Service Management Solutions: Boosting Productivity and Profits

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 Liam 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 is 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 to for the next 20 or 30 minutes as we dive into his business. 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 in him, 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, 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. 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.

There's so many questions I've got from it because this is sometimes when I've got guests, I don't know of their business but I've actually seen your business both be advertised and, and around and, and that, and that's always exciting to see that because you know that it's, it's doing a good job, it's growing, you know, it's being seen, which is what we're all about at Boostly is can you get your business seen, can you get more direct bookings? And I know that's a big part of what you guys are doing 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 here 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 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, you know, property investment in the blood if you like. I came back from university in 2010, 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 to let property. But then in 2017, or 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 Elect 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 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 booking, handle the maintenance, handle the cleaning, 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, it felt like a really fragmented solution and we were looking for a one stop shop. So we decided to, to generate bookings and manage it ourselves. You know, 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. We then 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, 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 or essay. 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 letter short term rental management business. So from December 2018 to now, 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 yeah, so it scaled quickly. We found what we felt was a gap in the market on that full management piece that no one else was really to do in, 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, 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.

I mean I'm already learning things because often when I see management companies exactly what you say, it's like, hey, I can manage your, your property. But what I mean by that is I'm just going to get the, the bookings for you, you're still gonna have to do the cleaning, you're gonna have to arrange the maintenance, you're gonna have to do all that stuff. Whereas like I say, these full solutions, well, it makes it easier for owners because literally they've got their business and somebody else is pretty much managing their business for them, yet they're still getting the lion's share of the income. I mean it sounds good to me if I'm the, you know, if I'm the, the client. And I know there's lots of people who go, yeah, but I don't want to give away whatever percent you go, well actually, come on, they're doing, you know, management companies are worth their weight in gold because they know the customer, they know the area they've got. They're paying for softwares which simply as independent owners just probably can't afford or don't want to have to invest and ultimately, it's more the focus and the time. I'm under the belief that anybody, any owner listening to this can actually do pretty much most of the stuff now. It's just chances are if you are an owner listening to this, you're probably busy with a job, a family, all these things, whereas actually having a company manage that stuff and do that for a relatively small percentage of the total. Well, you know, it sounds good to me, Dale. You touched on a lot of. A lot of threads that I'd love to dive into. The first one I'm going to dive into is, obviously you've done something different to the rest of the market, but what are some of the challenges that have come with that and how have you overcome them?

I think the first one is just the scale of having that many people employed, Liam, really. And as you scale the number of units, then the intricacies that come with the processes of that, you know, when we were 10, property, you know, I could go out and check every single property on a daily basis to make sure it was of the right standard after the claim. You know, as you scale that up, it just doesn't become, you know, doesn't become feasible. 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 of 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, you know, I think that probably goes for most businesses that have got any significant headcount and then making sure that you've got the right systems in place and the right process in place and combining those together to. To keep being able to scale the business and to keep margin in it, because, you know, if we said that 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 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 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. Um, 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, still actually running the profitable business?

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I didn't realize, like you say, that the, those players there with 15,000 and like the, the hardest part they're not having to do so actually, you know, just, just plugging units in is, is, is, is what they're doing. But yeah, it makes sense and I can see how that's the biggest challenge. 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, we've always marketed from day one. I speak to so many property managers at this 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 year 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 to your P and L. It shows us the cost on the P and L. But it's absolutely 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. 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 the expected running costs would be. So we'd almost give the potential new owner a P and L for the property, which to some degree some owners would look at it and go 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 or 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 are the 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.

And it's worked at the end of the day, I mean, it's amazing to see that they say that revenue is vanity whereas profit is sanity. So I think by showing owners what they're able to get and you know, be honest, hey, there is times where things go wrong in any hospitality business. But Ultimately, we're looking at the bigger picture. We're looking across the year, we're looking at, you know, sort of helping you with the right teams in place and the right systems and the right marketing at the end of the day, which is, which is good. One of the things which we spoke about just before we went live was some of that awesome marketing. And I know Mark Simpson mentioned this before, which is you actually advertise on things like roundabouts and things like that in the areas you look into Target. Is there any other sort of hacks that you've used to take on new owners which without giving the secret sauce away, obviously things which you'd go, do you know what, I'm glad that we've tried these tactics.

