Service Management Solutions: Boosting Productivity and Profits

We've always marketed from day one. I speak to so many property managers at the sort of 50 to 100 unit level who say to me, oh well, we're not doing any marketing at the moment. It's all word of mouth. And you know, I think all of us know word of mouth is certainly one of the most impactful marketing tools, but it's very, very difficult to get scale in terms of, if you, if you're solely relying on word of mouth.

Having a blast, gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee Cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes don't write it, do it loosely if you want my respect you'll better book direct. Here are the words in the podcast. That's what comes next.

Hi, welcome back to the Boostly Podcast. This is a podcast that gives hosts the tools, the tactics, the training and most importantly the confidence so you can go out there and get yourselves direct bookings. My name is Le Carolan, I'm Mark Simpson's co host and today we're going behind the host with a successful host who's grown an absolutely amazing company up in the north of England. It's somebody who I've seen on stage many times and he's going to be sharing the story of his business and sharing some tips and tricks with you. This is one that you're really going to want to stay and pay attention. So let me introduce, we've got Dale Smith, he's the CEO and founder of Host and Stay and it is an amazing, amazing company which I'm excited to find out more. So Dale, welcome along. Thank you for joining me tonight.

No, great to be looking forward to it and yeah, thanks for having me on.

No worries, no worries. So I know I've given you a bit of a tee up there, but tell me what Host and Stay is just as the elevator pitch.

Yes. So we are short term rental and holiday home management business, as you rightly say, founded and based in the north of England, although we do cover the entire UK now and just over 1000 properties under management, aiming to grow that to 2000 this year in 2024. So a big task ahead of us and our point of difference really is that we are full management business or full service management business. You know, our snapshot is, you know, we employ over just over 400 people. Over 225 of those are employed housekeepers. So that is really our, you know, our, our biggest point of difference over the competition, but also probably one of the things I'm most proud of as well in terms of the business and being able to have that full on the ground staff and keep that growing really.

Before we dive into all of that cool stuff, can you talk me through the history like you say, I mean the number of units you're at now is incredible. But take me back to the early days. What is the history? What did you do before this? Why did you get into hospitality?

So always had an interest in property. So my dad started to invest in residential buy to let properties back in 2006. Just obviously pre, pre recession. I bought my first apartment about the similar time, maybe just after, before I went to university. There was always a bit of property investment in the blood if you like. I came back from university in 2010. I was lucky enough to study in the US and at that point in time, when I came back, started working full time, my dad and I started investing in property together. That was Buy Select Property. But then in 2017, well actually late 2016, we ended up buying a property in our hometown with Saltburn. And we thought because of the position it is in, in the town overlooking the sea, two minute walk from the beach, we thought, right, let's have a go at Holiday Let and see if it generates us a better return than what the standard buy to let stuff does. And that was kind of our stumble, if you like, more than anything into Holiday Let investing. That was our first property, we launched that in March 2017. You know, it's kind of always been the horse and stay flagship property. But at that point in time I was still living in Scotland. My dad I think had just moved back from Scotland and we actually wanted a management agency to, to look after the property for us because we didn't know anything about Holiday Let, but we just couldn't find an agency that we felt offered value, you know, could generate bookings, handle the maintenance, handle the clean the linen, etc. The agencies at the time all wanted to generate bookings for us, but didn't want to do the on the ground work. They could recommend someone, but it felt like a really fragmented solution and we were looking for a one stop shop. So we decided to generate bookings and manage it ourselves. That was the easy way and probably most of us get started now anyway on booking.com on Airbnb and the booking started to come in, my mum took over and did the housekeeping side of things. So we pieced it together, doing it on our own, but that was really the start of the journey for us. So fast forward from March 2017 to the, to December 2018 and we built up a small management portfolio of nine holiday homes. A couple of them were our own. The others we'd ad hoc started to manage for other people that, you know, friends of friends. We had a couple of investor clients that we were actively managing property for that then wanted to do holiday, let's rsa. So we kind of had the makings of a management company at that point in time. And that's when we said right, let's come up with a brand, let's really go to market and try and build a holiday or short term rental management business. So from December 2018 to, to now, you know, early early New Year in 2024, the portfolio has grown from that 9 to just over a thousand. And we launched the brand in that December, well probably January 2019. It was so, so yeah, so it's, it's scaled quickly. You know, we, we found what we felt was a gap in the market on that full management piece that no one else was really to do and not the big players in the market anyway. And we kind of run with that really. That's always been our USP and you know, it comes with its pros and cons because the more we do in terms of full management on the ground service, the more employees we have, the more difficult it then comes in terms of process management, people management, everything else that goes with that. But you know, you know, we've stuck by it and we, we feel like that's the, that's the right route in terms of what today's market really needs.

Obviously you've done something different to the rest of the market. What are some of the challenges that have come with that and how have you overcome them?

