Stories from other hosts during the CoronaVirus Crisis

Foreign.

Podcast. We're in season eight and we're episode 22. And tonight I am interviewing six other hospitality owners who are bringing in profit during the Corona virus crisis. And not only are they bringing in income, not all of them are doing it in the form of accommodation. They do different types of accommodation, they've got different properties, different port portfolio. The reason why I wanted to do this episode is it was recorded on the Tuesday 14th April. We are now one month in to the UK and the hospitality industry being hit by the coronavirus. It was time to spread some positive vibes because a lot of people are starting to get a little bit downbeat with government grants and loans and not knowing when this is going to end. Tonight's episode was amazing for one main reason is that they all shared the same tip, is that you've got to utilize your social media media to get bookings. Don't think that you can't put something out on social media, don't think that you can just go dark, don't go quiet. You need to be present even at a time like this, even if you can't take bookings right now. This is the most important message that was spread and I'm really looking forward to hearing from all of the hosts tonight. We've got Andy Garnett, we've got David Dyer, we've got Georgina Bearman, we've got Matt Ward, we've got Tanya King Mohammed and we've got Liam Carolan. Watch this. Please reach out to all of the people that took part if you've got any further questions, but most importantly, please can you do me a massive favor? Go to the sponsors of the Boostly podcast that make all of this possible, that make sure that I can keep doing this time and time and time again. Go check it out hostfully.com you get one free digital online guidebook that you can together and send to your potential guests priest day post day during the stay. And it's so cool because it means you don't have to have that really old laminated guide on the kitchen table that nobody reads. It's absolutely free. If you want to upgrade and go premium, you can do if you put in Boostly 2M in the coupon code, you get two months absolutely free. Do me a massive favor before you leave today and go rate, review and subscribe. If you're watching the video, go to the YouTube channel and subscribe there. If you listen to the audio, go into the Apple itunes and leave a review. Every, every review just means we go Higher and higher up the charts. Thank you so much for being here. Sit back, relax, make sure you learn, but most importantly, implement these changes and I'll see you whenever, Mark, than for.

Inviting me on tonight. It's a real good opportunity to help other people as well. So, yeah, my name's Andy. I run a service accommodation management company called Art of Rest. We've got properties in distributed number of locations actually in Surrey, in North Wales, Hampton Court. We do a mix of our own properties, we do some rent to SA deals and we also manage for other people as well. So it's been a rather interesting time for us during the coronavirus period. I'm also a coach as well, so I love teaching other people about how to do service accommodation.

When and how did you get started in hospitality serviced accommodation? What were you doing before? What sort of made like the transition into this.

So I'm a bit of a geek, so I come from an IT background, so I spent about 15 years in the city in an IT career. I've always been interested in property investing and I kind of came at service accommodation for a property investing angle. Little did I know at that point that actually I was dropping myself into a hospital hospitality business. But I absolutely love it. I know this is what I do full time now. I love learning about new things. You know, I recently joined Boostie as well and I just. Yeah, it's. It's been a massively fantastic experience and I never go back to my corporate job ever.

What happened to you on that sort of week? The 12th, so let's say the 12th to the 19th of March, when it really sort of hit home what we were going through here and specifically with hospitality, what was happened to you? What happened to your bookings? What was. Was it as bad as others or were you okay? Did you have a lot of bookings already? Were, you know, were you able to navigate? Just sort of just bring us back to where you were.

Right then. That particular week wasn't so bad for us because we still had quite a lot of bookings in the system and it hadn't really started to hit us. Our market here in Surrey is a whole mix of things, actually. There's lots of corporate business, construction, bookings, but also quite a little bit of family tourist things as well. So we've got a good mix of stuff and actually during that week it wasn't too bad but towards the end of that week we started to get some cancellations in and then it was really after that point it all kind of started to happen. And where we thought, right, well, we've really got to do something here. So we then started to get a slew of cancellations come through and we just saw the market just completely pivot. Right. You know, so it just went from your normal tourists, your corporates, to get the rest of it. And then there was just this. I mean, before the government really clamped down, there were two markets we went after. One was self isolators and the other was key workers. And, you know, we changed our titles and our listings and there were about three things that really worked for us. Do you want me to go through those?

Yeah, I was going to say sort of what actually worked, you know, because obviously after the 21st. So please, yeah, please share those three things.

