Why your Business will never grow if you try and do everything yourself With Amanda and David of SAAngels S6E3

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Welcome to the Boost Hospitality podcast, season six, episode three. And in this one it's something kind of special. This is something that I've been looking forward to for a long time. Now we're going to be talking about outsourcing. So the service accommodation world is fantastic at working with VAs and outsourcing the tasks that they don't need to do or, or don't want to do. And this whole season is all about merging the two worlds together. So what do people in the SA world do well that hospitality could do better in? And what do people in the hospitality world do well that the SA people could learn about? And today is very much the former. So hospitality people, B and B, small hotel owners, you know, one person rental properties, one thing that they try and do is try and do everything themselves. I'm a massive component of outsourcing. I have my own full time VA, I've got VAs that I work with all over the world and they help me improve my business. But what I see is that so many people try and do it themselves. This episode is all about the reasons why to outsource, about why to hire a va, the benefits for it. But a lot of the times it's a, it's a massive time saving tool. But the people I'm going to talk to you today, David And Amanda of SA angels.co.uk show you that not only is it a time saving tool, but it can also make you money as well because you can have people working for you all around the world, all the times of the day and it would cost you a fraction of the cost of if you were to hire somebody in your team, in your office, in your property, from the same town or city of where you're based. Dave and Amanda, like I say, have been in the property game for a while. They actually have four companies now and one of them is called SA Angels, where they have built a team all around the world that are experienced in all of the channel managers in every single scenario that your guest could potentially throw at you. So I wanted to get them on this podcast just to go about what they do, how they go about it.

How they started in this.

And we also share some fantastic tips on what to look out for when you first start to outsource the biggest mistakes that people make. And make sure you pay attention to a bit of software and kit that a manager recommends because it could be potentially a game changer for you and your guests. So without further ado, please sit back and listen and, and enjoy Amanda and.

David, talk about, just introduce yourselves how you got into property and more importantly, how you got into the world of helping business owners outsource.

Okay. I kicked off with property in 1999 and I think Amanda kicked off 2010 with your buy to Let journey. And we built over the years, we built a steady portfolio of property, but nothing exciting and just using traditional Buy to Let models. You know, you're saving up the deposit, getting some modest cash flow. But we did pretty well because we caught a couple of decent upturns in market. So we did all right, but it pretty much kept us in the job. We are a married couple and co directors. We run the businesses and we've got four companies now, Claris Living, Claris Manage, PropertyCube, we've just rebranded, we've got a coaching business and we've got Claris Property Investments. And to break down Clarus Manage. I think what you're interested in here, Mark, is Clarus Manage breaks down into SA Angels and Made in the uk, SA Angels being a remote admin service to service accommodation operators throughout the UK and made in the UK's housekeeping business, which just really predominantly works down the M62 corridor. So, yeah, that's a potted version of what we've been doing the last few years.

Wow. So four companies, obviously you direct and run them all. How much of what you do and how much of being able to have four different companies do you attribute to being able to outsource and grow a team?

It's really crucial. You need to outsource jobs, take up your time, but like low cost jobs to free up your time so your time can be used on the more sort of higher, higher level jobs. So it's. Yeah, it's just, it's just freeing time and leveraging time as much as you can do.

I think we're going to really just scale it back and just go over some of the basics really of what outsourcing is all about. And there's a term that gets used a lot, specifically around groups that we're all a part of and it's va. So can someone just break down exactly what the term VA means and what outsourcing means?

Okay, so VA stands for virtual assistant. Virtual meaning that they're not sat in office with you. So with the advent of the Internet and the ability for you to contact anybody anywhere in the world at any time. So the first time we outsourced was, I think it was when we were doing the purchase lease options, wasn't it, David? When we Used upwork. We used upwork to go and find people to do jobs and that's how we've. In fact we've been quite successful with it because that's how we met Anna from Montenegro and she still works for us now. So she worked for us on and off. She started scraping data for purchase lease options. She did a really good job with that. She started to put to research some data for me and we've ended up taking her on full time now. So she works for us full time. Montenegro and I think it was about four or five years ago we met hard job through upwork and he still works with us. We've built essay angels with him. He's just recently this week gone. He's emigrated to Canada because hard jot was four and a half hours ahead of us. He's now four and a half hours behind us though I've laughed and said that I'm going to start waking him up at 7:00 in the morning.

