THE BOOK DIRECT VIRTUAL SUMMIT - WRAP UP PARTY TIME

Gratis. Look, I spit fire while I'm good looking. I'm gonna tell you to get more direct bookings. Not circuitously through a travel agent. One that's come to you. You sit there in amazement, like wow. Mad respect to the guy with the hashtag bookdirect. Not a gang sign. It's a pound. In the US we call it hash over here. Running through this book directly, it means that you go. Not a book from a library. Oh no, bro, you need to understand words. Please heed to get more leads. Like a dog with the collar with the multiple leashes. More leads. That's the pun. It's hard to believe it. I punch hard like Bruce Lee. Probably the only rhyme I can think with. Bruce Lee. Like an orange, I squeeze it cause it's so juicy. And Mark Simpson. Not orange, but he could be yellow like the fellow in the Mac Groning show. That's the Simpson thing. Mark my woe rds. That's the words. When I fill it out. Here's a little thing. Pay attention you louts. Don't over rely on booking.com or Airbnb. Cause that could be gone. Cause the pandemic shut down everything. Airbnb offices, the phone don't ring anymore. But over reliance is not required. Yeah, I see you're not silent and saying, chris, can you shout to me how to save money in commissioning fees? Well, I can't explain, but I know what doo doo does Mark Simpson not like Bart with the buzz sore haircut. Let me make this clear. He's not from the Simpsons. Guys, please lend your ears, Romans and countrymans and all the viewers. Get your guests to book direct and you will see your coffers swell and swell and grow. The guests all go. They're like, wow, I'm glad that I watch this show or this podcast and they'll enjoy their holiday. I'm gonna go and book direct right away. Admittedly, I'm not. There'll be a slight lag. But when you do book direct, don't forget the hashtag bruh. Sipping a virgin mojito. And there you have it, a freestyle rap from me, Chris Turner. Do make sure you check out Mark Simpson and boost free 5 day challenge to get more.

All right. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, welcome one and all. I hope you have had a lovely Friday wherever it is and however you are starting it. Before we get going, to everybody that is here with me, don't forget we're going to be doing Spin the Wheel. So get your lucky numbers in 1 to 10. We had Chris Ditrick Dietrich who won yesterday. I've messaged Jody, Jody Sterling, Jody Odlin, sorry. And she is at the moment gonna reach out and all that lovely, lovely stuff. But before we do, I wanted to let you know about the Boostly bingo. The boostly bingo is what we've been running all week. Let me just share this screen right here. Not the wheel, we'll do the wheel in a second. So this is what we've been doing all week and it's a chance for somebody special in this group who has shown up, taken action, joined in, done the things to win an extra special prize. And that prize is going to be a one on one with me in July. We'll speak for an hour on a zoom call. We'll go into the business, what you're doing, marketing, all of that, and I'll be able to give you help and guidance and if that sounds good, then all you need to do is complete this bingo card and you've got until the 1st of July to send in the proof. So all you have to do is to get a full house. And to get a full house you've got to tick these off as you go. So even if you haven't attended the live, you can watch the, the replay of the day one, day two, day three, day four, and obviously this, you've got to subscribe to the booster, YouTube, take a picture on Instagram, all that good stuff. Fill in the post event survey and if you're thinking where is that survey? Where is it, Mark? Well I uploaded it today. Go and take that, fill that in. Literally takes a minute to do but it will help me improve this summit as we move forward. This is our third time of doing it and I feel like we've got into a real nice mix but obviously I want to make sure that we get better and we keep on improving because then the better we improve that means the more that you show up and but it most importantly it means the more than you can take feedback and implement into your business. Because we've had a lot of sessions this week and we're going to do a little debrief in a second. But the main wins that I see are when people actually take action with what they've learned and we will go through them in, in a second. So. But before we do that, before we did a debrief, I hope that you've all had a great week. I would love to know what has been your takeaway. What's that one piece of advice that you have learned and picked up this week. It could be Instagram, it could be SEO, it could trust, it could be Avatar. Whatever it may be, let me know in the, in the chat below what has been your main takeaway, your main piece of thing that you are going to take away from this week. But before we go any further, let's do spin the wheel, shall we? I need a number between 1 and 10. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 0, 9, 10. Put that below. Same rules as it has been all week. I'm gonna spin the wheel. It's gonna land on one of those numbers. If it lands on that number, it doesn't mean that you automatically win. It just means that you get to send me a mess. Say, hey, Mark, my lucky number was whatever. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10. Later on tonight, I will pick a number, put all the names that have messaged me into a hat. We'll pick a winner out and you'll win and you'll have a winner copy of hospitable host book, which is pretty cool. So last chance to do so now then let me go and share my screen and then we will kick on with this evening. So where's this button do share screen in to spin the wheel? All right, you've got one more minute to do so. Oh, actually, no, let's do five seconds because we want to get this spin because we want to go through the debrief because it's going to be a long debrief because we've got a lot to get through. So 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Here we go. Spinning that wheel. Foreign. Number seven. Lucky number seven. If you have guessed that, all you need to do, send me a message on the Facebook. Well done. There's a few people I can see that have done that. Go ahead and, go ahead and do so. Send me that lucky message on Facebook and I will pick ahead one winner. And then if you were that lucky person, you'll be winning a copy of that book. All right, so let's go through the week, shall we? Because it has been a lot. We have done a lot, we have seen a lot. There's been so 10, 10 hours worth, 8 hours worth of content, which has been crazy. We've had some amazing sessions and it is crazy to think that we kick started all the way back on Tuesday. Seems like a long, a long, long time ago. But we had the fantastic Paul Anderson kick everything off with Instagram skills again. Paul's session was very enlightened. We learned some new things. I think the main thing for me was that he was talking about how we should not view Instagram and Facebook as social media companies, we should view them as advertising agencies, which is so true. And the advice and the seven deadly sins was definitely one that I know a lot of people picked up on. And if you've not yet Instagrammed yet, please do go ahead and do so go and test out what he's taught you and make sure you tag in Bruce Lee and tag in social media hotelier as you are going through. Then we moved on to Kate's session. Kate from Fantastic Touch Day really walked us through storytelling one on one here, how to spin a good yarn from grabbing the attention to delivering on what you're going to say and then wrapping it all up again. That session, if you missed it or if you're playing catch up is one to definitely go go back on. And then the fantastic team from Aperto, Axel came in and did a masterclass on upselling. You know it is when you think about it, not on a singular level, but think of it over a course of a season or a year, the amount of money that you are leaving on the table by not offering upsells is phenomenal. You know, and the amount of times that we do things and we just say yeah, no problem, we do it for free is crazy. If you put a little bit of a charge on it, it could mean, you know, the difference between black and red at the end of the day. Your P Ls will be much happier for it at that end of the year. So if you haven't yet checked out a perto and how they help you with upsells as well as everything else, then please do go and check them out. O, P E R T O and that, that was Tuesday. You know, there was a lot in there. But I sort of started you off slowly because I knew what was coming, I knew what was coming on the Wednesday and you know, it did not disappoint. We had a first time speaker ever in, in Ger Jones and and I think we will all agree how good girl was. Can we all please show girl some love. I know he's with us live in the chat which is fantastic. Again, that session on Avatar went down really, really, really well with a lot of people and it was, it was awesome for me to see Ger step up and deliver that, deliver that session. So yeah, thank you very much for that. Then we jumped in with Mr. Craig Webb. Craig delivered another SEO masterclass, walked us through exactly what Google and these search engines are looking for and broke it down into a very simple, basic level of what SEO is, which again, I think for a lot of people didn't even realize. So well, well, well, well done. And then we moved over to Phil Kennard, a Future State. Now, a lot of people wouldn't have heard of Mr. Phil Kennard before, before Wednesday's session, but you definitely did after it. I got a message from somebody later on in the evening and he said it felt like I was listening to four webinars in one. It was just boom, boom, boom, boom, drop, drop, drop. And it wasn't just marketing, it was psychology. It was, it was, it was everything. The booking journey. And for those who missed it, Boostly and Future State have worked together and teamed up to offer a product called booster light. Free PMS, free website. Go and check that out. Go to boostlylight.com or you can just go to futuresday.com Boostly there are some stipulations at the present moment in time, just as we roll this out, you've got to be us based. You can't be a co host of a property and you can't already have a pms, but we're going to remove all of them moving forward, there's going to be no limitations on this. So very excited to, to sort of progress our partnership with Future Stay as we go down the line, which is very cool. And then we finished off with Matt Metros. And again, for those of you who missed that session, it was the simple blueprint of what to have, how to do it and what to have in the background to help build your super team, your power team. Because you can't do this alone. You can, you can do it alone up to a certain point, up to a certain revenue threshold, certain amount of properties, but there's a point in time where you need to bring in support. And I can speak firsthand with this. You know, I, you know, started Bruce Lee just by myself, just little old me, but I needed to bring in people to help me run it. If I tried to do what we do now with, with over a thousand customers and all of the things that are going on by myself, I think I would drive myself up the wall. So I, you know, you needed to bring in staff and, and you know, I've done every single mistake you could possibly imagine when you're bringing in people to help you, whether it's in house or virtual. And I wish I could have Matt's session in front of me before I went on this journey because it would have helped me loads. And so for those of you who are at your hiring journey, please, please, please make sure that you watch that. Vanessa's just asked how can I get a copy of Craig's spreadsheet, please? I think Craig is traveling today, so he might not be in to chat with us now. But if you send him a message on Facebook, I'm sure be more than happy. He's very, very, very easy to get hold of and, you know, send him a message and I'm sure he'll be able to help you with that. No problem at all. Okay. That was Wednesday's session again, jam packed on. On Thursday, another jam packed session. I like to cram them in. So again, unless you listen to the