The first thing was local Facebook groups. So we wrote some lovely little posts. I joined about 10 local Facebook groups around us, community groups. We wrote some lovely little posts in there saying we want to help people. We were quite genuine about it. We said that we didn't want to make money out of this. We were trying to do it as low price as possible. And these are the types of people we wanted to help. We have to be very careful when we go into these groups because they can be quite sensitive and if they see you as profiteering, then it can turn against you quite quickly. But we have had lots and lots of inquiries and also a number of bookings through that group. The second thing that was really good before the whole Airbnb thing happened is Airbnb. So we're still getting Airbnb queries to this day. What we found was people weren't actually booking on the site, they were just messaging us. And then we were either to able to book them on Airbnb or actually to take them off Airbnb and book them directly. That continues to be a popular platform for us. The biggest thing that's been a success for us is actually contacting the existing guests that we already had in the apartments that were starting to book for reasons of isolation or wanting to be apart from their families or key worker bookings. I mean, one week we got 121 nights worth of extensions in one day. And then a few days later we got a further 51 nights of extensions just from existing people who were in the apartments. And it was so important to keep in contact with existing people in the apartments. That's the biggest thing that we did.

There's three different routes then that you've gone down, which are really interesting and I'm really excited to sort of hear what Everybody else says local, Facebook, Airbnb, or from an. That you're able to then convert to a direct and any existing people that were currently in your properties who couldn't go anywhere else for whatever reason. So as it stands, and if we're sort of talking like occupancy rates and, sorry, occupancy levels, have you noticed an increase compared to this time last year? Are you noticing, like, even ground, Are you noticing a little bit of loss? Like, where are you at sort of compared to.

We're probably just as full as we were last year, but obviously the rates that we're getting off are quite significantly lower. So we put our business into kind of survive mode for the next two, three months and actually we dropped our prices. We got people in and we're helping people who really need to be apart from their families as well, which is, which is great in itself. But we're just taking each week at a time. Some of our apartments are actually booked out for the next two months and then some are just getting booked week by week. We've got two or three apartments that are being booked by construction workers that are working at a local hospital, but they just keep booking week on week. So really it's just a case of taking each week at a time. You know, that's what we're doing.

You notice now that the average night of your bookings has sort of gone up.

Yeah, massively. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's gone from an average of probably like four or five nights to like weeks now because people are just booking weeks and they want to stay to get away from everyone.

Thank you for sharing that. And if you've got one tip that you could pass on to anybody right now who can take bookings, and I just want to prevance this to say we obviously get viewers from all over the world. We've got people from Australia, America, uk, Europe, and we've got people that cannot physically take bookings right now. But if you can take bookings right now, what is that one little tip that you can just pass on to somebody that is watching this?

I think the information is out there for you to get bookings. Right. And what I mean by that is been such a phenomenal response from like minded operators on particularly Facebook. So the service Accommodation Network UK Group, Hospitality group, you know, these, these groups and people are coming together to share tips. I did an interview with Mary Cullen the other week. She shared 25 tips on how to fill your places. You know, people are pushing information out there to other people and you will Find, you know, what works. But the biggest tip is just connect with the law operators, right? They will help you. We're all in this together.

If anybody wants to reach out to you, wants to go find out more about you, come and check out your videos because you're doing a ton of videos, which is fantastic. Where's the best place to find you?

Just come and find me on my Facebook page and then just message me from there and then G A R.

N E T T. Best place.

Yeah, that's right. And yeah, I think I've spoken to more operators in the last, like, month than I have in the entire time I've done service accommodation.

Yeah, there's been a. Interesting question because obviously this is being recorded live on Facebook and you may be listening to this live right now, you may be listening to this on the replay, but people that are tuning in live and asking questions, there's one that I'm really happy is coming because David is the man to answer this. But before we go into that, David, just give us a couple of a minute, a minute of your life and just intro to everybody who you are. So basically where you are in the world.

Hi, everyone, I'm David Dyack from Sunny Southend in Essex. Been operating in the hospitality industry since September 2016. Been a good journey, done well, built a good team, built a good business. Got to 65 different service department units, should we call it, at a minute, varying from studios. One beds, two beds, three beds, a.

Little bit of everything.

And then, yeah, here we are. Now. We've helped people along the way, coach them, help them start up, systemise, scale up and evolve, really. We've been doing that for the last 18 months.

Because I was sat with you on the 12th of March when all of this started to kick off. We were at this short stay show, easy for me to say, and we were literally seeing it as it all sort of kicked off. How can you describe the business and your life from the 13th of March to, say, the 17th of March, those sort of four days that followed?

