Spend less time managing guests

Yeah, technical issues. Right, fine.

Just your Mac. All right, I think we're good. All right, everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome for a very special, a very impromptu Facebook Live, YouTube Live, LinkedIn Live, even on Twitch. The power of power of the Internet. We are everywhere this evening. Right now it's going to be about a 30, 45 minute chat. Well, this chat is. I literally couldn't think of a better time to be having this discussion. We are in the peak of the peak. This is coming up to bank holiday weekend in the uk. We are in summer season right now. Hosts and you watching this right now, whether it's live or on the replay, running around like blue houseflies. And one thing that I know from being in hospitality for so many years and one thing that I've been trying and trying and trying to do ever since starting boostly in 2016 is encouraging hosts to adopt automation and delegation into their work in life and business. Whether you're in the Boostly academy or you do one on one coaching with me, you'll know I bang this drum all the time. And what is it, Graham, about a couple of months ago, six months ago, we had like, like a chat, was it on WhatsApp or something about an idea that you guys had had and think something you're bringing to fruition. It was in beta mode and et cetera, et cetera. And I said, right, well let's, let's chat about this on a podcast live and we can speak to everybody. So here we are today, 25th of August. We are, we are live on the zoom, live on all the socials and we're going to have a. Just a chat about the power of guest flow, going to have the chat about the power of outsourcing our delegation, but most importantly how you can keep it all together. So, Graham, welcome to the Boosted Podcast experience. Thank you very much joining us. So just give us a very quick 50,000 overview of who you are and how you came to be sitting here. What is it in your garden shed, did you say? In the office outside?

Yeah, I've got a home office here in Nottingham. That's why. Yeah, it's in the back garden. Nice.

Okay, so first and foremost, what is your experience and background in hospitality? And then we'll chat about guest. Guest flow and we'll basically crack on.

Cool. Yeah, thank you. First of all, it's an absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you. Mark. Got going in hospitality quite. When Airbnb is quite new. I think it's quite interesting. It's where a lot of people first discovered the world of short stay, even though it'd been going on a long time. And that was just a spare bedroom. That was. And it. We loved the way it kind of gave us control over who could stay. And it was inquiry only. And at the time I had a job as years and years later, I was at my first property networking event and someone said they did this thing called service accommodation. I was like, what's that? That's interesting. And someone else was doing rent to rent on HMOs. And I thought I had a brainwave. I've got this new idea. It wasn't a new idea rent to rent, but, you know, my background, I was an engineer and I thought, actually, this is something I could do. And I got excited about it. I already had a bit of familiarity and, yeah, I already made connections with a couple of local property agents and it took quite a while, but we finally went live with a really nice block of four units in the center of Nottingham as an operator. And, yeah, I mean, I had a job, you know, I. But I also wanted to start essentially a side hustle, but I wanted to do it properly, I wanted it, you know, everything done to the absolute best it could be, I guess. So, yeah, I, straight away, I had the challenge, right? And that's the challenge a lot of businesses have, even if they don't have. Even if you're not trying to start a business whilst you've got a job, it's like, how do you delegate in the first place? And ultimately, that was the point. I wanted to start a business, I didn't want to start an alternative job, that I'd go from a job to a job, you know. So, yeah, I needed to. I needed to kind of straightaway work out how I could have people doing things during the day for me and in the evenings, ultimately, when I was coming home from work and I was taking over, I didn't need it. I didn't want a whole manual handover. I wanted to be able to. When the guest phone. The guest phone, I needed to know the status, what happened, what still needed to happen, you know, the background, all of that stuff. So, yeah, essentially I built what is the very, very early rudimentary version of what has become bestflow. And yeah, we had it on just four units. That's how it started. And I showed someone quite early and they went, overkill, isn't it, Graham? And I was like, yeah, no, this will scale us to 50 units, no problem. And actually it did. We did scale to 50 units quite quickly. I mean, that was January we launched, and by November, I'd given up my job, gone full time. But I think by the end of the first year, we were about 12 or 15 units, and by the end of the second year, we were, yeah, just over 50. And I was going to say, picking.

Up on something, you are scratching your own itch. And this is something that I love about this industry, is that so many people are getting into the industry, whether it is through rent to rent or service accommodation or buy into rent or whatever it may be. And people are coming in and they're realizing that there are faults and systems with the current thing, and they're creating solutions around it, and you are definitely, definitely one. And obviously then people have looked at it and gone, hang on a second. This looks all right. So when was that moment? What sort of year are we talking now that you realize that the systems and the structures that you had set up for yourself could actually be duplicated and offered to others?