Exactly. So I mean you definitely hit the nail on the. On the head there massively. Is that the beauty of outsourcing and virtual assistants and with the Internet being just so easily readily available now you're able to. Not when you want to hire a member of staff, you don't have to hire somebody from the local area. Again you could do which is all well and good but you may not get the right person for what you need. And with like you say countries like the Philippines and like India where I mean I've been and traveled that I know like the state of living and the state of pay is so less so if you. It just ticks loads of boxes for yourself. You can find a quality member of staff that can do the tasks that you need and then for them they can get a wage and a job satisfaction. But for the most part the reason why I love outsourcing because I've done it for years with Boostly and obviously the family business is that I can set a task at say 6pm and I know when I wake up the next morning it's done means that so much more can get done and it pretty much can get done while you're sleeping. So it's definitely an advantageous. So I guess you've mentioned upwork, but is there any other channels or any other websites that you use for resources when it comes to outsourcing or is everything pretty much predominantly done in Upwork.com.

We like Upwork because it's really good tool to get to know somebody, to build that trust between you. Because, I mean, we've known Hardjot for, is it four or five years and we've never met the guy, but we trust him immensely. With upwork, they can start working for you, they can do a task and you can get screenshots of their work. So, you know, through the software that's available there that they are definitely doing the task and they're doing it right. So we, we got Hardshot to build websites for us and the work that was produced was perfectly adequate. Much, much cheaper than getting it done in the UK with the Internet. Wonderful invention. We can communicate with them at any time. And like you say, it's, it's just wonderful. I go to bed knowing that I've got a team who are dealing with.

Guest queries for me really nicely there into book how you've now got a team to actually help you with your reservations. Now, can you just sort of explain to the process of when you started to do this? Because for many people that are watching or listening to this, having somebody in charge of payments and dealing with guests is scary. So what would you recommend to somebody that is, how would you recommend somebody to get over that barrier? Because like I said, I think that a lot of people watching this will be, no, I want to do that. So. But how do you. How did you get over that? And how do you recommend other people to say, listen, this is okay, it's total secure, it's 100% safe. And why that people should do so?

Okay, well, yeah, I totally get it because like most people, I did everything. I did everything. I did the payments, I did the ID checks, I did the telephone calls, replying to inquiries by phone call, by email, by texts, by guests try and get you in every way, don't they? I used to deal with all of that and you don't realize how much you're doing it because it just builds up and up and up and up and up. And it's when you start realising that you've never eaten a meal from start to end without being interrupted. Because that's when they're booking and that's when they've got their inquiries, they finished work, they're making inquiries and you're trying to eat your evening meal. And I think it was actually David, he was speaking to Harjot about it and Hardjot said, well, we can do that. And I'm like, no, no, nobody's doing that. I'm doing that. Nobody's doing it. Nobody can do it as well as me. It's A massive, It's a massive mind shift to trust that somebody else can do that for you. You have to be realistic. Nobody is going to be as perfect as you. Nobody. But if you want to build your business, scale up, market your business, improve your business, grow your business, you have to let go of those little jobs. It was baby steps. It was just baby steps. I'd get him to check things. So I taught Hardshot initially. I got him to do things that weren't really that important. And when he started to do it, I could give him something else and he would start, he would do that and then I would gradually give him something else. Baby steps, bit by bit. It's not perfect. It's never going to be a perfect transition. You have to be realistic. Nobody's going to be as perfect as you. Human error does still happen. Sometimes a system error goes down. You just have to be realistic with it. But the point is, is that when you can give up that work, it means you can go and do something else that you've always wanted to do.

Or you've always needed to people. And you, you know, hire, you work with people on how to outsource. What is the, the big mistakes that you see people make when they first start getting into outsourcing and finding people to work with?

I think there's two, I think there's two mistakes that people make. They either don't let go and don't let those people help them enough because they, they're so reluctant to let go. They're so, they're so. They say, their mouth says, yes, I want you to help me, but kind of like their heart is being, no, you can't do it as well as me. Get off, get off, get off. Is that they. There's delegation, isn't there? But then there's abdication and they just leave a whole lot to the angels and run away. And when things go wrong, they start shouting about it, understandably. So they're upset. But we're not running their business for them. We support them. We can do a lot of things on our own, but it's their particular business, the way that they want things to be done. They might have a slightly different policy on, say, checking idea with guests, but they abdicate. They abdicate all the responsibility. They just kind of disappear. And my team have text them, what do we do about this? What do you want to do? A situation has happened, what should we do? And there's no answer. You have to get the balance right between understanding that a VA is there to support you and help you not to do it for. Do you understand the difference?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

No, 100%. And like you say, I think if you have the systems and the structure in it, and I think it's more of a mindset than it is anything else, if you're ready to let go and you're ready to get help, then the process is a whole lot smoother.

You know, we have a client who said to US recently that 260 transactions, so 260 bookings that had arrived that month. At the moment it's about 350. Because it's a busy month, isn't it? June. Something went wrong with 10 of them. Something quite didn't quite go right because, you know, still you still, for all of the automation that you've got, you've always still got an element of human sort of interaction there. 10 thing, 10 situations. Something went a little bit awry and it's too easy to focus on what can go wrong. So he said, I had to switch my mind and instead of focusing on those 10 things that went wrong, I had to think, no, 250 times it went absolutely right. Spot on, followed procedure. Guests were happy and I didn't deal with them. So the time that he's now saved himself, he can use to build his business further and he's just got to keep remembering that. And that's the kind of client that we love to deal with, is that realism of expectation and to allow us to help. That's the main thing we can help. We can make huge suggestions to people, allow us to help them and do a better job for the business.