I'm not gonna lie to you, I was, I think just before that I was away in Centre Parks. I'm sure it was before I went just after. Yeah, that weekend and I remember being away at the weekend and I like, holy shit. This is. This is like.

This is.

Can I swear on this as well? And you know, like when you're sort of having a word of yourself and I was away, I was with my family and I was just thinking, this is going to hit us hard, like how are we going to deal with this? So I'm not going to lie. I had a bit of a weekend where things are mulling over and I got back and spoke to my business partner, Matt, who's on this, and we just said, look, let's make it happen. What have we got to do between us to get through this and do well? And mate, not gonna lie like, it's difficult with a team and housekeepers and having clients you've got to manage and agents and landlords you've got to work with and having very awkward and difficult conversations. But you have to step up and have a big mindset shift. And we did it between us and we've done all right.

We're really, really proud of where we're.

At, to be fair.

The question that I wanted to ask you, it was something that came on from Aaron and he basically said that his cleaning team let him down with an appointment that they should have done and he lost a book. And on the back of that, obviously with now more than ever, the way that your properties are cleaned is so important. That for me is a systems sort of miscommunication now with what you do, what you and Matt do really well, if you've got your systems and structure in place better than probably anyone that I know. So how have you had any issues have you had. Because obviously you've got a membership program, you've got people that you help and you know, get, get into sa. Have you sort of seen any of these things happening? Like what, what advice would you give to somebody that would be having a problem with that moving forward? So that could potentially happen again.

Yeah, cool, mate. So, like, if anything, like on our programs, it's a business build up. We talk heavily about being a couple of steps ahead. Yeah. So although you might have one cleaner, we're always talking about having plan A, plan Plan B and plan C. And in our situation, we, yeah, when we've had issues, the issue is the money down to PPE not being available in all fairness and housekeeping teams not been able to actually clean because they haven't got the right equipment, which has taken time to get and you know, we've got to respect that. But having a plan A and a plan B in place for everything, communicating more than ever. We've had to make sure that we're very vocal with our team. We've held team meetings, we spoke to everyone. We want to make sure they're comfortable, we're comfortable on the same page. We're all talking about the outcome Post this as well, and what it means for the business and the longevity that's in it for them that, you know, like, we at GM bought us this culture that the business is built on the foundation of housekeeping and maintenance, which it is. And we need to respect their views and their work with them so that when we do come out of this, we're all able to thrive and grow as people as a business.

Obviously, we're going to get Matt on in a couple of minutes time. Spoke to Andy before and he said he really found a lot of joy in Facebook groups. OTA bookings were coming in, but he was able to convert them into a direct speaking to existing clients to sort of get them stay. So what was like, we'll let Matt talk in length about other things that you guys did, but what's the one thing that you could say that you did that you can remember you doing just to sort of help the business?

Me and Matt have been sort of working hard on the NHS stuff like getting in with the right people. And I think the consistency and the persistency of drumming up and working on relationships we've already had, building new relationships has made a significant difference. And between that, between getting the agreement or the opportunity to house NHS funded by the government is one thing, but then getting the leads has been sort of one of the key things. I mean, I put a post up this morning, so last night, 219 shares across multiple Facebook groups. I've got a flurry of leads coming through for NHS staff who've got to self isolate. Just like being aware of who your audience is, like, one minute is corporate leisure and whatever else. Next minute you go, right, this is our audience now. How can we possibly be in front of this audience every single point of whatever we do every single day? And what are all the angles we can tap up? And that's what we've done.

When you're going down the NHS route and key workers and whatnot, what are you. Are you charging for this? Are you doing it free? Like, how are you sort of bridging it?

Initially, we were charging a very reduced rate. Some is what Andy said, to be fair, building up sort of relationships from that. Then we've been speaking to them, the doctors and the nurses, and understanding how their colleagues are getting accommodation, how they're getting it paid for by the government, and then following up on that process and going deeper and deeper and deeper down the line. I would love to say that I'm trying to pull something together for other operators. I'm working on it. It's been a difficult thing to get, but it's actually all funded by the government going forward. So we're in a position now where we can accommodate nurses and doctors and we're paid a good rate and it's funded by the government.