I think, I mean if we start with the basics, Matt, really we've, we've always done paid social advertising. I think for anybody that's not really doing much marketing at the moment. And I'm, I'm talking, you know, new host generation here. But it equally applies on the guest side of things as well. So paid social on Facebook and Instagram is to me the lowest hanging fruit because even if that does nothing but generate visits to your website that you can then do something with later, that's got to be number one. And also it, it's very cost effective or can, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be done in my opinion all that well to be cost effective on the paid social side. Whereas paid search is a little bit different. If it's not done well then you're going to waste more money on that side of things. So paid social advertising, low entry level as well in terms of what the monthly cost is on that. So we've always done that paid search as we just said. Again, I would try and just make sure the paid search aspect is kept very regional. So we'd always use location based advertising methods. So you take away based in Saltburns. When we started, realistically we just wanted to manage properties that were saltburn plus, plus a 60 minute drive time. So we effectively went salt burn plus 4 plus 30 miles that covered about the 60 minute drive time more or less given the fact that we're coastal and it's not as, not that quick to get to different places. But then as we've evolved, you know, touched on the roundabout advertising. So we've always looked and said, right, well where can we hit two potential demographics? So take Scarborough, which is the ones that Mark sees. I think we've got about 12 to 15 roundabouts in Scarborough where host and stays advertised. And my logic always with that was market's a key market for us. We want to get market penetration. So if we can have a blanket effect where you get consistent brand exposure. So if you're driving through Scarborough, you're going to see at least probably four or five of our roundabout. So subliminally you're picking up that host and stay message. And also Scarborough, we know that there's going to be lots of hosts that want their properties managed in Scarborough that are going to be driving in Scarborough either because they're buying that they live pretty close, they're going to scope the area so they're going to see our messaging. We also know gas are already traveling there and going to be driving around. So we want them to see our message. So we're hitting both sides of the coin if you like. We're going to attract new guests and we're going to attract new property owners as well. And any of our brand marketing, we always try and do that. You know, we've now evolved into doing football partnerships so we're front of shirt with Derby County Football Club this season. Again, that's an area that we want to expand the portfolio, but it's also an area where we already know is called guest demographic for us. And the same was true with Sheffield Wednesday last season. That was strategic in terms of its location of expanding the portfolio but also attracting guests that we know travel from that M62 South Yorkshire into the Peak District corridor because they come and stay on the North Yorkshire coast and Northumberland coast. So you know, that's extending now in terms of what we do. But those core basics of I would always start with paid social, that's the lowest hanging fruit, move into PPT and then look at what outdoor stuff you can do. Again, early days we had leaflet boxes outside every property that we managed that were a leaflet for that particular property from a guest point of view. And on the back was always our management services. So again, if you've got a property that's in a high football area, I would have those outside the property is a really simple, easy action to do as well.

That's a great one. And people don't realize that that is advertising space which is free for you, isn't it? You know, like on public properties already, you know, like it's very free or low cost anyway.

Yeah.

So yeah, I really like that.

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Thinking about it on the other side of things. So looking towards guests. Yeah, has changed from the days when you manage just nine properties to now when you manage in a thousand odd units. How are you marketing to guests differently now compared to then?

