The Boostly Podcast Turns 800! (Behind The Mic with Mark & Liam)

Right, welcome to the Boosted podcast where we give hosts the tools, the tactics, the training, mostly confidence to increase their direct bookings. This is a special recording because this is number 800. I've got some numbers. 800 total episodes, 456 guest interviews, 146 host success stories, 98 vendor technology sessions with our biz besties that are out there. We've done 57 countries represented six continents, 34 states in the U.S. we have featured on this podcast. We've had 45% international guests, 35% UK guests, we've got 15% Asia Pacific guests. We've done 25, 600 minutes recording sessions, done. Our average session, our average podcast is 32 minutes long. Our longest ever one was 24 hours back in the clubhouse days.

We have done 67 sessions on AI. We've done 89 episodes on automation, as in automations behind the scenes. We have average Downloads per episode 2847 with over 1.4 million views on the YouTube average rating. So your reviews is 4.97, which pretty much is 5 star reviews. So thank you very much to everybody who's left the review. Our first episode was 2017. June 2017. June 26, to be exact, in 2017. And this is the first episode that we are recording in person with my co host, Liam Carolan.

So welcome and important number you missed, two bald Brits, you know, who have been doing this for fun. It's been great fun.

Yeah, it's been amazing having you as a co host because for some time people just thought that they were speaking to me when they were on the, on the thing, but when they were speaking to you.

Yeah, yeah. They're like, hello, Mark. I was like, yeah, I'm not Mark. I know I'm bald. I look a bit like him.

But yeah, yeah, it's very, very funny. So, other little numbers, which again, we. I plugged all of our database of podcasts into AI and I asked it read every single episode, every single transcript and I just pulled out these numbers. We don't know how factual they are, but we'll go with it. But there's 156 direct booking strategies. There was 134 episodes on guest experience, 98 episodes on technology AI, 87 episodes on revenue management, which I think Jacob Murphy was probably on the most of them. And there are only 76 specific sessions on marketing and SEO, which would probably be Craig Webb doing them. So eight years from 2017 to 2025. And in this episode we are going to recap biggest takeaways and then talk about the future of this podcast as well. We are filming this session in Laura and Kieran's killer studio in York. It's a fantastic studio. If you are anywhere near York and if you want to hire this place out, get in contact with the killer creative team directly. So, Liam, welcome. So for those who are maybe tuning into this for the first time, who have not watched any of the other 800 or 799 episodes, just give a quick background on your story and, and, and that'd be a great place to start.

So first of all, thank you for having me here and inviting me to the studio. Got to do a trip up to York, which is amazing. So for those who don't know me, my name is Liam Carolan. I run a business called Ginger and Gold based in Norwich in Norfolk. Started off as a host doing rent to rent or rental arbitrage for the US listeners and steadily over learning off great people, people like Mark and, and people who were lucky enough to have on the podcast steadily grown to now 30.

Mixture of management portfolio and rent to rent and also now ones that I own as well, which is very cool. So yeah, that's me.

So when you started in the world of Boost Lee, I think it's 2021 is about right.

2021, yeah, I think so. I mean that's on one of your challenges. You hooked me on one of your.

Facebook group challenges, one of the five day challenges. And then at that point when you first came in, was it right, you went around about 9, 10 properties in the portfolio?

I think I had less than that. I think at the time it was as low as 4 or 5. It was, it was low.

All of them were in management at the time.

Or is it a mix purely rent to rent, I didn't know what I was doing.

And so now four years later, obviously the business has grown. Where are you currently at in terms of numbers and the models that you're doing?

So we are doing 32 properties in total in terms of numbers. We're just shy of a million turnover each year, which is big for us. Started off as a dream from somebody working in retail.

Numbers wise as well. I mean we are the highest rated agency as far as I know with the most reviews on Google in our area. Feel free to challenge me. If anyone's listening to this in Norfolk, come at me. So yeah, that's where we're up to for numbers.

Crazy. And so when we were doing this podcast and you know, for the most part, I think for the first say 400, I was doing it solo or we were interviewing guests. The reason why I really wanted to bring you in is A, you were just so good at speaking on camera just from sessions that we've been doing within the Brucely world. But B, I could sense that you really what it's like to advance your knowledge, your experience of being into this game and also as well start to be from the other side of the camera as well and start to build your own personal brand. So I, I think it was around about 400. So for the last 400 episodes where we've been sort of co hosting and you've been interviewing people, what I wanted to do in this episode is just pull away your key takeaways because obviously you're interviewing people and it's great because then you get to spread that word and education to the people that tune in. But obviously as well you can help implement it into your business. So what's like one of the standout episodes that you would say I wanted to stand out lessons that you have learned that you then implemented into Ginger and Gold and it's had like an impact in the way you run your business day to day.

