This Is What I Have Learnt About Running A Business Over The Past 18 Years. 🚀

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and welcome. And I am not really here. I am currently in the uk. Fingers crossed. All things going well at the Book Direct show and the Short Stay Summit. Now I am pre recording a couple of these intros so there is something to go out on the daily podcast. Like I said in the whole of 2021, I want there to be a daily podcast going out to help you, the hosts, get the tools, the tactics, the training and the confidence to get more buckets. Now I'm going to slightly flip it kinda because I was interviewed on a podcast recently by the Amazing Lenka. Now what I wanted to do was just to put that podcast on the Boosted podcast in its entirety, but it was over an hour long and I do like to keep these episodes kind of short. So what we're going to do is I've got a little segment of that podcast to to show with you. Lenka has some amazing questions. I sort of documented the whole of Boostly.

So if you been ever been interested.

Who I am, how I got started, why I do this, and most importantly the tools that I use to run Boostly and recommend to others, then this will be a good one to check out. So without further ado, let me flip my camera. You're going to be listening or watching to the Amazing Lenka and we are delving into all about Boostly and who and how I got here. As always, thanks to the sponsors, I'll be back hopefully in a few days time from the UK where we'll be able to pick this up as per usual. But for now thanks for watching, thanks for listening and here is the amazing linker.

One of the worst things as a business owner that you can do is to be reactive to just wait for that email to come in and say booking. That's the worst thing that you can do. Because in hospitality we are very, very, very, very, very, very, very lucky. There is no other business in the world, no other career where you can create a business, open the doors to it, list it on 1, 2, 3 websites and pretty much be guaranteed as long as your pictures are alright, guaranteed to get in revenue. With hospitality, you've got that. Because we are so in demand, especially now where we are in the world. Coming out of lockdown, there's some pent up demand to go traveling and again it very much is very much market specific where you are in the world, et cetera, et cetera, but there is a massive demand for it. And so Airbnb have come out and said listen, we need 1 million. We need millions more hosts to cope with the demand. And you know, it's a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because you can go get listed on Airbnb and you're pretty much guaranteed to get bookings in straight away. But it's a curse because as soon as that happens, you get lazy. And when you get lazy, you become over reliant. And like you said last March, everybody who was around then had a business and had a hospitality business and will never forget it. It was the 20th to 21st of March, 2020 is when you woke up on the phone like you said, and Airbnb sent out a blanket notification email to everybody, all of the platform hosts and guests saying free cancellation. Doesn't care what the policy is, doesn't matter what the cancellation policy is. Free cancellation. And they rub salt in the wound by giving vouchers back. Giving vouchers back more crazier for a lot of people, not everybody. And a lot of people never, never got the money. They never got the help and support. They never got the thing. Doesn't matter what the PR they did on the other end because they had the IPO and ico, sorry, and all that. So it's, it's, it's a blessing and a curse. And there's no coincidence in the fact that April 2020, so today my business growth went up 200% because there were people that were stout Airbnb supporters, especially in America, because Airbnb is an American thing. They were so behind it, they've changed the verb. It's no longer str is Airbnb. I'll get an Airbnb. It's not I'll get a short term rental, it's I'll get an Airbnb. They were the ones who are like, hang on a second, I'm building a business here. I can't be just relying. I can't put build my house on someone else's land. I can't put my eggs in someone else's basket. I got to do something about it. I got to become multi platform I to get this thing called a direct booking website. And I'm very, very, very fortunate that through the last four years of building a personal brand, of showing up every single day, coming on podcasts, talking about these things, now talking on stages, is that when somebody went into a Facebook group and goes, who do I go to for a website? People were instantly recommending me, which was amazing. And this brings me back to maybe my final tip to give because I know we're sort of running out of time is that business is all about two things. Number one, it's relationships and number two is about becoming the go to. So relationships, just like anything and Matt Hancock and his cronies are all about this. It's not who you, it's not what you know, it's who you know. At the end of the day you could just be next door neighbor to Mr. Health Secretary and you can get a multibillion dollar contract and it's the same with anything. It's like high school. It's like when you want to get picked on a football team. It's not how good you are, it's it's if you know the captain. And that's literally business. It's not what you know, it's who you know. So it's relationships and it's about when you first starting joining that local BNI group, going on a Friday, going down for breakfast, meeting other business owners in the area, telling them about you and your business and what you're doing. Because you never know. These are the people. The business world is very ancestral. Everybody knows everybody. All it takes is for you to stand up and go, hey, I've got a couple of really, really high class luxury apartments and houses that are made for contractors or people. Business, business owners coming in from out of town and need a place to stay that don't want to stay in a travel lodge with crappy wi fi da da da da da. We actually work out really cost effective and if I'm fully booked, I've got a wealth of other people in my network that I can recommend you to as well. Just doing that for about three or four months building those networks because you never know, they may not be the person that's going to be your customer, but they'll definitely know somebody who's coming into town and they'll go, john, I'm coming to Tall Bay. Where do you recommend get to links. Go check her out. Amazing properties, really well known. I've met her at the local bni. Go check her out and then again that's the relationship building. And about becoming the go to is even more simpler. You've got to become your local brand ambassador. So what do I mean by that with the granary? What I did is I created a loyalty scheme, not a loyalty scheme for the granary, but I went and I went to my favorite coffee shops, I went to my favorite days out, I went to my favorite bars and restaurants and pubs in the local area that I knew that my guests would like. And I went to them and I introduced them, I said, hey, you know, so I've been coming for ages. I don't know if you know this, but I actually run the Granary 14 bedroom guest house. We've got three holiday cottages. We have thousands of guests come every year through our business and I would love to recommend them to come and check out you when they come to the area. And what we did is I basically said, have you got any discount that you could offer? So I worked out discounts of each one and I created a cool little PDF, a little printout, a little laminate, whatever you want to call it. I actually stayed in a place in Harrogate and they created a mini map which I loved. And I wish I stole the idea, but I didn't. I just loved it and so I moved on. But again, you can create a little mini map of, for example, Torbay and just pinpoint on it. You can get a printer to do it for you, your favorite places to go. You can leave it on the kitchen table and get a cleaner to put it down and you can do this place has 10% discount, 20% discount. You get a free starter X, Y and Z. Because a guest, when they're coming to your area for the first time, doesn't matter it's leisure or workcation or staycation or whatever it may be. They would love to have the insight of a local person because they don't want to be wasting their time trying to find on Google or TripAdvisor a place to eat or takeaway or whatnot. They just want to go, go here. It's amazing.

Having a blast. Gonna get it on the Bruce Lee podcast. Bruce Lee, like Bruce Lee. Cause it's so hard and the tea is loose leaf Making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.