What is the one tip then? So people watching this and we've got a lot of people watching live, we're going to have a lot more people watch back on the replay if they can take bookings now, and I want to stress if they can. You know, there's obviously a need for accommodation right now from NHS workers and for key workers. What would be the one bit of advice that you would give to somebody that is wanting to sort of get these bookings? Like, where should they start? Like the first thing that they should do tomorrow morning.

The first thing, the quickest and easiest thing to do for me was create a post. If you're not friends with me, add me on Facebook or I'll share it into one of the groups or whatever. The exact post that I wrote, I've shared three posts in two weeks and the audience that it builds off of it and the people that come towards is just phenomenal. And that's the quickest thing you could do. It's free, it won't cost you anything, but it's getting awareness around what you do.

My name's Georgina Bearman. You might recognize me from the hotel inspector that was on last year, series 15, episode two. I have an eight bedroom bed and breakfast or a dinner in Livingston Anne'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 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 BNB obviously been 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 a big part of bed and breakfast is 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.

And it wasn't until we hit around, I think it was the end of that week of the. Well, The Friday, Friday 13th, I think it was around that time. When did we start? The 23rd, Friday the 20th, around that was it really, really hit because everything 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, 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? Was it? You're 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. 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're working 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.

Bear 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, they 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. I've got 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's 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, but it was quite well populated. We sprout, you know, I have delivered in the St Anne's area, within three miles from 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. 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, 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. Next we have got Matt Watts, we've got Matt's business partner. David was on a couple of people ago and started chatting again. If you could just explain what your sort of role in, in the company is and then we'll go into how your mindset was. We spoke about obviously David being at Alton Towers, having a bit of a wobble, but let's just see like what is your role in the company? What do you do? And then we'll sort of go on to how it was back on the 13th.

Hi, I'm Matt. We obviously got the business based down in Southend. We've been running for a few years now. My role in the business is more so the numbers side of things, the more of the analytical kind of research side. I wouldn't go as far to say I'm like a complete geek but I do love my numbers and spreadsheet and I'm partial to a good few systems. I love them. Yeah, so that's pretty much what I do in the business as well as a lot of the sort of sales, sourcing the book inside as well and working on a lot of the numbers.

Just like with David, I was sat with you on the 12th. We're in down by the London Excel before I got turned into a hospital and we're having a. Having a chat and I don't think either of us were sort of could even comprehend about what could happen next. We were chatting more about the football season than we were about the hospitality. So then obviously we went our Separate ways. On the 13th was when it really started kicking off. 14th and 15th was the weekend and then 16th was the Monday. How what happened? Like from your end, from the side that you. Obviously you're analytical, you see the reports. And on all of that, 13th, 14th, 15th, 6th and 17th of March, like, where, where were you at? Where was the business at?

Quite funny because it was actually my partner's birthday on a Saturday, so there was about 25 of us that went out in central London and it was almost like quite surreal. Like, should we be going out? Should we not be going out? It was kind of in that bit before. And then the Monday came and over the weekend me and David were chatting a lot and it was like we kind of just dropped into this temporary lull where we're like, you know, shit, like, where's this all going? Are we going to have to shut the business down? You know what's going to happen? I think between, in about a 12 hour gap, me and Dave just got super resourceful and we just thought of like every possible thing that we could do and how we could cut our costs back and what kind of deals we could do long term, who we could approach, you know, where we could find leads, that kind of stuff. And we just, we just went into what we call sort of hustle mode and we just went into like super resourcefulness. So yeah, it was like, it was a bit, it was a very, very strange time. Especially when they kind of announced. Was that when they announced lockdown as.

Well, around that time? Around the 23rd, so the week after. So yeah, you had a week before. Yeah, week before. So we're talking about being super resourceful about going into hustle mode. What, what were some of the things that you were doing to be proactive?

I think one of the main things was looking at like our existing costs, really. And it's funny, isn't it? It takes something like that for you to then realize and scroll through the bank statements and look through Xero and see where all the money's, all the money's going and where you can save instantly. So that was a big thing we did and I think we curved about 3, 400 quid a month instantly there and then. So that was brilliant. We then looked at doing some of the longer term stuff. So we thought, okay, how long is this going to go on for? Potentially it could be three months, it could be six months, we don't really know. So what we started to do was advertise the properties on more of a longer term basis. So we looked at things like on Airbnb putting like a bigger monthly discount, put in a weekly discount because we noticed that we were getting sort of like two to four week inquiries as normal, when we'd normally be getting sort of three to seven days as normal. So it was a big shift and we just kept adapting and kept trying to find, you know, different avenues. Like, for example, we were getting approached by a lot of couples who were both living at home but now wanted a place to live during lockdown. So then they were all coming to us in about a week. I housed about five or six couples into our apartments. You know, things like that I'd never even thought of. But yeah, they just came out the blue. So, yeah, we just, I think it was a lot of things like that and just knowing, just having to look in every single angle and have the right sort of mindset when we're looking at the angle and going, okay, how can we monetize that?