It's a great question and there's loads of the people that I've talked to, each with their own kind of thing, whether it is interior design or, you know, software or scaling. But I really thought about what would help the people listening to this the most and genuinely, what have I taken from the podcast that I did go, you know what, that works, I'm going to go and put it into my business. And the standout one is actually one quite close to home. It's a guy called Sasha Tucker who's got Norfolk Holiday Properties. Now this is it was competitor. He actually sold his business to another one of the guests which has been on to Host and Stay, which is Dale Smith from Host and Stay. And we had Sasha on just at the point where he had just completed the sale and he was free to tell us some lessons that he had been taught over his time. He'd been doing this about four years and scaled to 120 properties and sold his business. And I don't know if I asked him on camera or off camera this, but this is all from doing the Boostly podcast. I said to him, I said, what is one income generating trick that if you was to start this business again tomorrow, what would you do? And he said, well, a lot of hosts take security deposits and we just made one change instead we took a rental waiver we just charged a small fee where instead of them paying the security deposit, they could then pay this rental waiver. And it would act as a protection up to a certain level. So for him, £200 worth of damage would be covered. So it means things like stains on towels, broken cups, all of that sort of stuff. We ended up, I listened to him and I was like, okay, let's give it a go. Went about putting it into the systems, changing the workflow and everything like that. We only put this in in April and we've already made over two grand extra just in these tiny little amounts. And I, I actually, I feel that chickened out a bit because I only done half of the amount that he was char charging. He was charging more than me, but even from doing half that amount. And this taught me that if that one little change can generate, and this is, we're not talking big money, but this is extra profit that simply wasn't there last year. And the other benefit is that compared to security deposits that people take within their businesses, somebody's got to pay for the transaction fees on that, whether it's the owner or whether it's you as your business that suddenly saves that. So not only is it profit generate and, but actually saves that as well. And out of everything that I've listened to from hosts on, there is these actual tricks which you can take simply put into your business and it genuinely makes a difference to your bottom line or reduces stress.

You are the second person that I've spoken to in the last month who's talked about this. I was in South Africa speaking at the scale event down there, and Rebecca Cribbin mentioned this to a host a year ago. And then over a course of a year they've generated in rand. It was about 300,000 rand, which is, I think it's about, I don't know, a tenner. I don't know. It's a large chunk of money. It's at least six figures extra in revenue over a course of a year. And it is such a simple fix. And the cool thing is, is that, I mean, some of what we've been talking about for years is that you've got to be able to in your business generate multiple revenue streams. And when we talk about that, people instantly think, oh, I've got to add more properties. I've got to do all this extra work. Sometimes a little tweak like shifting a setting in the background, bringing in a waiver fee where you get a cut of the commission if they go for it, it's it's no uplift for you, it's no extra work, it's just a simple little switch. How did you actually go and implement that into your business? How did you implement that into the back end of your operations?

So it's quite a tough one because whenever you want to implement a change, you suddenly go, ah, but this software does that. And how do I put this in? So I decided to go and check out all of the softwares again. This is a great thing about being a co host on the Boostly podcast. I have the little black book of contact and all of the softwares that we were able to talk to and I actually went to some of the biggest names. So originally I went to Charge Automation and I went to people like Truvy, who was formerly Super Hog and Safely and I actually went and checked with all of those and they all have great products and great services. I just realized it wouldn't fit into my ecosystem and keep what I've already built without knocking something else down that I didn't want to. So I done it. I thought, what's the most simple way that I can do this? And I simply, I use the Boostly website. I built out a new page in the back end. As soon as people book, they get the email which says, hey, please choose your stay protection. You takes them to my web page, visits the website, which is great. But then they get a choice between choosing the stay protection waiver and that takes them to a stripe fee. So as simple as literally, you couldn't make it more simple. Or they choose the security deposit and they do that. There's two different stripe accounts. One goes to one place, one goes to another pot. So the money's kept completely separate and we just get, we use internal zaps and things like that which tell us what to do. And a note just added to their stay and. And then we get a reminder after this day if we need to refund the security deposit.

Wow.

But do you know the other added benefit of doing this isn't just the money. Beforehand my team was stressing about you'd get a stain on a towel. And as a host we actually hire our linen to our owners. I found that's another good income generating way of creating extra income where you wouldn't normally have it. But the problem is with that is that when you've got marks on towels and things like that, you're talking 10, 15 quid each. Each, each time things go wrong. Well, suddenly we've got the money which covers that along with the linen hire. So it suddenly just makes sense. And from a stress point of view for my team, they're not having to chase guests for stuff that we probably don't want to chase guests for and make it unpleasant after the stay.

Yeah, because it stains their opinion on your business 100%.

And you don't want to have to. You don't want to have to chase people for stuff. You want it to be smooth. When you look at Amazon is a great example of this. If anyone's got a problem, it's very quick and easy to refund or to take answer. They've made that guest experience really super. And I actually thought by having this extra charge option, people would look at it like we're trying to.

Con people, you know, and take money off them. But it's the fact that we've set it up so they've still got the choice they can stay for effectively without losing any money. They get their security deposit back. But so many people opt for this waiver option just for peace of mind and, and that's the win. Everyone's happy out of it. We get more 5 stars because of it.