Oh, okay. So I started working with Chris Poulter, who's awesome, and he was a consultant initially. You know, a lot of our early success in the management business was thanks to the, you know, his strategy and his, you know. Yeah, he just. He brought to the table what I didn't have. I'm the get stuff done guy. He's the guy who's five pages ahead and actually need a bit of both, you know, and he saw the solution I brought to the problem that he was, you know. You know, I think he's probably consulted to, you know, quite a few people and over time, and he saw a very common problem with a lot of businesses. And my idea at the time is I'm just going to go and consult out. I'll let other people know how I've done it. And actually, he saw the opportunities, you know, it's thanks to him that we started Guest Flow. So we're business partners on it, you know, and, you know, we're two years into the project now. So just over two years ago, we were in Barcelona at the time and, you know, properly got to know each other and we were out with a delegation of business businesses. And, you know, I didn't realize at the time, but that was something that was part of it for them. They wanted to understand me and everything, you know, and the way I like to work, and there's just great synergy there, a lot of trust. It's been a, you know, a difficult journey to get it this far. But, yeah, it's two. We're two years in and it was around 18 months ago we launched, like you mentioned earlier, the beta version is essentially like what we call an mvp, minimal viable product. I'd say the analogy is we built a steam engine, right? So it's a little bit ugly and it's a little bit clunky and it's a little bit slow, but it absolutely works. And that was the most important thing. We needed it to perform certain functions every time, right? And we've made massive learnings off that. You know, it's all about trying to get it in front of businesses, real businesses, not just our own, but other people's businesses, as early as possible and get feedback, you know, what works, what doesn't, what do people like. And the more of that you can get, the earliest, like, possible, you know, the much better your product becomes.

You know, I remember this time last year, it was around about September last year. I remember speaking to you with a phone call. And I was coming. Just arrived back in Javer and we were. I was driving back from the office one night and we're on a phone call talking about this and you're saying about how you were trialing it and testing it and beta stage and. And I was like, amazing. Just let me know when it's ready. Cause it does sound really cool. So for anybody who's wondering, Guest Flow. So the link. So you can go check it out right now or after this podcast, or if you're watching this on replay, it's guest flow.co so g u e s t f l o w dot co so for a very. Like your elevator pitch. So you're at a conference, for example, and you're chatting to a host and you've got literally 30 seconds to explain what Guest Flow is in the most simplistic style. How do you describe it?

It's a companion app that plugs into your channel manager to ultimately enable service providers to perform their tasks in the highest priority order. Which means you can spend much less time as a business owner managing guests. You get to focus on the big picture and you just know that everything is being done, nothing's being missed, and there's nothing. There's no overlap at work.

So the channel managers I can see from the website that you link into. Toki Bez 24Guesty smooth. Is there any more in the pipeline or those. The main ones for now.

There's a few we're looking at. To be honest with you, right now we've got a very tight integration with Tokit and you know, that's it's working very well with those guys. The others we're collecting data, to be honest with you, 80% of our reach so far have said that's the one that they're looking at. But we are open to working with lots of partners because what we do is we solve a different problem. We're enabling service providers. Ultimately, it's a platform for service providers and that might be a team of bas that you want to build, or it might be your housekeepers. And of course the two need to interact really nicely together and they both essentially need the same set of data to perform their tasks. They just need it presented in different ways. That's what we're enabling, you know, and it means that as much as possible can be automated. But when you do need to do something, like someone sent in an ID and you need to actually check it and you need to know that on this particular property there's a minimum age of 25, for example, and there's the postcode of that property. And you don't want anyone who's a local resident without it being escalated to management. That's a manual task. You need a VA to do that. But of course, if that guest is checking in and then not arriving for three days and now you've got another last minute booking and the payments just bounced, you want to make sure that the VA is focusing on the payment. That's the highest priority task right now. And if that's been, if you've got multiple stuff, got a couple of staff, because you've got quite a few units, you need to know that one's working on that and the other is working on the next highest part of the item, you know. So yeah, it's about, yeah, ultimately it's about guest experience. You want five star service and you want to be able to deliver that in the easiest way possible. And so that's the problem we're trying to solve.

So who would be the ideal host to test or trial guest flow? Like what stage of the journey, how many staff? Like, what would you say is like the ideal, your ideal person to come to you and say, graham, I want to give this a go?

