Georgina Bearman shut down her eight-bedroom bed and breakfast during the March 2020 lockdown and pivoted to breakfast takeaway and afternoon-tea delivery within days. She made £1,200 in the first four weeks, operating early mornings and delivering up to 13 miles using local Facebook groups to spread the word.
Questions this video answers
Monday the 23rd (decision around Friday the 20th/13th week; went live Monday the 23rd).
£1,200 in four weeks.
Running from 8:00 AM till 12:00 PM.
Within 3 miles of the B&B (with paid deliveries beyond that, up to around 13 miles reported).
Eight bedrooms; started in 2015.
Chapters
My name is Georgina Bearman. You might recognise me from the Hotel Inspector that was on last year. Series 15, episode 2. I have an eight bedroom bed and breakfast or a Ditto in Livingston Ann's, which we run quite well, very successfully since Alex came. Started that in 2015 and we were on. We were riding the crest of the waves since she came, which was very exciting after the programme aired and then the end of February, the income just stopped dead. That was it. So I sat there sort of looking around, wondering what I was going to do. And I think it was a collective decision between my husband and myself that we would go into doing a takeaway.
Let's just double down on that for a second. So the B and B, obviously being on the TV last year has helped. You know, bookings were coming in, came to end of February and obviously start of March came in and bookings dried up and you had basically, obviously anybody here who's got a bed and breakfast or knows a bed and breakfast is big part of bed and breakfast, you provide breakfast as well. What was the date that you decided to make this pivot and this change? Do you remember the sort of the conversations you were having? Do you remember, like where your mindset was at and like what made you put that post up on Facebook?
It wasn't until we hit around, I think it was the end of that week of the Friday 13th, I think it was around that time. When did we start? The 23rd, Friday the 20th around. That was really, really hit because just can close down and I didn't think it would. I don't know why I didn't think it would, but I didn't think it would. And it was the case of on that day, what am I going to do? What we're going to do? Because I knew that our mortgage company weren't going to help and we'd got finance out and they're not helping either. So it's a bit on panic mode. And we'd actually discussed doing a breakfast takeaway before, never really thinking about it seriously. But when I think, I don't know, I think you mentioned something and it just sort of sparked something off. And I said to myself, right, we'll get a menu together and we'll go live with it on Monday the 23rd. And we did. So we're into our fourth week of trading now and we have brought in income wise in that four weeks, twelve hundred pounds. It's not massive, but we're only running from eight in the morning till twelve. But this week it's pivoted again.
All that you did is you took your breakfast menu and you posted it up on Facebook and did you just ask the question? Is that what it was or was it you just asking the question?
Initially I'd seen quite a lot of people in the community groups on Facebook looking for sources of, well, treats really. And also I had in the back of my mind that if these people are self isolating they're not going to be able to get out. Maybe we can bring breakfast to them. So I think the first few days initially was just to sort of suck it and see and see what happens. Anyway, the orders started to come in and we've done really well with them.
The way that you work in it is in a certain amount of radius, obviously with delivery and you can literally place an order for anything and the orders are coming in and you then decided to do another pivot. So just explain to everybody what the extra pivot is.
Bearing in mind, we were delivering breakfast within three miles of the B and B and we charged outside of that I saw because I spent quite a lot of time in the Facebook groups and I've got a few well placed friends who are admins on some of the larger network groups in my area. So I suppose they're quite good at influencing people. So I noticed that there were a lot of people that were looking for birthday treats and especially in the last sort of 10 days we were looking for deliveries of food almost like meals on wheels. And then somebody started mentioning afternoon tea and I thought, well, we've done that easy. And then this week I did an afternoon tea for a friend of mine that lives outside of my area. She posted on Facebook and it's bloody gone viral, hasn't it? So I've been baking the last couple of days. This week I've got two tomorrow, two the next day. I don't even think about next week. There's about seven on and the markup on that is a lot better.
It doesn't matter where you're tuning in from in the world. It doesn't matter what your situation is right now, whether you can or can't take bookings. There is. People are spending money. You know, people have. I think we just naively think that literally nobody's spending anything right now. People are and people will. And specifically with like birthdays or special occasions and things that are coming up, even in times like these, people will want to do something to treat the people that they love. And if you can do something like this. And again, it's not like Georgina is living in the middle of Manchester. You're in, you know, the northwest. And what's the population of where you are, would you say?
Well, half of the pop. Well, half the catchment area is the sea, so we've only got 50% of any particular catchment area. It was quite well populated. We sprout, you know, I have delivered in the St. Anne's area within 3 miles and lithium and then I've actually gone up as far as of Cleveland, which is about 13 miles away. But it's quite dense in the half I've got.
This is the thing, it's not massive. You know, you've got a specific area and 99% of people that will have seen your post on Facebook will have gone, nah. But you don't need those 99%, you just need that 1%. You just need that one person to go, this sounds good. I just want to say well done. And you know, when all of this is over, when all of this calms down and all of this sort of goes back to what a potential new normal will be, you've now potentially grown a second business. If there's one advice you could pass on to somebody that is watching and they're thinking about bringing an income, what would be the one step that they could make to go from thinking about it to doing it?
It's been a bunch of new Covid groups set up and there's a lot of demand for various bits and pieces in there. So if you're nervous of doing something new, have a look in there first. Make yourself a member of the local community groups. If you come up with an idea, just put it out there, put it out there. Get as many likes and shares. I use the marketing skills that we did from the competitions so when anybody comments, I replied and of course it's just gone silly. So yeah, I would do that. Just make yourself as members, as many local groups as you can.
So impressed. I know everybody else has, everybody else who's part of the Boostly Academy, who's been. Who's been joining in this journey with you along the way. So yeah, thank you so much.