Yeah. I must think from a personal point of view as a guest, and we've stayed at a lot of places where the technology is integrated into one of the companies that you've mentioned. And when it comes to it, instead of having to walk out a couple hundred dollars for a security deposit or a thousand dollars for a security deposit, if you can just say, right, 50 quid or whatever it is, small nominal fee and you're covered, you know you're not going to get it back. But still, again, the context is when we travel, I travel with four kids under the age of 12. You know, there's a two year old savage in Rosie who literally, it takes it upon herself to go and touch everything when she walks into a place and you just. Peace of mind is there and you're covered. You know what I mean? And for you to actually build it into your own in house solution is just means again, even more profit and revenue back to you. Guest satisfaction is good. You mentioned something there about hiring the linen to your host. Did you pick that tip up on the podcast or is that something you've just learned from other hosts along the way?

It's something which I'd done by mistake in the early days and worked actually. So yeah, unfortunately it's not one I can attribute to the podcast, but I found that when you're taking on management clients, one of the biggest stoppers is they don't want to spend a lot of money on linen or they buy the cheapest linen, which doesn't last and you get worse reviews. And obviously that reflects on your brand. So instead we do a higher option for the linen to clients. The benefit is there that when they take it, you know the linen's good quality, you know that you can swap and change it because it's your linen. So you can swap and change it across your units and ultimately you can bulk buy. So it keeps your order costs down. You then rehire it to your clients and create an income that way.

One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is when you first started in the world of short term rentals, you were doing rent to rent, which is otherwise known as subleasing, arbitrage, rental asset, whatever you want to call it, it changes around the world. But now you've pivoted to where you're all management pretty much.

Reason for that is, especially in the uk, there's a couple of issues with tax wise when you reach certain levels. So management is just much more scalable. And it's something which the podcast taught me from talking to people who have scaled well. So people who come to mind there was Dave Cordner from the Belfast Apartments. You've got people like Ryan Luke. You've got all the people. There was a guy called Syed L who was a guest on the podcast, Scale to 300 Apartments. All of these people taught me one thing and that is that actually the management side is a much more scalable business. It's very hard to lose money if you're a good manager because there isn't a risk. You're not putting up your own money. It's the client's money. As long as you're cherry picking the.

Right properties and the right homeowners.

Yeah, yeah, that's the other thing. Yeah, because there's a lot of dodgy. I say dodgy. There's a lot of homeowners, which are those ones which caused you 80% of your work for 20% of your profit.

Okay, so this is a, this is a topic that I see come up a lot. Obviously at the end of the day, if you've got the money and the funds to own your properties. Fantastic. That's brilliant. That's the way you want to go because you own the asset. But for a lot of people, and you know, we've spoken to over 145 hosts on, on the podcast is you haven't got that funds available, so you go down the route of arbitrage, Rent to rent or management. Now for, for you, what is the pros and cons of management and why again have you decided to go down on, on that route? And what skill sets do you find that you have learned and brought into like this management model that means that you are enjoying this more than other verticals to potentially go down.

So what I'd say the first thing that I've learned from doing the podcast is you don't have to have the business that everybody else has got. So when we talked about some of these names, there's a lot of people who scale really quickly and that's just not who I am. So I'm building the business which I want to build.

But to allow us to have.

The right systems in place, you still need what these people have built. So if they've got funnels and landing pages and things to do it, I've learned that from them to put that onto my website and make sure that I've got follow ups, automatic follow ups and things from the CRM.

Is that in the Go High Level CRM that we're using?

Yes, in the Boostly Go High Level CRM I was skeptical of any of these tools and you know that I'm the first.

I'm still learning it to this day. Yeah. So but you've been tapping into it and you've been using it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean it manages my leads and it's something which is a tool. I actually done a post last night of tools I wouldn't now be without. And yeah, I'm genuinely not just picking up the Vuce Lee CRM because at the end of the day, as long as you've got CRM, what you learn from all these people that you interview is there's certain tools and systems they have and you need a database, you've got customers. Right. You need a place to put them customers, you need where to keep their contacts. When somebody contacts you for property management, so many people will send a couple of emails and that'll be it. And then you forget about them because the next opportunity comes in and follow up is everything. Oh yeah, the follow up. And this is where the CRM stops you from forgetting. As long as you've got it set up. Right, Right.

So literally talking, not about the podcast or anything. Yeah. I have been interviewing free copywriters this last week to help me create more Bruce Lee case studies. We had Lauren, I don't remember Lauren Almeida do it years ago. She was a really good copywriter in Vancouver. She Wrote the success stories that were on the Boothly website now with Sergio from Jungle House, Rose Tipka over in Ohio and Seth who is somewhere in the States. And I reached out to her, she said, listen, I'm not doing it anymore. I've moved on to somewhere else. So I went to my, my contact who passed me free copywriters and you know, I am interviewing them. They're going to be chasing me to get this work. And the guy that I picked is the only one who did the follow up. So original email, he did his pitch, we had a call with all of them and it was him who did the follow up. And I was swaying towards somebody else. But after the call I totally forgot his name and I was trying to search in my inbox for his name so I could reach out to him to book in a follow up, but he didn't get in contact with me. He stayed quiet, this guy who was just as good as the other guy, but I vibe with the other guy better. I went with him because he did the follow up. He came into my inbox and a lot of the times to get the sale, to get the property, to get the outcome that you all want into it comes back to follow up. And people who are listening to this or watching this, they can take it in that in any way, shape or form, whether it's getting a guest, whether it is getting your homeowner for your management or just whatever you're trying to pursue. The follow up is everything. And you're right, the CRM is super effective with that because you get reminders, you get notifications, you can get texts.

