce Lee. The blog is there. But Amit, if anybody wants to find out more about you, where you're speaking, what you're doing, the words that you're saying, how is the best way to keep in touch with you?

They can go to my website, which is just my name, Ahmed Khan. Co. It's not dot com, it's not co.uk it's simply co. And my email is there. If someone wants to have a conversation on something or if someone has a question here and there, feel free to send me a message and I'll get back to them and we can take it from there.

Nice one. I really, really appreciate that there's so much. And it's always the case with one of these, when we do an episode where so much information is thrown at you, it's easy to get overwhelmed. So I will make sure that there will be a full blog post on this and we will document and we will link up everything that Ahmed has mentioned. We'll talk about guesty and Silver Door and everything that we have covered today. But I just want to say thank you so much for tuning in. If you could do me one big favor. If this episode has been the one that you have liked the best, please get out in touch. Go on to itunes, leave one of those reviews and talk about it. Share this with your peers, people that you are maybe running service accommodation with. You may be running your own hospitality business. You may not even be doing service accommodation. It may be a guest house, hotel or just a small rental. Just reach out and tell more people about it because the more people that do and the more people will then eventually will be able to start then increasing their direct bookings and like Ahmed said, not have to rely on those OTAs. So thank you so much for tuning in. This has been season six, episode 13 of the Boost Hospitality podcast. If you want to find out more, go to boostly.co.uk podcast. There are 12 podcasts, other episodes in this series that you can tune into now. And then there's another five seasons which shows you all about direct bookings, the booking process, how to run a Facebook competition, interviews with actual hospitality owners up and down the country, and much more. So thank you for tuning in and I'll be back very, very soon for the penultimate episode of this season of the Bo.

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