We try and drive direct guest bookings, but the scale of our business, for us it's always, it's always getting a balance. So if you think from our point of view, the more and the way how a man, our management model works, the more direct bookings we drive for a short term has a negative impact on our P and L. So for us it's how we. So what we don't want to do is shift and this goes against where you would be if you're a smaller host where you can focus on the direct booking because your payback is much faster. Whereas for us, managing over a thousand properties, we want to scale the direct booking over time in line with our brand growth. You know, it's not a matter of us, you know, being able to go from, we're just over 25% direct at the moment. For us to go to 50 is a massive jump across, you know, a thousand properties going to 2000. So we want to actually build a direct booking with brand presence and that layers back into everything that we're doing now in terms of what we do from a marketing point of view for us is about growing the brand, not just little hacks in terms of generating more direct bookings. And the other thing that we're working hard on at the moment is to really understand the different demographics from each of the OTAs. So we've got a, or have had an overall guest avatar. What we're working on at the moment is what does that guest avatar look like for booking.com for VRBO, for Expedia, for Airbnb? Because if we can then understand those avatars for each of our, for our regions, we can then do a better job of retaining those guests going forward because that's again the Low hanging fruit for us is to say, right, well, if we're getting 50% of booking through booking.com how do we better retain those guests going forward? Let's really understand why they chose booking.com to book with as a platform. And, you know, we, we acknowledge that some people are always going to book with booking.com because they've got the app, it's easy and that's just what they're doing. That's what those big platforms have built themselves into. But if we can understand that guest, and those ones that didn't book with booking.com because they've got an affinity, they just did it because it was easy, then can we retain them in our brand going forward? And the other element that we've actually battled with as we got bigger, because our direct booking contribution has actually gone back over a little bit in recent years as we've got bigger. And what we found is as we scaled and added more properties to the portfolio, a booking.com and an Airbnb, as soon as those properties hit their platform, because their reach is so much wider than ours, they can absorb that calendar availability faster than we can. So if you think we've got 10 great properties that we put live today and they all hit booking.com, who've got a global reach versus just live on our site, they're instantly going to pick up the best, the best availability. So again, we're looking at ways to think, is there a better approach to that and how does that work going forward? As we release dates, then do all dates get released to all platforms or do we drip feed certain dates, et cetera, to build more opportunity to build direct? Because we've kind of, I guess that we're a victim of our own success in that the bigger we get, the more inventory we create, the more we pass that to the OTAs, the more they're going to swallow quickly, which actually has a negative impact on our direct booking rate. Whereas when you're a handful of property, you, you've got more control over that than what we do now. It's kind of inverse logic, if you like. But you would think as you get bigger, naturally you drive more, more direct bookings as a percentage. But as it strictly been true over the last few years.

Yeah, and it's just a case that different size businesses have different challenges. This is the great thing about why I do this podcast. Certainly when Mark invited me, I was like, yeah, I'd love to learn from people who are way ahead of where I am in the Industry, but also from different perspectives because often you hear, you know, like as, as you get bigger is. And when I say when you get bigger, you know, for the people who are like 100 properties instead of one property, they're more likely to have direct bookings within their, within their kind of influence, you know, of what they want to do with the business. But yet like you say, then at a thousand it changes again because it's about where you're putting those properties to get them filled the fastest to get a return for the investor, for the clients, isn't it so?

Yes.

Yeah, that's a really interesting aspect which I hadn't thought of, which is amazing. What's your thoughts Dale? And as we record this, we're obviously early 2024, but what's your thoughts on the current market? I see all the time people are talking about regulations, they're talking about saturation, all these things. What words can you give us which is encouraging or if it is encouraging or you're kind of view of what's happening in the market and what the opportunities are?