You do. As humans, we think that everybody else remembers and puts weight to the stuff that we put weight to. And they go, well, of course they know the name of my business, of course they know I do holiday, let's in Norwich, you know, like. But let's be honest, so many people are concerned with what they're doing that most businesses and people they interact with, they've forgotten like a few days later. And this is where having that follow up and having those reminders, I mean, for me, I have a reminder for after our first contact, we call them within one hour, the Alex Hormozy. Call them as quick as you possibly can. Obviously it depends what time of the night it is. But then after that initial follow up, I've got automatic emails to prompt me to get in touch with them just as a nudge, you know, like for weeks afterwards.

I feel like now as well, with the, with the way of the world when, when you have somebody come to you. So a homeowner has come to you, they can do so much research on you before they even reach out to you. But they're pretty much already sold. They're probably again speaking from like a management model. They're probably speaking to you. We're probably speaking to other management companies or research, not speaking to have research, four over five others and they've probably sent that message to four or five other operators already and they've pretty much made up their mind they want to speak to you because again when a management model, it is a relationship, you're going into a relationship with this person and they want to make sure that they get along with you, they vibe with you that you're not a scammer but you say you are going to say what you're going to do and that's what a conversation untold. And so if you do not have a follow up built in then you are pretty much never going to get the sale as much as it may seem.

Yeah, 100%. And one thing on that as well, just to build that trust, which is pretty new and I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago is that. But it's happened again for the second time this week. I had a host ring up. Her property was rubbish. So we didn't take it on. I say rubbish if you listen to this. Hopefully she's not listening to this. Her property wasn't right for what we needed for the area. Yeah. But when I called her up, the first question I now ask and I think it might have been you or somebody from the podcast who tells me always ask that question, how did you discover us? First question every single time. And she goes, oh, actually to be honest, I just typed it into ChatGPT and I asked which management agency in Norwich is good to have my home managed? But it's because I've got a website which has got all the information on a property management page where I can scrape it quickly. I've got blogs out there which is something we talk about a lot on, on all of the previous podcasts. And then I'm also working hard to make sure that social media and the trust signals and the reviews are all there that that's why we get recommended on AI.

Yeah, a lot of people are now coming to Boostly and saying oh we found you on chat GPT and it is literally because the digital footprint is everywhere around the Internet and there are these really fascinating AI solutions called one's called Peak P E C A I and that basically runs a search on all of the for your brand and it tells you where you are being found. And what's really fascinating about this new SEO, AI SEO is that in the past, traditional SEO, Google SEO, it really matters on the website that you're on because every website has got a ranking by Google. It's called domain authority. The higher the da then the better you will rank. And if you can get on say 10 websites that are ranked high on their DA, you've got more likelihood of being ranked high for research to management companies in Norwich. The way the AI works at the moment and this may evolve over time. It doesn't care on the da. It doesn't care. It just cares how many times you're being talked about in a positive way on all these websites. And it not only goes on websites, it goes on Reddit forums. It's mad how much it values Reddit. It's mad how it doesn't even care about Wikipedia. It is fascinating to me and Brucely is just everywhere online for all the things that we've been doing over the years, whether it's a podcast, whether it is X, Y or Z. And because of that, if you go on to chat GPT and you type in website design for the world of short term rentals or who's the go to expert in direct bookings, our name comes up and we've had again the thing we always ask every single time, how did you discover us more and more people? I'd say maybe 2 in 10, which is a, which is a lot saying chat GPT. So go and check your LLM scores for how your company comes up on peak.

I'm going to do that.

Yeah. P E C A I so Peak AI. There's others, but Graham Donahue of the Sykes fame, he was the one who recommended Peak and it is really handy and you get a full month trial for free and you get everything you need in that month's trial.

Nice. And just what you mentioned there is one of the lessons which has come from the Boostly podcast in general is that the hosts that you see time and time again who are most successful overall. And I mean not just a flash in the pan, but the ones that stand to mind are people like Avery Carle, who's very on social media, all over social media, people like Daniela from Marbella from Skoal, people like Laura Muse, you know, the people like that who come up, who have been guests who are active on social media and then people go, how come they seem to get More success. And the reason they get more success is because they're putting themselves out there more. Whether it's being found on ChatGPT or on social media or from a YouTube video they've made, it just builds that trust. And in a world where people aren't going to be searching in the traditional ways, they are just going to be asking. I mean, at the moment we have to type it in, but it's going to be a stage where you're driving along and asking AI stuff.