podcasts, unless you've been on LinkedIn a lot, you may not know who Alec Husner is, but she's had a very, very big career when it comes to market DMOS and big companies and has now decided to go, go alone and showcasing that knowledge. And she's working with Kanan on this project. And you know, at the moment it's just at a stage where we're having a beta launch and all that good stuff. But she walked up through like happy guest referrals. And if you break down direct bookings to an absolute, you know, simplistic level, referrals is one of the main ways that you are going to boost your direct bookings. It's a guest comes to stay with you, guest has a great time, guest talks about you online, whether it's a review or posting about you on social media or when they get back into their, into their real world scenario, school run, soccer club, etc, meeting up with friends and they go, oh, where did you go on vacation? Where do you go on holiday? They go, oh, I stayed here. And they don't say, oh, I stayed at an Airbnb. They actually talk about you, talk about your brand, on your business. And that is a massive way of growing a business. And you know, if anybody was to ask me about the success about, about Boost, not Boostly, about the Granary, our family business and how we were able to get to 80% direct bookings pretty much consistently year in, year out from, for all these years, it was because of that referral aspect, not so much repeat guests, it was referrals and spreading the word and you know, Alex laid that out. Then we move very swiftly on, on to Deb lobby again. I had two people message me saying this was the session of the week and I don't want to do any disservice to any of our speakers because it was a jam packed of quality. But Deb did step up and it's been fantastic for me to be able to showcase Deb. I've known her since ish, 2019, 2018, 2019. And it was fantastic, you know, five years later to be able to send her a message and say, I'd love for you to do a session at the summit. And here we are, Stepped up, produced. So thank you very much. Then we moved on to Price Labs. Again, I was a big part of what they're doing. The revenue estimator was one of those moments of the week where the collective room and maybe a lot of what Price Labs were talking about in his session went over your head. But when he started talking about the revenue estimator for potential properties and you just have to go and view it, that was when I went, okay, hang on a second, what is this? And again, I had messages asking me about it and people were saying, where do I find this on Price Labs? So that was really cool to see because it, it. If you don't know about that world of dynamic pricing, it's very easy for you to switch off, treat it like an advert break and just go, I'll come back in 20 minutes. But a lot of people were like, okay, that was crazy. That was good and I love that. And then finally we, we finished up with Jen Boyles and again, Jen has got her own success summit coming on later on this year. There's going to be loads more speakers on that one, so please make sure that you go and take a bit of interest and register on there. Thank you very much for Jen for coming in and walking us through how to, you know, moving on, life after Airbnb, which is, which was really cool. And then, you know, I couldn't end the week without sneaking in a little session of my, my own. I've discovered these very, very cool prompt engineers or prompts on, on the Open Eye store and I wanted to share it with you and I really hope that you watched what I showed you and went to put it into practice because these things will make your life with AI so much simpler. I feel like those have been playing around with it for a while will know that the better the command, the better the question, the better the answer. The problem is, is that we don't know the question to give it. So now I find that every single time I go into chat GPT to start a conversation with it, I go via the prompt because I go in My back of my mind, I've got some I want to talk about, but I need to know what question to ask it to get the best response. And that doesn't matter whether it's an email, an idea. I've just had a business idea that's came to me this week and I needed a name and whatnot. And it was all stemmed from going into there. And the cool thing is this is free. You don't have to pay for this anymore. It's all free. Which, which is great. So there should be no barrier to entry with this now. And the cool things that we showed you, again, 57 prompts on, on direct bookings, literally everything we've showed you. You can lay it out. And let me just very quickly show you this because it's something that has been a passion project of mine, I would say, since January. Let me share my screen. This is something that you can go to at any point, at any time. This is a. A GPT, so a bot that has been created. So my own large language model that has been totally trained just on bo. So every podcast that we've done, every video that we've done, any book that I've published, we've trained it in here. All of our tutorials behind the scenes, it's been trained on here. And you can go to this by going to boostly.co.uk bot the cool thing at the moment is that you can actually call me and because it's trained on my voice, you can ask me a question and I'll speak back. And last week I went into a studio near Leeds and I was filming for an hour and it, and it was done with a green screen behind me. And the next step to this is you'll be able to video call me, which is crazy, and you'll speak to a video, like, realistic version of me. So if you want to carry on the conversation, ask questions, you can do it all in there, which is pretty cool and pretty crazy. All right, this is where I pass the conversation over to you. Everybody that is watching doesn't matter whether it's live or on the replay. And Jane, thank you for sending Vanessa the link to the spreadsheet. That's fantastic. What has been your takeaway? What has been that moment of the week that stood out for you? What are you going to do next? How are you going to take what you've learned this week and put it