What Makes Success For Your Accommodation Business with Dino Tartaglia - FULL VIDEO

Podcast we are in season seven, episode 10 and I am so excited for this episode because I have invited Dino Tatellia into the podcast to give us a breakdown of what makes a business successful. Dino is one of those guys that I've had in my world for a while now, part of the different Facebook groups that we're a part of and he is one half of the success engineers. Now what he has done over the year is he has been able to work with success. Some of the most successful business owners that are around and he has broken down the tactics and the tools that they have done to get from A to B. They've just released a podcast between him and Simon, his co founder and in the podcast what they do is that they look at businesses like Tinder, for example. We talk about it in the podcast, how it went from an idea to now being a hugely successful business and they break down the methods and the tactics etc in this. Now for this episode, I wanted Dino to come in and I wanted him to share some of the successful traits and I also wanted him to share what he sees as seen some of the biggest mistakes that he sees business owners make. This is one not to miss and I want a massive thank you to Hostfully. Who are the podcast sponsors we talk about Hostfully actually in this episode because I shared one of our mistakes and Dino went on to explain about an experience that he had, a hospitality business in Poland and how someone like Hostfully could have prevented that. So please go and check out hostfully.com please make sure you go check out Dino. And at the end of the call, again at the end of his podcast, if you listen all the way to the end, he will share with you a link that you can go to where you can book in a clarity call with him where he will help break down where you are now, where you want to be, what you need to do to get on, who you need to be talking about. Go and check out the show notes brucer.co.uk, there's going to be lots of tactics and tips and things to talk about in this, but without further ado, let's jump on in and let's have a chat with Dino. What makes in your opinion a successful business sustainable and what threatens that most?

Now one of the key things, Mark, that I think it's worth mentioning to the guys listening is that you can't develop world class business like this, a world class ethos if you like thinking anything other than you're going for excellence. However, there is a Continuum. There's a Spanish spectrum that people sit on from good enough to world class. And it's in my view, and I know Simon shares this, perfectly acceptable to adopt some of the characteristics and the insights and the understanding and the practices of world class people and apply that to being good enough or to being excellent. Yeah. Which is further down the line. Perfectly okay. So I don't want any of the guys thinking, oh, you know, I don't know, world class. That's not. That's not who I am. That's not. The point of this takeaway that I'm.

Getting so far is what so many business owners that we chat to do is just scratch your own itch. You know what I mean? They build something from a problem that they're having, like Tinder from a prime example. So it's really interesting. Like, that's the takeaway that I'm getting just listening to these shot examples. But yeah, please, please continue.

And that's a great way of describing it, actually. Yeah. But here's the key thing. It's understanding that a lot of other people have got that itch and they're in. It's uncomfortable or painful and they'll pay to have it taken away. Big, big.

Just like a Tinder date that goes wrong.

For all. I talk a lot about, about Tinder as one of the examples that we use. Never been on it. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing. So the next thing is embracing the challenge. The guys listening may have heard the term, and I know you have fallen in love with the process. I'm not a great fan of that language. It sounds a bit trite and kind of pseudo motivational. But the reality is you've got to build a process that you do love, warts and all. And the message really here, and probably one of the big takeaways, is about the shift from being destinational to becoming directional.

Now we've talked about what, what people are doing well to sustain. Now. I wanted to sort of flip it to the biggest mistakes that you see that business owners make. Now, you work with a lot of business owners. You know, you coach and teach and, you know, advise. And obviously there's going to be a lot of people. Doesn't matter whether it's massively successful or, you know, kitchen table, like you said at the start. But what's the most common mistake that you see that people that are making the. You work with specifically those business owners.

So there are five, what we call fatal mistakes. If they're not trapped. First one is obsession, and that is nobody likes to be told that their baby's ugly.

Yeah.