Well, it's talking about AI. It is crazy what we can now do. So we've got 800 podcast episodes. Bringing it back to the podcast. I'm just looking at numbers here. 426 total hours of content that we have created. I said earlier, 25,000 minutes. We've got a lot of content that is out there. We are using an AI robot that's built by Delphi and that AI robot, that AI clone is being solely trained on this. 426 hours of content is trained on the books, trained on these YouTube videos. And what's happening now is, is that anybody can come and talk to it at any point, in any time. They can ask it a question specifically about their business in the world of short term rentals and they don't have to listen to 426 hours of content. They can get an answer straight away. And I feel like this is the next round, the future of courses, course creators, coaches. And I've already started to notice it a little bit in terms of the people that I follow, a guy called Ed Lawrence, because I'm really looking to try and Upgrade up the YouTube game for Bruce Lee and for my personal channel in the next 12 months. And I follow a lot of Ed Lawrence and he has totally redefined his course. He's on version 4 of it now and a massive portion of that is an AI bot. And where I can now, if I've got a title in mind for a YouTube video, I will run the idea by him and this bot will give me an answer based on what it's been trained on, which is his knowledge, his brain. So instead of me having to watch, you know, let's say 400 hours worth of content, which I will never be able to do, I can just go and ask a question and the answer it gives me back is bespoke to my, my brand, which I think is, is fascinating. So if you want to go check out that it's boostly.co.uk forward/AI. It's the Boostly AI. Talk about Hormozy. I know he's got one now with his ACQ AI which is trained on. On him. And I feel like that is definitely going to be the future of it. When we talk about 800 episodes, this is why it was a bit of a landmark because I asked Chat GPT and they said it was an average of eight episodes a month, which, you know, is. Is a lot. We went for a stage during COVID I remember I was doing one every single day when it was. The world was turning a little bit upside down. We didn't know what was going to happen, you know, after April 2020. So I decided to do a podcast every day. And that continued up until 2021, which was like, basically we had 300 episodes right, right there by the time we finished. But I was looking around at what other podcast hosts were doing. And I mean, I'm a big fan of Heather Bayer. I've been on that podcast a lot of time. Jasper and Eric with the get paid for your pad. And those are the ones where I think are anywhere slightly close to the amount of episodes that we've done. And there's a lot of people have done podcasts and even if you do one a week for a year, that's only 52. So this is why with episode 800, we've been religiously doing this every week for the last God knows how long. But moving forward, we are going to change it a little bit more and I'll explain about that later on. But when we look back on these 800, let's say there's over 200 guest stories in here, outside of Sasha, because Sasha is one that hit close to home, obviously. Is there any other people that you've. You've like listened, listened to or had these stories and you were like, that has impacted you. When you're looking back and on these 800 that you've been part of 100%, there's.

There's so many good people that we've talked to. I guess there's a few lessons that is that in the end the nice ones do, you know, stick in, in mind. And I think that's true of our hospitality brands. At the end of the day, I mentioned all the people who scale really quickly. But if you're wanting to build a brand which is about people, there's. There's a couple which come to mind. So there was.

Christina Crump from. She had a place in Whistler. I don't know the name of her business, but she created str Hub, which was a host who created a hub for other, other hosts, which was really cool. Brian Hatcher is a hospitable host as well. Yeah, he was a hospital host as well. I mean he's a firefighter and he's got this awesome place in the US and he sticks out as being some of the nicest guys. And it made me realize that everything that we talk about on the Boostly podcast, all of that stuff happens to all hosts all over the world and the market that we've got the opportunity to go into is huge. In terms of lessons that I've taken from those hosts, I would have to say that.

The lessons about niching down as much as possible be really clear on your brand. So a guy called Andy Easton from Beach Retreats, great business because he's basically an inch wide in his niche, but a mile deep. He only takes properties which 150 meters from the coast. And I thought, well, he turns down every other property. And on that basis I started looking about what I was taking on. And whereas I was taken on stuff which was outside of my area or I was taken on like one bedroom things, which wasn't at the time what I did, you know, like without cooking facilities or people were asking can I manage their home when they go abroad and stuff, things which are slightly outside of my chosen niche. And I realized that I was failing because I was just trying to do so much versus what I should be doing, which just focus on what I actually do. And I took that into my business. So there's a couple of noticeable ones there, but many more I could go on.

I think what stands out for me is we talked about Hospitable Host very briefly there that came about because of Jody Odlin who created it. And then I remember that I got speaking to Jody Odlin about this book on the back of getting to know her through Clubhouse and the Bruce Lee podcast. And now that book has transformed so many people. There's 140 offers. A lot of the people that you have mentioned are part of that, that series. And it's a lot of host again, we've, we've interviewed on the podcast have like spun up things like STR Hub or have gone and created their own tech solution, scratched their own itch within this, within the industry. And having done it for so long, eight years now, like you said, if, if, if there's anything that I want to check out or if you want to check out, you can go to your little black book and you can reach out to people, contact people and you know, you're able to do So I think that's been one of the major benefits of doing the podcast is that expanded the network and when you can have a network and it's very cliche, your network is your, is your net worth. And being able to do in the podcast for so long now, if there's anything that I need or got any things that I want to check out, I'm just a WhatsApp away from being able to. Being able to have a play around or to do something with which has been fascinating.

And just on that note as well, when you look at all these softwares, I mean some of the best softwares, what you start to realize, and I won't name names here, but some of the best softwares that you look at aren't necessarily the most known. And this makes you realize that it happens in our hospitality businesses. And the people listening to this is that you, you could be the best business, but if nobody knows about you.