I think the first one is, is just the scale of having that many people employed, Liam, really. And, and as you scale the number of units then the intricacies that come with the processes of that, you know, when we were 10 properties, you know, I could go out and check every single property on a daily basis to make sure is of the right standard after the clean. You know, as you scale that up it just doesn't become, you know, doesn't become feasible. It doesn't, it doesn't scale with the business unfortunately. So those are the bits that then start to become more difficult in terms of, you know, quality control is always done to standard, you know, training. As our housekeeping staff churn on housekeeping staff because you could have 10 fantastic housekeepers lose three of them and all of A sudden they might be your best three housekeepers. So you're then trying to replace those, train the next batch to come through. The people side of it is definitely the most difficult and I think that probably goes for most businesses that got any significant headcount and then making sure that you've got the right systems in place and the right processes in place and combining those together to keep being able to scale the business and to keep margin in it. Because, you know, if we said we were just going to focus purely on quality and making sure everything was perfect every time, you know, to actually do that, the business wouldn't be profitable because you need such significant headcount that it actually isn't feasible. So, you know, there's elements with, you know, the buzzword of AI starting to come through. We're feeding into our business that are certainly helping with that. But scaling the people on the ground side of it is the most difficult. And you know, we knew that going into this and that's why we stuck with that. Because all of the big players in the market, you know, you take your psychs, your travel chapter, your, your cottages.com, who are the biggest three, you know, equally 15 to 20,000 units each. On those, they're not doing the underground piece, they're doing the high level driving of booking generation, which is very, very controllable. It's the on the ground piece which in my view, deliver, delivers the most value and the piece that none of our businesses would actually exist. No matter whether you've got one property, 100, a thousand, if you can't clean it, the next guest can't come in and therefore we haven't got a business. So that's the most valuable but certainly the most difficult to deliver. And that's still our biggest daily challenge is always on the underground services, the housekeeping, the maintenance. Can we get the quality right while still actually running the profitable business?

What would you say? What does it take for every property manager listening to this right now? What does it take to go from your, you know, 10 to 50 units to really scale up to that 1,000 units? Is there, is there one or two things, looking back that you can go, do you know what? I'm so glad I did that action consistently. What would that be?

I think in terms of, we've always marketed from day one. I speak to so many property managers at the sort of 50 to 100 unit level who say to me, oh well, we're not doing any marketing at the moment. It's all word of mouth and you know, I think all of us know word of mouth is certainly one of the most impactful marketing tools. But it's very, very difficult to get scale in terms of if you, if you're solely relying on word of mouth because it's only, you know, it's only a result of what you've already got. So we've always marketed from, from the very first, first day that we started. So I've always been an advocate of investing that's, I think any property managers that want to scale that are not currently investing and marketing is an investment. It isn't a cost of your P and L. It shows them the cost on the P and L. But it's absolutely an investment in your business. If they're not doing that already, then they absolutely need to be if they want to bring more properties on and scale that management piece. That will be my, you know, the number one that we've always done consistently and we've always invested in our marketing ahead of time. Arguably our marketing budget at the moment is too big for the size of business we are at the moment. But I'm investing in that because of the size I want the business to be in two and three years from now, not because of the size I want it to be at the end of this year. Yeah. And then we've always been, I would said into the detail in terms of what we provide potential clients. So again when we were looking at our main competitors in the management space and what a potential new property owner would get from them in terms of a forecast of what the property could generate, those forecasts were always very high level. We always tried to go really granular and give the potential owner as much information as we could. Not just on what the revenue would be, but what the nightly rate would be, what the occupancy would be, how that would vary by season, what would the expected running costs would be. So we'd almost give the, the potential new owner a P and L for the property, which to some degree some owners would look at it and go that, that too much detail. So we'd have to talk them through that. But we've always wanted to be really transparent and make sure owners know what they're getting into. Because I think there's so many costs in short term rental that sit below the line that you might not have thought of, our owners might not have thought of. You know, we all know the revenues can look fantastic, but unfortunately there's quite a lot of costs that go with short term rental versus standard property investment. So we've always wanted to make sure we really convey that and get into the detail that with potential new owners. And, you know, I'm a big advocate of just, you know, getting right to the bottom line of what is a property going to make from a profit and loss point of view. So those are probably two of the key things that have helped us scale the portfolio.

So how can we find out more about Host and Stay or Come and Folia. What. What are the social links that we need to, to come and find out more on?

Yep. So probably the, the primary social channel for me would be LinkedIn, so you should be able to find me on, on LinkedIn if you search Dalesmith or, or Horsemen Stay. I think my handler might be Dale underscore PBL using old handle. But you definitely the best place to get any content from. From my perspective, obviously you'll find Host and Stay on all the social channels, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram. And I think we're at Host and Stay UK is our, our handle on there. And obviously there's the Horse and Stay website, which is horseandstay.co.uk so across those you'll be able to find plenty more information on, on the business and on me as well.

Awesome. And of course those links will be around however you're consuming this media. If it's on the podcast or on YouTube, they'll be around this content. So thank you so much, Dale. That leaves us with the last question. First of all, is there anything we missed along the way and if not, do you have a motto which you can share with us, which has helped you along your journey?

We've covered plenty. I'm sure there's some bits we've missed, but we've covered plenty in the time there for sure. And, and probably the motto for me that I've always tried to run the business on from day one, and it's a motto that, you know, I learned from my, my previous CEO. So my background from a commercial point of view was actually in the motor industry. And I always remember my, my CEO saying that he would always be rather, rather be two laps ahead of the competition when the wheels come off because we'd have time to put them back on and still be ahead. And that for me is kind of stuck with me and everything that we've done, not looking for perfection early on. You know, so many people try and plan everything to the nth degree before getting started, but ultimately there's no better way than coming up with a rough plan, getting stuck in get it going, refine it as you go along and it comes back into that same point as other business. We're going to keep on evolving. I think that that applies in whether you're in day one, year two, year 10. It's just about getting it done and learning as you go. And if something breaks, don't worry about it. Put a solution in place and keep on moving forward.

It's very inspiring and I feel inspired. I mean, I'm a property manager myself, so it's really good and I hope people, everybody listening to this is really taking away some good tips and mindset lessons is really what I've got from this about what it takes to grow a bigger business and actually like you say, look past some of those kind of glass ceilings and ultimately just take action and go and do it. So thank you so much, Dale for this. Thank you too for listening to this on the Boostly podcast. We know there's lots of places you can put your attention and we thank you for putting it with Boostly. That's it from us for now. We'll see you on the next one.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee like Bruce Lee cuz it's so hard on the tea is loose leaf making up those rhymes don't write it, just do it loosely.