into practice next week? Please carry on the conversation. This Facebook group will keep open for the rest of this week and then at the end of this week, all of this, all of this group will get moved over to the Boostly YouTube channel. And if you don't know where the booster YouTube channel is, just type in YouTube boostly and it should come up here. If you haven't ever checked out the booster YouTube, do come and check it out. It's got loads and loads and loads in it, including the one in their Role documentary that we filmed all of 2023. And it's, it's one hour, it's. You can go and check that out at any point, at any time, but all of our videos are going to get moved over to here. You'll be able to come and check them out at any point in any time and that is where they are going to move from the, the main, from the main page. All right, with that being said, we've got a big weekend coming up. There's Glastonbury happening right now. With that being said, there is the Euros football on this weekend and many a barbecue to be had. I really hope that you have enjoyed this week. Let me know your feedback. I would, I would love to get it about timing like as the five to seven o' clock slot work. Well, would you rather be later? Would you rather be earlier? Obviously I've got to think about my family and the things happening outside these walls, so there's sometimes I can't do. Let me know about the sessions. Did you enjoy the sessions? Would you like more? Would you like less? Would you like it to be more condensed or spread out? Etc? Let me know what you like in the next one. And we will be back in September, probably at the end of September. I really hope that your peak season is as peak as it can be. You know, I do see a lot of posts, a lot of the time in groups about how quiet is, etc. But what I want to leave with you is this, is that if you've just got one property, you've only got to fill a certain amount. There's only a certain amount of heads on beds you can do. Okay, don't worry about everybody else, just focus on you. And it's so easy in this industry just to leave the market into the OTAs, right? And what we've got to realize about this industry is very unique. There's no other industry out there that you can start a business, take a couple of pictures, put it on a website and be guaranteed to get in revenue. But that's what hospitality has been, especially in 2021, 2022 depends on your Market, etc, every other business. You've got to build a brand, put yourself out there, you've got to market yourself in as many places as possible and just hope that the stuff that you put out sticks and you can start to bring in a customer base, get referrals and grow. We're at that stage now with hospitality that we're back to 2018, 2019 levels in terms of people who are traveling and doing the bookings. Unfortunately for a lot of people, there's now a lot more properties and a lot more competition in the area and there's a lot more people on Airbnb, a lot more people on booking.com, a bottle of people on Verbo. So there's a lot more competition out there. What I implore all of you to do is just to focus on what you can control. Any booking that you've had in the past, reach out to them, any five star review that you've had from a guest, reach out to them, build a list, build a referral business. Try and see how you can incorporate yourself into that local area. Become the go to start going to local BNI meetings, start putting yourself out there on Facebook groups. Yes, it takes time, but that is just what it is to run a business. It takes time and effort. Once you get going and once you build it up, it can become a lot more automated and become a lot more just stuff that happens in the background. But if you're starting from scratch, even if you've been doing this for years, even if you've got, you know, many properties, but you've never done marketing, you're going to have to start again. If you have the budget, go and hire somebody. That's the beauty of having Matt doing it this week. If you haven't got the budget, you're just going to have to roll your sleeve up, eat the glass, as they say, and just crack on and do it. For those of you that are fully booked out for the rest of the year, congratulations. Well done. But the best time to do your marketing is when you're at your fullest, because you can start to prep for when it gets to the quieter seasons. So you should always be marketing, you should always be doing new business. One of the things that I learned way back when, when I started full time in this industry in 2011, was that you should always spend the first one hour of your day doing new business. That could be reaching out to a potential guest, it could be posting a Facebook group, sending an email out, connecting with a business owner in your local area. Doing X, Y, Z, please, whatever you do for the next year, just dedicate one hour a day, that first hour to new business because I promise you, by the end of it, your business will be in a lot better place for it. If you're struggling, you don't know where to start, then you've got all this quality content from this week to be cracking on with. You've got the boostly bot to be asking questions with. You can pick the phone up at any time and call it. You can ask questions. It will give you answers and responses. The main aim of doing this and bringing everybody together is to give you the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to go ahead and do this. And I wish you all the best. We will be back in September. I want to say thank you very much for tuning in with us this week. Thank you to all of our speakers, thank you to our amazing sponsors, Aperto Futures Day, Price Labs, Craig Web SEO, the social media hotelier AKA Paul Anderson and again, thank you very much. All right, everybody, have a good weekend, have a good week, have a good month, have a good summer and we'll be back very, very soon.

Let's show them how we do. I like to rhyme my words when I speak. I take two from a seven of the week, Monday to Friday. That's the five days. It's the challenge and you know it's provided free. Yeah, that's where the star is day.