Yeah.

Then you're never going to win. And this is where I've taken from just generally seeing the softwares that don't put themselves out there enough, who are very good software, is that you can't just rely on word of mouth. You've really got to put yourself out.

Yeah. I was speaking to somebody yesterday and it's a software and people that I've known for years and they are sitting on so many email addresses and they said to me they never do a broadcast, they never do a broadcast email out. And I was shocked as somebody who sends thousands of emails every single day that they're sat on all this data and they don't broadcast, which I think is bananas. And as you were talking, that reminded me of Rory Sutherland who says marketing always wins. You can have the best product in the world, but if you market it correctly, you will win. And I feel like that is what has helped Bruce Lee over the years. I'm not saying our product is shit, but I'm saying that there are probably better products out there, people who just do better things than what we have done, better training, better website, whatever. But I feel like it's the market and has definitely helped get the awareness and the podcast has been a massive part of it. I was just looking here, we have done about 200 to 300. I'm sure there's more. Behind the host guest host stories. The average property size. So one of the things we do, we ask them how many properties that you have the average property size in their portfolio. Has been 4.7 but in total there is a 15,600 properties combined. So that's from everybody who's at a smaller scale to people like you mentioned, you've got 300, 400, 500 in. So we have definitely touched every single corner of this globe. We mentioned UK in usa but I remember speaking with Tracy Norcroft in Japan. We've got a lot of people out of Australia, but we Australia, Tim Mortimer, Julie George, Rebecca Cribbin. There's a lot out of Australia, even South Africa with, with Melanie Creel and a few of us down there. But even like in, in Europe and, and further afield we've interviewed people in Dubai middle like Latin America, South America. So it's definitely got a digital footprint all over the world. I would love. There's a number here that stuck out to me where it says we've had over 2.5 million downloads. But as I was doing the research on this and it's really hard to get podcast numbers to. To be actually legit because I looked at the downloads and there was about half a million that were in Pakistan. I was like I've never had anybody from Pakistan come to me and sign up to Boost.

Do you have any editors or anything like?

We've got editors but they're not in Pakistan. They're normally in like the Philippines or middle America, South America, uk.

Big hospitality movement in Pakistan.

It must be. And it's a bit mad on that one. So I've never really trusted the podcast download numbers. YouTube views is is mad 1.4 million on the YouTube. But someone was asking me about that the other day and I feel like the when it really kicked off was 2022. And the reason why in 2022 it kicked off is that Boostly qualified to be a big. A YouTube Premium Partner. And what that means in simple terms is that we've had over a certain amount of watch hours and over a thousand subscribers. And when you are a premium partner, I get paid or Bruce Lee gets paid when ads get shown on our video. And I signed up for it and I didn't think anything much of it, but I was starting to get about a thousand pounds a month just paid in for doing nothing else and just having the podcast. And it made sense because Google was getting paid to push our videos to other people around the world and obviously the Airbnb thing was getting massive back then. I turned it off at the start of this year because you know, in a. Without sounding too big headed, the money that we're getting in from YouTube was just a small little blip in our overall revenue that we're getting. And I know how disruptive watching a video on YouTube is when all of a sudden it cuts to an ad or cuts to a video. So I turn that off and, you know. Thankfully, the viewership numbers on our episodes for the podcast has stayed roughly the same. We've dropped off a little. I remember we did one recently with furnish finder Jeff Hurst, and that got nearly 7,000 views, which is really cool to see. So it's been fascinating to see the numbers. But the thing that I take most from it is, again, speaking from like a new business point of view. We talked about AI drives, chat, GPT drives. 2 out of 10, I would say 5 out of 10 people, when they book a call with Bruce Lee, they mention the podcast or they mention a podcast that we have guested on somebody else's podcast. So in terms of if you're thinking about, do I start a podcast, Do I do this medium, is it worthwhile? 110%. How have you found it from a personal point of view for what you do and your personal brand? And what. How have you found that it has benefited you apart from being able to reach into your black book and speak to Truvium people like that, you got.