Well, I know it's worked in our own business, over 100 units and it works incredibly well. Our business wouldn't work without it, it just wouldn't. And so however, we've got clients with five units and it's just enabled them to completely step away and focus on growth. I think ultimately what it helps solve is the commercial balance issue that a lot of businesses have. And you have it at multiple points throughout your growth. I think actually going from three to four units is as difficult as going from 20 units to your next point of growth, leading up to 25, 30 units. It's how many staff do you need to enable you to get the volume of work done to the right standard without overwhelm and without over capacity of staff? And that's not an easy problem to solve. And I think by having a tool that really enables a lot more efficiency with your staff, just clarity. You want to get everything into rhythm. You want it in flow states. You know, flow state is. Everything's just flowing through, it's not chaotic. It's about being as proactive as possible. You don't want to be reactive in your business. Right. So that's. Ultimately, we want a tool that enables that to happen with all your service providers. And that's really the dream of Guest Flow is we're going to be building in more and more cool features.

So I think for me, looking from the outside in, I think the best way that I would describe it, it would be using, if anybody's familiar with Slack or something like that, it's basically a version of that that's been created specifically for the hospitality industry. Would that be a fair assumption of Guest float?

It's interesting. We actually intubate with Slack. Slack. Slack's a fantastic communication tool. And I, you know, when you're looking at tools, I think, like I like to say to my starters, my new starters, especially because we're quite. We're into our tech, right? And I say to people, like, we're a remote. We're a remote business. My manager, my guest experience manager, who is running the team of VAs and she's fantastic. She's. She managed a Barclays bank branch for six years and she. And a call center for RBS and she's in Bedford. You know, I've not met her once. You know, it's incredible, really. Right. We are, we are meeting up too. I'm not. But we, you know, we don't need to. And that's, that's the advantage. We've got staff literally all over the UK and all over the world. And so we have to use tools and it is to replace the efficiency that you often would get and the dynamic you'd get in an office when you're working together. I say, like, the tools are to replace certain things. And for me, Slack's replacing just the conversation. The, hey, how's it going with that thing? It's not so great at managing tasks, actually. So it's great for notifications like, oh, look, the till registers just rung and like we can see a stripe notification and it's just, we can see the payments just come in and actually if potentially that verification that we mentioned earlier, the IDs just been submitted, you want to get notified about it. And Slack's great for that because your team's there and you're already chatting, it's like, ding, ding, here's a notification, this action is required. You can see the status of it in Slack. Click a button and it takes you somewhere else to actually perform the task. And I think that's what's important. Slack's great and it's an interesting analogy because it is like an online SaaS product. But yeah, ultimately where Slack falls down is in task management because it's conversational, like things can get lost and something needs to be done tomorrow. It's got built in reminder functions, but it's not necessarily the same as a piece of paper sat on your desk in the office. Right. And that's more where the task management comes in. So guest flows like essentially a task manager for the service for the hospitality industry, where you can actually perform all of the tasks from the app itself.

Yeah, from basically from the point of booking to the point of checkout and beyond. There's a task flow that has been set up by yourself and obviously you can work with the host. So just at every single point of the way, like you said, the guest experience is on point. So because you've got different members of staff in your business, whether it be cleaners or VAs or communication handyman or whatever, they know exactly every step that needs to be, needs to be taken. And it's been created by hospitality owners for hospitality owners, which, which is awesome. So I throw the question out to the people that are watching live. We've got over 20 people that are watching live on the different channels. Let me know in the comments below. How many people do you have working in your business? Are you a one man band? Is it you and your partner? Are you and your family? Or do you have VA's, do you have cleaners, do you have handymen? How many do you have and what systems and structures and workflows or templates do you have? So please leave that in the comment. Doesn't matter it's live or replay, because it really does help. And this is such an important conversation. And the reason why it's important conversation to have now is that, as everybody knows, I founded the hospitality community Facebook group back in 2016 when we started boost leave, there's about 6,000 members in today and every single week on a Monday I come in. When we do a Monday check in, we just see how the group is ranking from 1 to rubbish, 5 to amazing. And over the course of the last few weeks with the world, well, especially the UK coming out of lockdown and being open and being really busy, we've had so many ones and twos. And the reason why we've had ones and twos and people feeling rubbish is that they feel overworked, overstressed. And a lot of the times, especially if you have staff communication is one of the, is one of the key downfalls, and you know, Graham will allude to this, everybody will allude to this, is that a successful business is based on communication and you've obviously got your systems and structures, but sometimes, and you know, I've definitely been guilty of this with Boostly and especially with Degrading, which was our family business, is that, you know, exactly the task that needs doing, but it's stuck up here and you don't communicate it properly. So by having set checklists, and we did this in a very, very old fashioned 10 years ago, we had paper and pen and a checklist and a print off and, you know, and it worked until it didn't work. And so by having what you're doing, it's fantastic because it brings it into the 21st century, it brings it all modernized. It's on a computer, it's on software, people can use it. And the best thing is, is that, especially if you're running a team that is remote, it can be done virtual. Like you said, somebody's based in Bedford, people may be based overseas, but everybody can access it and everybody can just know that there's a strict guest flow to work from. So amazing work, well done. So main question is, at the present moment in time, how much does it cost to use your service? How is, how, how is the pricing?