I suppose that's a synopsis at the moment. If we look back post Covid or during COVID we saw a lot of stock coming to the market and I think pretty much every market in the UK has seen supply growth over the last, what's coming on three years now. I think post Covid we saw a lot of people rush into the short term rental market because they thought it was a quick win and that hadn't necessarily been true over the last few years. And I think anybody that came in thinking that short term rentals are going to make them rich overnight seen that that isn't actually the case. And there's a lot that goes into it obviously with rising interest rates. We obviously had the utility crisis in terms of rising energy costs and then ultimately once you combine that with inflation and people have had less money in their pocket, we've seen a real compression of margin in the market the last 18 months. I think the positives of that are that any stock that hasn't really stepped stacked up for the owner or the investor, we have seen being flushed out in the last six to 12 months. We're still going to see some of that flush out I think in the next six months. But I think that's a positive for anybody that is invested in the, in the sector long term. You know, we see that as a positive in the sense of anyone that's not coming in as an investor, and for me an investor is you buy A property and you hold it for five, five years minimum, probably more like 10 years that property investing. If you want to make money out of property in under five years, then you need to be trading property buying, redeveloping, selling or being into development, title splits, et cetera. If you're actually truly investing in property, it's got to be a more medium to long term hold, which again are the clients we want to work with because you want to build that relationship over time. We don't want to be judging our performance on the first three to six months of a property coming on board. To get that going as quickly as that is very difficult and you need a 6 to 12 month run rate to actually get a property up to standard and then, and then manage its performance going forward. So I think we've seen those kind of quick win investors come and go in the marketplace, which for me means that there's going to be less competition in terms of supply because we've actually seen demand grow over the last few years as well. We just haven't seen it grow in line with supply. So I think as that washes through, we will start to see more bookings per property come back to probably more like pre Covid level, which I think for anyone, for anyone sticking around in the sector for the next three, five plus years, that'll be a big positive. If we look ahead to regulation coming in, my take on regulation is that I think it's massively positive for the sector. You know, we look at what's happened in Scotland on licensing. Again, I don't necessarily think licensing is a bad thing as long as it's dealt with right at kind of government and council level. If we take what's happened in, in Scotland, the licensing criteria I think is 100% right in terms of what we're asking owners to have in place. We have a 10 point compliance checklist where we ask for more than any other agent does in the country in terms of what we want owners to have in place because we believe it's the right thing. If you've got a family staying in the property, it needs to tick all of the boxes from a health and safety point of view, not just the bare minimum. And if we look at Scotland, once an owner had all of those, the issue has been, well, if I put my license application in and I know I've got everything in place, when am I going to get my answer? If that owner knows, right, well within 30 days, 60 days or even 90 days, you're going to get a yes or no, we can all live with that. The issue has been put your application in and then it's open ended in terms of when you get your answer back. And I think that is the, that's the fundamental problem from that point of view, not actually the licensing scheme itself. When you look at planning conditions you're then into a whole other ball game because planning is, as we all know, the biggest gray area ever and it's down to a, an individual kind of interpretation and decision and vote and whatever else. So the planning one is, that's the one that scares me most out of everything. Licensing doesn't worry me. The compliance, health and safety stuff doesn't worry me. If anything, I think it's the right thing for the sector and actually would be an advantage to us as a managing agent because if licensing did come in, probably more owners are going to look for management services because they don't want the hassle of it. They're going to look to us for the expertise and because of our full management piece we are already in a position to facilitate all of that versus again the bigger players in the market who have not got that, that level of probably infrastructure in place to actually manage and deliver on all of that where we can. So for me it will be a positive. The planning one is the one that scares me most because you know, planning can go anywhere and it can change at any moment. So that's, that's the only one in the sector that frightened me as the planning one. Everything else I think is hugely positive for us going forward. And yeah, I'm still bullish on the sector. I think we've been through the worst of it now. We're getting back to a more even playing field in terms of supply and demand bouncing out. Poor operators in the market have already dropped out or are going to drop out in the next six months and I think from there, yeah, it's positive for me.

Yeah, it's good to hear that. And nobody wants to, you know, it's the rainy day investor, you know, as in, oh, you know, like, oh, it started to rain, you know, like I'm pulling out. And the trouble is that when you see that they've just got in, they've just got out. Well, they've just got in at a costly time for, you know, often the investment and then they've got out before things settle and things get better, you know, like so. But when it comes down to the planning, like you say, just being left on tender hooks and, and not getting answers from the people who are making these policies probably aren't in the industry. You know that and that, that's, that's what communities like, obviously the Boost, community hospitality communities, things like the Short Stay Summit, the pasc. There's so many of these, these different places that you can go and get information and band together to at least try and affect policy. But planning is like you say, it's pretty hard to influence some of that stuff, but it'll be interesting to see what happens. So, last few questions for you, Dale. What is the future of Host and Stay look like?