Goosebumps to thinking about. Honestly, it's not just built the business that has helped me grow the business, and as I say, the business has changed massively, but it's helped build me. And I know that sounds really corny, but because of the. You can hear rain on the roof now, I don't know if it picks up because of the experience secondhand. From some of the people we've spoke to, you really start to see the mindset shift. And from doing this and meeting and being around very successful hosts and some which have had setbacks, you start to see that failure isn't final. As Churchill said, there's hosts we've interviewed who have failed in a lot of things. They do, and then they just rebuild. The one thing that you carry on is the experience you've taken from doing it. And it's actually the speed of action, which is the main thing that I've taken away from seeing what these hosts do. Find something that works, put it into your business. If it works for you, keep it. If it doesn't, take it away. And then from a personal level, it's got me excited about. So I've been researching recently about names for a local podcast for me, and there's One which has come up, I won't name it yet, just in case somebody grabs it. But it's got me excited because all of a sudden I'm thinking about what I want to do in my short term rental business and if I genuinely want more people to come and stay, which everyone listening to this hopefully does. And I want to be seen as a person of influence in my area and get more opportunities for the best properties, well, to do so, I need to be around the businesses which attract people to the area and if I can then have a reason to reach out to them and those businesses, if I reach out to them and say, you know, would you like to come and be on a podcast? And I'll promote it to listeners on your behalf. There's not many businesses out there who will just go, do you know what? No, I don't. I don't want more promotion for free. And this is where now I've got the first of all, the equipment I've got obviously to do it, but also the mindset and knowing that it isn't just, you know, having those questions prepared, but you get used to interviewing people. And when I look back to that first episode, the first episode I done, I think was 2022, 2023, something like that, and that was Paul Anderson was the first one. And I remember being so nervous, I remember you can hear my voice break and I was a bit raspy in it. Whereas now, honestly, you could, I mean, we haven't prepared for this in any way, shape or form, but I'm more than happy to just jump on in any situation. And it is. That's what I mean about it's built me because you then get used. It's like reps, right? Any muscle, if you go to the gym and you do more of it. And I'd recommend that if people are thinking about doing a podcast or being seen as someone in their area where you can, you know, do a local podcast, whatever you want to do, or something you're interested in, real crime, all that sort of stuff, then just, just do it.

Yeah, definitely. It makes you more confident speaking on camera. It's definitely helped me get on stage speaking as well from doing this because you get your reps, you get used to used to doing it, but that's a good place to end that. So just to give you an idea of what's going to happen next is now we've done 800 and we've been publishing weekly for a long, long time. The podcast will still stay, but it won't be as regular. I'm going to start a new series.

Probably the next week, a few weeks time called the journey to 1000 and that is to coincide with the launch of Boostly Connect. And the goal is to get a thousand users on Connect and I'm going to build in public. We're going to show you exactly what we've done behind the scenes and how we promote it and how we sell it. And I'm excited for that series. The, the next thing that I want to do with this is, like I said, We've got over 200 stories here.

Over the last four years, we released two books, the book Direct Playbook and the book Direct Blueprint. I've got the third book in mind which is going to be around stories and it's going to be like hospitable hosts where we talk about their adventures. But it's going to be based on the podcast, the stories, the takeaways. That is going to be a massive project. I need ghostwriters and assistants and we can probably use chat, GPT and AI to do all the research, but I need someone to help put it together. That will be the third book will be around the stories from this podcast. So I'm excited to put that together and, and yeah, so if, if you, if you've enjoyed this episode and if you want to do check out more, you've got a lot of content to catch up on. Go on to Apple, go on to Spotify. Annoyingly, when we first started this, I used to record everything on Skype and the first 50 episodes are somewhere in the ether of the Internet. But they're not on podcast, they're not on Apple, they're not on Spotify. They are somewhere, but you can go and find them.

It's that. It's the embarrassing one that Mark doesn't want the first one on there. You pulled it down.

You know, when I first released it, I remembered the first season. I released it like Netflix where I just dumped them all. I've recorded five and put them on. And then for the first few seasons of doing it, I would do it that way. I'd record 10 and then just dump them all at once. So that's why they are just randomly on the Internet. I was trying my hardest to find it, but I just, you know, they are somewhere, but you can go and find it. Which, which is mad. And yeah, along the journey, obviously we've had Liam, that's been a massive part of it, but we've also had special shout out to Maynard who Edits all of these that you see at the moment and Rohit who was before him, who was editing all of these for the audio and the video. We had the team at Hospitality FM which was Will Slickers which for I want to say two or three years they were publishing it. So they would tidy up the audio. They would publish it on. On Anchor I believe or it was which was bought by Spotify later down the line. And yeah just so many people along the way that have helped with the blog posts with it. Moon, they help with the blog posts and the emailing out and there's always been a team behind the scenes and. And the. And the sponsors that were there as well. So we had hostfully uplifting IPRAC Super Hog were evolved in a little bit some way shape or form. Stayfi have done bits over the years. So it's been amazing to sort of to. To. To do and yeah, it's not going to be the end but we're definitely going to slow down just because there is a lot out there and there's a lot to do when it would a podcast. So thank you very much for. For being all these people have left these reviews as well. If you want something daily, then there is some of that we started that is powered solely by a by AI. It's called the STR Daily that is three minutes an episode every single day. The AI that we've created goes and scrapes the big publications that are out there, takes the best news, plugs it into something called eleven's Lab, creates the script. Hey genders the voice and then we've got somebody who just basically connects the dots and then it gets published on Spotify, which is pretty cool. But that's on episode 320 already. It's every single day, which is pretty cool over the last year, final takeaways, final words of wisdoms that you want to leave for this one.

So I mean number one is thank you Mark for being interested in starting a podcast whenever. Way back in 2017 was it? Yeah. So just for doing that. But also, you know, I think a good way to bring it to a close for me is the lesson that I've learned from you. And that is you are the definition of ready, fire, aim. Where it's like you find something which is new and cool and you learn about it and then you inspire. Inspire other people to follow in those footsteps and those sparks which you can see throughout the boostly podcast. And obviously there's people that we know about where there's people who have gone off and created businesses off the back of what your podcast talks about, direct book and stuff like that. And there's some amazing people in the community. You've got people like Gur, who's now doing marketing off the basis of what he's learned. You've got.