So if you've got an idea that. And again, this could be the itch that you've decided to scratch because you think you've got a great idea and it worked for you and it made a difference, so you make a business out of it and the market just isn't interested or isn't interested in the way you present it. And you get obsessed with actually pushing this because you think you've got a great idea and you don't test it. That way lies madness and failure. So being open to feedback and proper constructive feedback that says, you know what, you want to look at this maybe differently or have a different perspective, have different inputs. That's the first of the five. The second is just being in a hurry. We call it the need for speed. There's this kind of modern phenomenon that I call the microwave mindset. People want to press a bloody button and have things happen. And sometimes there's a cycle, sales cycle or customer cycle, whatever it is, doesn't matter. There's that expression that you can't be half pregnant, and you certainly can't be. And pregnancy has a term, it takes time. You can't just press a button and have the baby pop out. So thus it is in business, as it is in life, Some things take time. So the third thing is what Alan Greenspan, who was the chairman of the Fed, called in the 90s, irrational exuberance. We call it the thrill of the chase. So it's being mindful, if you like, of the broader perspective that your business sits in, and not just chasing one thing and amplifying that. That's what Thrill of the Chase is all about. There are two other things to pick up. I'll actually pick the last one first because I've just kind of alluded to it. And that is, we call it no spare toilet roll. It's a situation no one wants to be in and it just literally means running out of cash. It's a cash flow problem. You know that expression that turnover is vanity, profit is sanity and cash is king. It's a massive thing to take in the business, particularly small, like in the short stay industries, small businesses, where these things are the lifeblood of the business, frankly. So just making sure the cash continues to flow is kind of key. The final thing we call, with a dutiful nod to Wallace and Gromit, we call the wrong trousers. And that is showing up as the wrong personality or job Type for your business, your business needs. I don't know if any of the guys have read Michael Gerber's E Myth or Emif Revisited. Yep, great book. I was very privileged to see Mike deliver that in Sydney when he launched Emyth way, way, way back in the 90s. Great, great book. But one of the things that Michael left out of that was leadership. There are four key personalities that your business needs. It needs a leader, it needs an entrepreneur, which is kind of key. It needs a manager to take care of the day to day and it needs a technician. Guess what most people turn up as in their business, they turn up as the technician because that's what they do and that's what they're comfortable with. But you know, running a team, you need leadership and you need to be the manager.

So we had a one star review and it was simply because of the water. Depending on what floor you're on, the water is at different levels and the.

Top floor is where we suffer the most.

It's the way that the building was created. It was due to where things are being placed. But basically when you are in the shower, it's either extremely hot or it's freezing cold, or it's a trickle. And again, it's. If anybody was to go onto our reviews on TripAdvisor, we do very well because of our location, because of who we attract. It's very family friendly, we get a lot of really nice reviews. And I think that our problem was, is that we took our eye off the ball. We sort of just masked that water problem. So when it came along and we got a one star review and we had really upset guests, we just really know how to react. Now. I'd like to think that we've got things in place now, but we do pre warn people staying in these rooms about the wall. But I'd be really interested. For all of your experience and what you've done over the years, how would you have sort of put that proposition to the guests before they made it clear that they were getting.

Certainly my experience of. There's two bits to this. Yeah, I think what, what I'm probably gonna do is talk about a concept that'll kind of open up the conversation a little bit at the back end of this. But a direct, a direct approach which is looking at the processes and setting expectations, which is kind of key because whilst people aren't cheap necessarily, they can be directed and you can set expectations, but also understand where the expectation needs to be set so that it kind of matches so I was staying in Dansk in the north of Poland a while back and I hired a through booking.com, i had a short stay for five days cracking little place, a little two bed just off the center of the town. And it wasn't exactly the same but there was a, there was an issue with the boiler charging up the water and getting it hot for the shower. So in Polish and in English on the shower and on the doors I came in. And on the instructions, which I never read, I have to say when I, when I check in at short stay was, was a little notice saying listen, if you get in the shower, here's what's going to happen. Yeah. And because I knew that I was absolutely fine with it and yeah, maybe somebody else wouldn't have been, but in terms of my expectations I was all right to follow that direction because I've been told had I stumbled across that, yeah, I might give me a one star review as well. Yeah. So what this leads nicely into is what we call the value equation. So for the mathematically minded amongst the listeners, what that is is value equals benefit over cost. And if you look at the mathematical relationship between benefit divided by cost, the lower the cost is, the bigger the benefit is and therefore the bigger the value is.

In an industry like no other, we hundred percent rely on those reviews. We rely on reviews for Algorith, we rely on reviews for social proof, we rely on reviews to get more guests and customers coming through our doors and if you can do that then you're more likely to experience getting those really good reviews that is then going to help you move forward in the business. Now Dina, there are so many routes we can go down with this but I think the best thing to do. You told me off air that you've actually got a podcast. I think that it'd be great if you could just let people know how can they find a podcast and just tell us a little bit more about what you are going to be discussing on this and sort of. And what you're trying to achieve with it.

Good question. So we're because of the experience that we've got with world class performers and understanding how sustainably successful businesses and entrepreneurs.

Function.