You obviously part of what you and David do, you help and mentor and coach other people are in sa. What has been the main bit of advice that you've been passing on to them during these times? I imagine your phone has been going a bit crazy. Lots of questions from people that may have just got started. It's a part of what you do. You help people get started and whatnot. So what has been sort of the, the main bit of advice that you've been passing on to them?

So the main thing really for me, being the numbers guy really is like, know your numbers at the back of your hand now more than ever. If you don't know your costs, like when you're quoting long term deals or when you're speaking with your suppliers and you need to still continue to make a profit or at least at minimum survive during this, you need to know the numbers at the back of your hand. So for me, what that meant was going back through all of our properties, looking at all the break even figures and seeing what we needed to hit on a minimum monthly basis and then speaking with all our clients and saying, look, if you're going to go out.

There and you're going to be looking.

For a long term deal, you know, you need to hit this as a minimum and gave them a sort of a calculation on how to do it and like a spreadsheet, of course, because I love those, and then just, yeah, just kind of, just kind of went through it and just said, look, let's aim the same to make a profit. But even if we just, you know, break even. At least we're, at least we're going to get through this period, which is, you know, unprecedented. As they keep calling.

Have you had conversations with landlords or have, you know, of your members, the people are part of your training group that have had conversation with landlords about taking a bit of a payment holiday for a couple of months. Have you heard of any conversations? Have you, like, how's the conversations being started? You know, is any sort of advice you could pass on to anybody that may be thinking about this?

So we've been advising our clients to do that where possible. Especially as, you know, the government is advising us to shut down in terms of ledger bookings. That cuts off such a huge sector of the market for a lot of people, the whole of our industry, because we all do some sort of leisure really on the whole. So we've just been saying, look, it's all about the relationship that you've got between you and the landlord. End of the day, you're paying their rent, you're guaranteeing their rent for a long period of time if you're taking it on a rent to service accommodation. So this is not a quick, quick win. They're in it for the long run, we're in it for the long run. So if we can work together and we can get through this period now, and it's going to be a short period, it's going to be over, you know, eventually, whether that's a two months, three months or six months, it's going to be over. And then once we're through that, we can come out the other side smiling and we can say, look, you know, we're still in business together. The last thing that people want to be doing is going out of business. During coronavirus. I've seen businesses, I'm sure we've all seen businesses go out already and it's, you know, super sad and that's exactly what we want to avoid. So yeah, just about having that human to human contact and just saying, look, let's work together on this and yeah, we'll get through the other side.

I really do appreciate that. And obviously you and David are doing fantastic work. David shared about the things going on with the NHS and whatnot. So if people want to find out more about what you guys are doing, where's the best place to reach out? Where's the best place to go? Is there a website, social media, like, where can I go for that?

So I'd say Immediately, look@www.freesatraining.co.uk We've got a free training, 30 minute free training. We've got another five videos that come.

Off the back of that.

You guys get. There's about an hour's worth of free training. It'll get you started. And then, yeah, just feel free to drop us a DM or join our community, which is the SA education community. Just search that on Facebook. Join. We've got nearly 2,000 members in there now. So, yeah, come and say hello and look forward to seeing you there.

Next up, we have got Tanya King Mohammed going back and looking at my note. The main sort of theme that we're getting here is think on your feet, look at where your costs are. Massive one from Matt and, you know, have these conversations, where these conversations need to be, but also as well, look at what people are asking for and adapt. And if that means going on to Airbnb and just having minimum stay of 30 days and then you whack a discount on top of it, then, then so be it. So, Tanya, welcome. Thank you so much tonight, take a minute of your time just to quickly introduce yourself, let us know where you are in the world, how many properties you have and then, yeah, we'll get started.

Thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure for meeting you, like, online, which is great. First time. I'm Tanya, for those that don't know me. I'm based in Devon, in Plymouth, which has been awesome over the last few days with this amazing weather, I'm not gonna lie. And I run service accommodation and I have been doing just over a year now in Plymouth and I've built my business on one day a week whilst working as a doctor part time, most of it whilst being pregnant. I've just had our second baby six months tomorrow. Who's six months tomorrow? Yeah, I run service accommodation here alongside my medical job, although I'm on mat leave at the moment and we've got a small portfolio compared to the other operators on this call of April properties at the moment, you know, it was going really well. I'm sure your question is going to be, so, what did you do and what did you feel like once all this shitstorm hit?

Let's have a little dial back to the 15th, to the sort of the 20th of March, that first sort of proper week of cancellations. Like, how were you feeling? What was going through your mind? Like, how did you cope? And, yeah, just sort of shed a little bit of light into that, please.

So I'll just give a quick, quick bit of a background. February was Our best month yet in trading. So I was thinking, great, things are going really good. We've turned over a lot, like a significant amount, a quarter of what we turned over in the whole of last year just in February alone. So I was happy just on my little small portfolio. And I remember all of you guys went up to the short stay show and I was due to go up there. I was really excited to meet you. Obviously one of my business partners, James Mitchell, was there as well. I was really excited to go and then I decided not to go just because of my young baby, who was what, three, four months at that point. And she's had a number of illnesses that have been serious and she's been hospitalized. So I thought, you know what? I'm not going to risk exposing myself and potentially exposing my kids. So I didn't go. And I remember speaking to James after the Short stay show and having a conversation and I didn't realize how it was going to hit. And I thought, well, I've had no cancellations and for that week after the short stay show date, we didn't actually have any cancellations. It was still going strong. I had some really big bookings. Luckily my biggest booking didn't cancel. But then literally they just started dropping like flies. And about a week after the short stay show or 10 days after it hit me, it really hit home. And I'll be completely honest with you, I lost it. I couldn't get out of bed. I literally couldn't. I just wanted to hide under the duvet, hide under the COVID which is not like me. That's completely out of character for me, really. I just, I just couldn't face what was going on. I just thought, that's literally it. We're not going to survive this. This is just crazy. Everything's getting booked. We're not going to be able to take any bookings. I didn't realize at that point all of the different avenues that you could go down and that I've been doing and they've been not lucrative, but they've been really, I've got results from it and I've had wins. After that painful week of literally not being able to get out of bed until midday, I decided to step up because this is something that I've built on my own, but with a lot of help in the background with my amazing husband who's a builder carpenter. And this is my, this is my key to freedom, to free me up from my medical job to not have a physical 9 to 5 or 9 to 9 job in the UK. And like yourself, I'm planning to move to Ibiza. We're supposed to be moving to Ibiza at this time. Obviously you don't live there, but that was the plan. And you know, SA was going to be able to provide me the passive, relatively passive cash flow and income to do that. So I thought I put far too much blood, sweat and tears into this. My little, my third baby, let's say to actually let it go down the drain, like to let it go down the toilet. I'm not one to give up on anything. I always see it through, I always follow it through. So I decided, right, that's it, you know, I'm going to do everything that I can and, and I'm part of your amazing community. I'm part of the boostie academy. I've tapped into that. I connected with you a few times, you know, a few of my messages to you were probably a bit desperate to be fair. Just like Mark, I don't know what to do. Can't do this. But then I just decided, you know what? This is not me. I'm not gonna let this go. And I've worked my ass off. Literally, like definitely the first week, 15 days, I literally worked non stop. I couldn't see my kids, they were just downstairs. It's all just, you know, really difficult. I've got two young kids at home, one of whom is a baby, and I'm breastfeeding her. But I've got this business to do, which I don't usually work a significant amount of time in it on a, on a day to day basis because I've got a little team around me. I usually do an hour or two a day, Matt. But I've literally had to jump back into it, take control. And I've literally seen it as. Take control of everything that I can control. I can't control what's happening in terms of coronavirus, but I can control diversifying my marketing and diversifying who I'm contacting. Completely diversifying my expectations. Because we're not hosting our normal guests, obviously it's a completely different market. So we just had to diversify.

For those who are watching and don't know, is it, is it normally a leisure area or do you find it's 50, 50, like what's the normal type of guest that you were getting before all of this? Like what, who was staying with you in February that made it such a, such a profitable moment?

Oh, God, I think corporate, a whole mix, to be honest. It's not just One set target market. Obviously from now onwards it would usually be heavily tourist based, but sort of February time it was a whole mix of corporates. Contractors are a big one because we've got lots of massive developments going down here, which I love because they fill you up Monday to Friday and then you've got your weekend to maximize your revenue.