You've also got, like, Craig and his hotel journey and SEO and stuff like that. But actually, just in general, there's probably so many more people who've listened to the podcast who have gone off and done stuff because of your interest and passion for it that we don't know about. And this is the last kind of takeaway is that when you look at all these people that we've interviewed, so many of those don't just start off as a host, but they end up serving the industry through Jeff from Intellihost, or you've got Etta Dinman who analyzes the stars and serves hospitality things. But you, you might be in the business that you don't know you're in, and you might end up serving the hospitality industry in different ways. And there's so many people who will listen to these podcasts, your story and your journey. Mark, who's gone off and started other businesses and improved their businesses. So just a big thank you to you, really, for what you're doing.

I appreciate it has been amazing to get people on the show, get people on the podcast, highlight and showcase their voice, and maybe that has opened up another conversation somewhere down the line that's pivoted and changed or something. You know, I. I see so many people now doing cool things, and whether we were like the little amplifier of the voice or whether we're just a little thing that can help, a bit of kindling. Kindling. A bit. A bit of boost. All puns intended. It's. It's been cool. It's been amazing to see. And like I say, looking at these numbers is a bit overwhelming, but, you know, truly, it just started. I just, I was on Skype, crappy microphone, crappy laptop, and just went for it and just always found a way of being consistent. I feel like when you get past, I think when, if you can get past episode 12, you're in the top 1% of all podcasts that are out there because not many people make it past those, those sort of numbers, which is. Which is mad. Which is mad to see. And I'm just looking at all these numbers here, all the things that we've done along the way, looking at milestones. So episode 200. I do remember episode 200, because that is when we featured Ty on Stage, which is probably my standout episode way back when, because the tie on Stage movement was something that was just getting going. Vanessa over in. Over in Spain, she started it because in 2019, she was at an event and every single speaker on stage was a male. There was no female voices, which is mad, because we're in the. The industry of hospitality, where it is like 78 of people that run the business are female first. And she started this movement called Ty on Stage to get more women speakers on stage at these events. And in that episode, episode 200, we featured Vanessa, Julie, George, Mariah out of Switzerland, and I'm sure there's one more, but the name escapes me. I do apologize. But that was a really cool episode because we spoke about that and it definitely helped open up more voices around that topic.

Yeah.

And now, you know, you go to places like Scale, Damien and the crew, John, Paulo, they do make a big emphasis of making sure that there are more female speakers, which is. Which is awesome to sort of see. And that is the one that I feel that I will always remember because it was episode 200, but this one as well, episode 800, this will come out. This will be published on the 6th or 7th of October, 2025, which will be the official 9th birthday of Bruce Lee. I remember nine years ago on that day, walking into Barclays bank and open up a business bank account and turning it into an actual business. So it's all sort of tied in nicely over the, over the. Over the years. It survived covert, it survived pandemics, it survived all the. The that's been thrown on us, and it's still here.

So just briefly, as usually I'm the one asking the questions. And this has been unusual. How has things changed over that time from episode zero or one all the way through to 800, those nine years, those 800 episodes. What has been the defining change?

Oh, you know, the mad thing is, is that since that time, I've had two more kids. I've lived in other countries around the world. We've traveled all the way around the world. I've released two books, which has opened up so many opportunities and speaking opportunities, which meant we're now spoken in stages in America. I've spoken in front of 1, 500 people in Nashville, which was insane. Got to speak in Dubai and South Africa and turned down so many opportunities to speak in Australia and other places just because, you know, life gets in the way of. Gone through a takeover that I rejected, you know, nearly lost the company Nearly lost everything at some point last year. But it's just this thing about hospitality teaches you, is that you just get done. You just get it done. You find a way to make it happen. And I've learned that since being part of the granary, being part of, like my family's business in 2011-2016, you just learn that, you know, things will go wrong most of the time, but you just learn to battle through and, you know, it's. It's been a ride, it's been crazy. But I still, I say this a lot. I feel like I'm only just getting started nine years in, which is scary, but also exciting, especially with this new launch, this new product that we're going to be doing to see what the impact we can have, and that's the main thing, is the impact Boostly now has got. There's 2000 boostly websites around the world that are live. I know that because I can see it on our servers. We've got 800 active clients right now, and in total that tallies up to over 10,000 listings. It's generated over $250 million in track to direct bookings. I feel like untracked is closer to a billion. And this new product that we're going to create will help just duplicate that, which is insane. So.

And that's not including the people who have just listened to the tricks and tips, put it into their own business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Couple of scary interactions with big OTAs, but nothing too crazy. No lawsuits just yet. So we've managed to do all of this. We've managed to build a brand, we managed to. To piss off a few people, we've managed to stoke the fires, we've managed to have an impact, build a community. And we're still here, so we may continue. Right, I need to go and check if the rain has got any rain in my car because I think I might have left the windows open. So on that note, I can hear them all but outside. So thank you very much for tuning in. Episode 800. Thank you for coming up.

Thank you for inviting me.

And we'll see you on the next one.