We're going with a flat fee, so all features and just 10 pounds per property. And ultimately it replaces quite a few other things. I mean it comes with a guest app and it's going to be, you know, all of the guest information because it's going to be your cleaning app, it's going to be the guest management app, it's going to be everything, I think it's going to be the, you're going to have the ability to process your deposits, for example. And because it's all interconnected, right and ultimately that's what you want, whether your business owner and I was a business owner that was doing it all myself as a one man band. So I know exactly all of the pains and the problems. I know how I felt. I know what it's like wanting to get people the right information the most quickly. So if you want the access, if you want all of the information to hand in your system and you also want to be able to communicate with your guests about how to access or how to use various things, it makes sense that that's all there. Right. And you know, I think like the deposit, the deposit bit is a really good illustration of how having the guest app is really important because you can, if that's the thing that they need to do to access the property, it's the highest priority thing for those guys as well. So we're prioritizing. There's one link and it takes them to their web browser. We call it the guest app. It's just on a web page, you know, and that, and that really, you know, the fact that that's tied in. They then get the guest information. If they phone up and they want to know where the head wire is, we've got screen pop on, on the, on the kind of guest VA side of things so we can access the property information there later. If the housekeeper reports problem, damages, you know, it's the same system, it's automatically putting a hold on the deposit. You don't want the deposit going back to the guests. Right. So yeah, that's what we're building is everything you need and it's a round number. Yeah.

I think a big pain point that so many people have suffered over the course definitely this summer I've seen it in groups, not just the hospitality community, but overall is with nightclubs and with bigger venues not open, people are instead trying to book short term rental accommodation, STRs, whatever you name it, to have that party because they don't want to wreck or have a party at their own place of a booking out units. And I can totally see from looking at the features of checking forms, ID collections, the deposit set, things have to be met. And sometimes the reason why problems occur, like what we're talking about with parties and things happening is that there is a leak in the system and an ID isn't collected or things aren't done properly and, and that means that that guest then is in the property. And you know, you may have noise aware or you may have sound devices set up but you're already too late. They're in the property and that's when the damage can occur. So by using someone like this, it just ticks off the boxes. So. Which is very good. So go and check it out. Guestflow co. This is not a paid podcast, this is not a sponsored podcast. This is just me wanting to try and bring more tools to you. And this is something that I wanna keep on doing throughout the rest of this year and going into next year. Obviously, with what we do at Boostly, we give you the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to get more bookings. This is definitely under the tools category. So guestflow co go check it out. Only 10 pounds per property per month, which is a bargain, especially for what we just talked about then, which was the deposits, the checking forms and the ID collection. Syncs into guesty, syncs into tokeet, syncs into beds. 24 sinks into smooth for the power of API. If your PMS doesn't have API functionality, get a new pms, that is. I can speak personally from obviously seeing the amazing work that Graham and Guest Flow and the team are doing there, but also from what we're doing at Boostly with websites and API, the power that we can now do with this amazing new technology is so much better. So again, go check them out. Graham, thank you so much for coming on and doing this. Thank you for everybody that has tuned in live with us. Graham, if anybody wants to reach out to you personally and ask you any questions, which is your preferred social media channel of choice?

Probably LinkedIn, but I'm on Facebook as well, you can find me on there. Graham Lindley. Yeah, just hook up, let's chat.

Lovely, lovely. And they can obviously book in a call via at a website as well, I assume.

Absolutely, yeah, that's the best way. Straight into my diary there and yeah, just book, book a chat. We can have a demo, show you the product and just help understand. Yeah, how it could help, really help you step away from the business.

Amazing, buddy. Thank you very much stopping by with the future for this and thank you to everybody for taking part. All right, everybody, I will be back tomorrow as always with another podcast. If this is the first time that you have tuned in in, then make sure you go to boostly.co.uk podcast daily podcasts every day in 2021 to try and help you get more direct bookings, which is lovely. Go check out the YouTube channel, go check out Apple, Spotify, all that shebang, and I'll be back tomorrow. All right, thank you very much.