So you're saying like, you just stepped up, you got on, you did so much productive stuff. What was one of the first things that you did, who was one of the first marketing proactive steps that you took that you wouldn't normally do? Like, what would that be?

Key workers. NHS workers. I'm a doctor so I can understand the need for it maybe more than others can potentially. But actually me being a doctor hasn't given me any more connections than anyone else because the kind of connections I thought I had haven't proven to give me results. So I've been contacting all of the companies and travel companies involved in accommodating NHS key workers. There's a whole list of them. I've been contacting everyone I could possibly think of who may have clients who may need to self isolate or who can't live at home, like local solicitors who deal with divorce, clients who may need to want to move. I've been contacting the Access to Housing, the council for emergency housing. Sadly, places like domestic abuse societies and people who help accommodate people suffering from domestic abuse, which is, is awful. But the rates of that are actually increasing because everyone's in lockdown together. To be honest, like most of the other guys so far have said, the most leads I've got are from simple little Facebook posts in all of my local Facebook groups, you know, and I've implemented everything that you've taught me as part of the academy and as part of being part of the boostly to kind of just, you know, use canva do really striking little images and I'm trying to up my game with that because I've got a bit of time to play with that now. So, yeah, local Facebook groups is an absolute must.

Amazing. So many, so many good things to sort of take away from that and just reaching out to people, picking up the phone, picking up like an email, an email into a department that you never know where it may, may lead. So, yeah, well done. Thank you very, very much for doing that. And if anybody wants to reach out to yourself, yourself and James, I know that you're doing something similar like training wise and sort of helping, helping SA people. Where's the best place for Someone to reach out and get in touch with.

You guys just hit me up on my Facebook profile. My Facebook page. Nothing fancy. Tanya Zahra King Mohammed. Yeah, I mentor in sa. I'm not encouraging anyone to get into it at the moment, I have to say, for obvious reasons. But, yeah, or anyone that just needs any support. I'm always in any of my posts, I say I'm happy to help. Yes, I'm very busy, but I'll do whatever I can to help anyone that needs it, voice notes, calls, whatever.

You're doing your own videos as well. You're doing some live videos now and again so people can jump in and tune into them. Is it Monday motivation?

It's usually a Monday motivation, Monday morning motivation. I haven't done that this week or last week. But yeah, I'm going to be stepping up my game from now with a few diversifying things as well, not just essays. So, yeah, I'm excited.

Well done. Thank you so much. Last Mr. Liam Carolan from Ginger and Gold over in Norwich. You could do us a favor, buddy. Just take a minute of your time, just introduce who you are, where you are, how many properties you've got and then we'll crack on with the questions.

So I'm Liam Carolan, I've got Ginger and Gold Limited is my company. There's five properties at the moment, which is a mixture of rent, serviced accommodation and management. We've taken on our latest one just last week as well, under management. So we're still still growing at this time. My background, I've been in retail all my life. I decided April last year that I didn't want to keep making money for other people and to take the dive into hospitality. And the main motivation behind that is because I wanted to spend time with my family. I've got a little two and a half year old boy named Harry who I wanted to make sure that I can spend some time with and that's what motivated me to start my business.

What was your business and how was it affected? On the back of when it really started to kick off here in the UK, obviously the lockdown started on the 23rd, but that week leading up to what was happening, because obviously Airbnb managed to cancel loads of bookings. Booking.com did some similar. Like how was it for you? How were you affected for me?

I mean, we were a bit like Tanya. I was then getting prepared to come to the short stay show. Things were going really well. We were about to take on more sort of summer type bookings in Norwich. We've got a real mixture of corporate and. In the summertime, there is a lot of tourists coming down to see the Norfolk Broads and just generally sites to see the history around the city. So we were starting to get a lot of bookings, weekends, weeks booked up in advance. It was getting busier and yeah, it was starting to come out of that dark sort of winter time and spring was really starting to hot up and then Corona hit us. So that was a bit of a shock.

How was the booking, like, was it just evaporated or did we manage to claw someone? Like, how was it looking, that sort of front?

I think it was the Sunday just before lockdown. We start to get one or two cancellations and they were citing different reasons, saying they were worried about traveling and things like that. Straight after lockdown, it was like an avalanche. We had over. We had almost 50 bookings and it was. It was pretty much our summer was wiped out in the space of a day, two days. We had a few people sort of hanging on, but, yeah, most of it was wiped out overnight. Most of them were the tourist ones, to be honest, canceling. So we still had a lot of the contractors still during the weeks, but it represented some. Some serious money for our business lost at that time.

