Why Paul Smith started Touchstone Education 🚀

Why is it that you've sort of come full circle? Why did you come back into this and why are you now sat in Doncaster in your offices now, sort of teaching people what was the sort of progression from where you were.

Sorry.

To where you are now?

Like, what do I want to do the rest of my life? And we made a fairly fundamental decision. We don't want to work for anybody else ever. So we then got into property and. And it was probably six, seven years after that that I first got into service accommodation and I was actually property networking event. I sat next to a guy called Justin and we were talking about Formula One, because I'm a mechanical engineer, he's an electrical engineer and he was William's chief telemetry engineer, which was really fascinating for me. I spoke to him for hours about that and towards the end of it I sort of said to him, what do you do then? And he said, so, conversation. I said, what? And he said, you know, Airbnb and all that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I said, what are you doing that for? Then he said, well, it's good money in it, really. And I said, where are you doing it? And he said, middlesbrough. And I laughed out loud. I said, what? And he. And I. And no harm to anyone from Middlesbrough. And this wasn't me being nasty, this was just like an instant of reaction. I said, who the hell wants to go to Middlesbrough? And he said, come up next week and I'll show you. So I did. And what he's got there is fabulous. He's got like a church with, you know, all like the vicarage and everything and a big car park and he's converted it to. I can't remember exactly, it's like 16 or 18 apartment. And he's making all kinds of money. And I was like, wow, wow. By that time I already had, oh, I don't know, 15, 16. I buy to let flats and houses and stuff. So all I did literally is I converted one. One flat, one bedroom flat, place called Dumbarton. And anytime I tell anybody that story, they say the same to me. That I said to Justin, why would anyone want to come to Dumbarton? And so it really doesn't matter where you are. I think with the right service accommodation offering, if you provide the right service, the money will come.

The next question is, you're now obviously teaching people service accommodation. Touchstone is teaching people service accommodation. We've had Gordy, we've got Abby coming up on the podcast from Touchstone. What is the one big mistake that you see, when you send your delegates out into the wide world, what is the one big mistake that you see that they're most commonly making when they're getting into service or cross accommodation and all of this jazz, the single thing.

That holds them back the most is they try and do everything themselves. And what I'll always tell people is, look, I'm trying to help you to set up a business here. So a big part of what I try and get across to people is it needs to be done, but doesn't mean you need to do it. And so many people are very, very resist employing VAs, you know, virtual assistants. And in my head, anytime you're doing anything that could be done by virtual assistant, you're working for £1 50 an hour. Now, I don't know about you, but I didn't get into service accommodation to work for £1 50 an hour. Now that's not to denigrate to people in the Philippines or wherever else that do work, because, you know, over there, that's really good money. So I feel like we're doing, we're doing good in the world by allowing people that wouldn't normally get access to that kind of money to earn, by their standards, pretty good money. But then from our end of the telescope, all the bits and pieces that need to be done get done and they get done well. But you don't need to.