Continuing to grow, Liam, really. So, as we said, we're looking to grow to 2,000 units in 2024. So we're planning for about 50% of that to be organic growth. So we've moved into a lot of new regions across the uk. Our underground property consultant, who advised new owners coming on that team, has more than doubled in the last four months. So we're set for expansion from an organic point of view and then we will grow through acquisition as well. So we made two acquisitions last year, which was about 150 units combined. This year we're planning to acquire about 500 units through acquisition of other smaller property managers. So we're actively looking for property managers that got portfolios that want to sell. We're actively looking for those at the moment. And we've got a number that we're talking to at the moment because we do find that a lot of property managers are getting to around that hundred unit mark. 100, 125 units seems to be one of the ceiling points for property managers that to get past, you're taking on more risk, again from an investment point of view for what it takes to double the portfolio from that size. So it seems to just be a kind of, you know, is it a glass ceiling? Is there a right phrase or not? But that people just can't get past. So we're working with quite a few in that space at the moment. Then ultimately we want to. We want to get to 5,000 units by the end of 2025. Again, that will probably see us go overseas again. We know there's operators that are operating in different markets, but not necessarily getting that full management piece. So our biggest challenge and biggest objective is not just to keep growing from a volume point of view, but making sure our full management service continues as well. So if we do go overseas, that will be on a full management basis. So that's the biggest challenge that lies ahead for us. But we think that's the biggest missing piece in the industry is actually being able to deliver on that and provide that level of service. So, yeah, that's what the roadmap looks like for us.

That's really exciting. And I'm just going to slip in that question of when you started off, did you know you wanted to grow a company to that level of, you know, like you say, the future of 5,000 units? Or is this something that your mindset has changed along the way?

Mindset's evolved as we, as we've gone in basically, you know, from that first property that we bought for us, that was just a change in our own investment. We never went into that to want to create a property management business. For us, it was just a shift in portfolio mix away from, you know, being fully exposed to just buy to let residential into a different asset type. You know, we've added commercial as well. And then as we built the management business then, then that evolved into just having a local management business to thinking, okay, we can, we can make this bigger and spread that wider. You know, even moving into acquiring other property managers. Last year before it just all been about organic growth. And then you think, okay, well, organic growth can only take us so far. So, you know, can we acquire other businesses that have kind of capped out and don't want to do it anymore? Well, you know, can we bring those in? And so, yeah, absolutely. Just, just continue to roll, evolve and move and you know, also moved in line with, with the market as well. You think the industry is still relatively young and I think back even, you know, five, six years ago when we, when we started how much the industry's evolved, you know, in that time to think where it'll be in another five years. You know, I think our, you know, our vision and business model will shift massively over the next two, three, five years as well. So, yeah, consistently, consistently rolling and changing based on, based on what's happening. But I think you've got to be with any business, the ones that end up failing, the ones that effectively fail to evolve. But that's what we've got to keep on doing.

Yeah, I really like that and it's good to hear it from somebody who's grown a business this big. So thank you for that, Dale. So how can we find out more about Host and stay or come and follow you? 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 host and Stay. I think my handler might be Dale underscore pbl, his no 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 Host and Stay website, which is horsemstay.co.uk so across those, you'll be able to find plenty more information 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 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 probably the motto for me that I've always tried to run the business on from day one, and it's a motto that I learned from my previous CEO. So my background from a commercial point of view, was actually in the motor industry. And I always remember my CEO saying that he would always 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 has kind of stuck with me and everything that we've done, not looking for perfection early on. 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 a 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.