I think everybody, everybody watching, whether it's live or on the replay, will totally relate to that. What have you done since then to bounce back? What proactive things have you been doing? What can you share with everybody watching to sort of help, give them a little bit of guidance?

Straight after that was announced that we're going into lockdown. I spent about one day feeling a bit sorry for myself and probably in a bit of paralysis from the fear, just looking around at the other people in the communities and the ideas that they have, and I realized that's a case of just got to get on it, got to step up and really start looking at the opportunities around us that we have got and who we can market to. So I think more than ever it's our responsibility to backwards engineer the future and think who is in need of the accommodation and who is it that I can actually help at a time like this? Who's going to need what I've got to offer. We reached out to every single guest who was still booked with us and really picked up the phone and start to talk to them. So whether it was a case of reassuring them if they were here for work, that we're still going to be open, everything's as normal, they were here for leisure and they did want to cancel then instead of just cancelling, would they like to move their dates later on in the year? Host who's got a flexible cancellation policy. So if they did need to cancel, then fair enough. But we then got a direct email and we got permission to market to them for later on in the year as well. So we've added about 20, 30 people from just doing that, like everybody else is saying as well. We pushed the Facebook posts, really followed your advice on Canva, pushed it towards all of the local Facebook buy and sell groups. We pushed it to the caravan and holiday park groups, there's a lot of those around our area. We started to really think about who is it that we can help. So at the time we did push the isolation message and I even joined a couple of groups further afield to say come and isolate in these units. When the government changed their policy and things start to tighten up, we quickly removed that message and really aimed more towards key workers particularly. Do you know anybody who works in the hs and particularly to rail workers, things like that side of things, you know, just anybody who is still working. Engineers. Yeah. We contacted the local accommodation officer at the hospital and she. It was quite interesting because she explained that she's been inundated with offers of accommodation and she didn't actually need it at that stage. Trying to build a relationship with her. We actually said, well, what do you need? What is it that you actually need at this moment? And she explained that actually her nurses and people like that needed. They couldn't get fresh fruit, they couldn't get fresh veg, they couldn't do all these things where they were working 12 hour shifts and then having to go to supermarkets which were empty. So what we done, we decided to get involved with local community and we'd done a collection, loads of people helped out and we managed to get an entire van load of fresh produce, tinned food, stuff like that to the local hospital. And off the back of that, we've now built a really strong relationship to the point where the accommodation manager stay in contact weekly and I'm now fully aware of her needs, accommodation wise, but otherwise as well as how we can help out.

This is a business tactic and tip. So if any business owners watching ask a very, very specific question, what do you need? Don't assume what they need, as in you assume that they think they need accommodation. Liam thinking on his feet and just said, what do you need? And on the back of that has done some amazing work and has built fantastic relationships moving forward. Okay, so if there's anybody that is watching now needing bookings, wanting to get bookings. What. What would be that one bit of advice that you would pass on to somebody if they sort of need it in this time?

Positive mindset. It all starts with just thinking there are people out there who are still spending money who needs your help. You don't need to sell to everybody. You just need those group of people who do need your product at the moment. Proactivity and taking massive action by picking up the phone. You know, really just build relationships around you with the people in groups, other hosts, your guests, local employers and really just take an action and get an out of the fear mindset because the worst they can do is say no. And you might have 20, 30 phone calls saying no, but all you need is one that says yes.

If anybody wants to reach out, have a chat with you, where's the best place to do so? I assume it's Facebook. Is there anywhere else you'd like to spend your time?

Facebook. So I've got a Facebook page as well. Liamsa Carolan. So if you go onto my normal profile, just message me on there. But yeah, I've been posting videos on the journey since I started way back last year just to keep it like a video diary for myself. So hopefully some people will find that useful.

I just want to say thank you, everybody that has tuned in to this and helped come on and do this. I know there's so many people watching this that are posting stuff in the comments to say thank you. So we really appreciate it. I appreciate it. And I know there's so many other people that will that will get so much from this and there's been so much. To everybody, thank you very much and if you could all just do me a favor and wave and then we'll say a goodbye. Thank you so much, everybody.

Thank you guys.

Cheers.

Take care. Stay safe.