Whatever walk of life they come from, and how people go, particularly working with Olympic athletes, how you go from being ordinary, as is the case with many of them, to being extraordinary, we're kind of keen to give those insights to people and not just let them sit there like more shelf development if you will. So called. This is about how do you Take those insights and adopt them in your business so your business gets better and so that you get more life from the business rather than taking it from you, which is what happens with a lot of people, because people get into business to get more life generally. That's the idea. And it isn't really what goes on. So the podcast is called Back Bedroom to Big Business. And we look at companies like Dropbox and LinkedIn and Tinder and Slack and Doe, which is a really interesting one and many, many more. Brewdog would be a case in point. That have started in literally a back bedroom or a small garage and then they've grown into something enormous. And the question generally for us, between Simon and I, because it's just us chatting away about the insights we've got, is what was it that created that? What are the key characteristics we can pull out from a personal development point of view, character development for the individual who grew from running a business that was a few thousand quitter a year in the past at the outset to, you know, maybe a billion dollar business, how do you go through that transformation? Because the lesson there, Mark, for everybody is, well, who do I need to become? What do I need to understand? What do I need to do to run a half million pound business or a million pound business as opposed to a 50,000 pound or 100,000 pound a year business? Because there are shifts in understanding that you've got to go through. But a lot of that isn't just business acumen, it's you as a person, how you develop to become somebody who meets those challenges and tackles those challenges and overcomes those challenges. So we look at the individual growth and we look at the business growth and we take those insights and we try and help people on the podcast who understand how to bring that home and adopt that for themselves. So they tailor it and create their own, if you like, their own blueprint for success.

I love podcasts such as Master of Scale and How I Built this. Well, definitely be getting that on with my fret, with my walks with Frankie when I'm trying to get him to sleep. So yeah, definitely look out for that one. And I mentioned to Dino before the call, before we got started, is there any way that anybody can reach out to you if they want to speak to you a little bit more, sort of chatting about these things, mindset and whatnot. And you said that there is a link that people can go to. Can you just explain a little bit more where someone can jump on a call and have a about doing so, please?

So I run a series of clarity calls. I kind of restrict them in a week. So I'll do anywhere between sort of half a dozen and a dozen. But I'm opening that up so that the function of that mark is for anybody that's just literally got problems in their business. I'm an engineer by profession, so I'm a troubleshooter and the coach and a mentor, and I try and blend that up. So the idea on the call, anybody who's got stuff that they just can't solve in the business, and they don't really understand necessarily where the problem is coming from. So there's a root cause causing a surface issue. Yeah, it might just be. You'll do this all the time. Not enough inquiries coming in. In your business, you will know that the person that presents that to you probably is looking in the wrong place for where the solution for that is, because they haven't got to the root cause. It's the same. So it could be an individual issue. It could be a team issue. They've got a couple of, you know, a couple of people in a team. It could be financial. It simply could be a sales focus or a marketing issue. My job on the call is not to give the solution, but to identify the root cause of the problem and what the steps are to solving it so that a professional can then come in and do the thing. It might be a marketing issue. I don't do marketing, but I understand it well enough to go. That's where your problem is. Yeah. So on the call to make this succinct, on the call we get clarity. Why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you focused on that? What is it you're trying to do? What are your aspirations? What are your biggest challenges? Okay, where do you think the problem's coming from? Let's go and have a look at it, and let's get a bit of clarity. That's what the call does, what I'll.

Do, because the link is a tricky one to spell out. So what I'll do is I'll write it in the show notes. I'll put it in, into all the videos and the content that we produce on the back of it. So if anybody wants to jump on a call with Dino, then you'll have the links to do. So just want to say finally, thank you so much for doing this, Dino. I learned something new every time about business, and as always, it's a pleasure for doing this. Have you got any final remarks that you would like to leave the podcast with.

Other than that, thank you and it's been an absolute pleasure. I just hope that it has. You know, mindful of what I said about the value equation, yeah, I'm kind of hopeful that the listeners get a lot of value from this. The podcast will go into this in a lot more depth and elicit these things. But if any of the guys have got any questions about this or have they taken insight and actually use it in their business, I'm very open to answering that as well where I can. But I thoroughly enjoyed talking to you as always.

Every podcast guest gets a free full mini bio on the show, notes on the blog post, so you can go and check that out@boostlee.co.uk podcast you are looking for season 7, episode 10 if this is the first time that you've tuned in, please make sure you go and check out the full back catalog. You've got six other seasons that you can check out with and in this season what I am looking to do is interview experts and business owners from all over the world that can help other short stay accommodation owners get more bookings, get more clarity in their business and figure out what they need to be doing. Okay, my name is me, Mark Simpson, Founder of Boostly Helping short stay accommodation owners Boosted direct bookings. Thank you so much for tuning in. Please make sure you go and rate, review and subscribe and I'll be back with episode 11 very soon.