We're incredibly proud of these guys and anybody really who works overseas because obviously the English language isn't their first language. So they're dealing with all different people and also different people all over the world. You know, obviously we all know we get guests from all over the world, China, all different languages and they've got to, they've got to get over that. They've then got to deal with properties that they've never seen ever. They don't, they're not familiar with it. Isn't it so much easier when you know your properties?

Yeah, yeah.

And you're trying, you've got news, you might trying to find it and you ended up quite not there. Or they're trying to find a key nest or a key box or a route in. It's easy for us because we know how are you, but someone 6,000 miles away doesn't. So you know, they can. They've got maps, they've got photographs, got videos. We give them all this sort of thing but it's really, you know, not like being there and it's being your own. Then they've got all the different channel managers that they've got to get their head around, you know, whether it's best 24 Tokay obviously now we start to work with Zivo with clients and just loads, you know, vivo, you name it. They've got to get their head around that and then they've got to get their head around, you know, every everybody else's expectations and what they want to do and everybody's a different client and you know what to do that and Amanda was pulling. The reason we got ultimate reason we got the SA Angels form was because Amanda was pulling her hair out. Dealing with hours. Imagine dealing with 100 plus properties when you've never seen them for different people with different expectations. So you know, the guys, and it's not just our guys. I say that about everybody who's going to take a decent VA on these guys. They're worth the weight in gold, they really are. So that's just what I wanted to add there.

You've got to give as much information as possible to your VAs. Do a video on where the lockbox is, do a 10 second video, you know, 20 second video on how your ceramic hob turns on. A video on how to use the boost button in the cupboards. A little video on the more information. They've got a library of information. They can just WhatsApp that out to your guest and they'll do that at one o' clock in the morning while you're tucked up asleep and they won't interrupt you, they'll just deal with it. We also have, because we, we have a lot of apartments so we have a lot of situations where guests will phone up and say, you know, the electric's gone off. So they have like a flowchart where they will check. So they'll get the guests to check. Is it just that socket or is it all the sockets? Is it. Go and have a look at the consumer unit. Most people don't know what a consumer unit is. So we'll send them a picture of a consumer unit. Check all the switches. Are they down? Are they up? If any are down, put them up. So they will actually go through this flowchart that I've devised until we get, we establish whether it's the entire building, in which case phone up the owner. Can they be moved anywhere? Or do we get an emergency electrician out and this depends on the owner? Or do we just say, look, really sorry, it's gone off, but we will let the owner know first thing in the morning and then they will sort of solve the problem for you. So we, we can. We're only as good as the information we are given by the owners.

Yeah, I think for the owner itself, the owner itself knows that all of that is going on, all that text back and forth and whatnot, and they've had to do nothing. They've literally, you know, because we've all been there on the other end where you get a WhatsApp, you get a phone call at whatever time, and so much has gone wrong, things go wrong. It's just obvious that things will go wrong and then you've got to waste, you know, take hours potentially out of your time just to answer a question where you're safe. The owner's safe to know that he can grow portfolio, grow his business, and they've got a team that is literally on the other end of the world taking care for him. Or when One o' clock in the morning, fast asleep. The next question is, there is a lot of people in the service accommodation industry that are now starting up virtual assistant businesses and outsourcing businesses. And you see a lot of advice, and you guys would have seen a ton of advice being given on Facebook, groups, events and talks and blogs and whatever. What is some bad advice that you see being given in your industry at the moment, specifically around outsourcing? And what would you like to like, sort of address?

I see a lot of people go and get a VA from the Philippines for $3 an hour. They're really cheap. It's great. Except you've got to train that person. You've got to spend all that time training that person and that person might not actually be suitable for the role and it's only one person. And then they give up, they don't want to do it anymore. So you've got to go and find the next person and you've got to train them up. And at the same time, you've still got to run your business. So we have an awful lot of people who have gone through their third or their fourth VA and you say to them, look, you kind of get what you pay for. This is a tough business, hospitality business. A VA on $3 an hour is great if you want to just get them to research something in your area. No deadlines, no pressure or anything. But if you want them to answer your queries on booking.com or go into your email and answer your queries with good English as well. Why would they do that? They can go and get an easier job for $3 an hour. So they leave, they don't want to do it anymore. They disappear. They've gone and you've got to retrain somebody else. You know, with the SA Angels, they've been doing this a long time. They've been trained by me and Harjot, Harjot's been trained by me. I've been doing this a number of years. We're constantly evolving our systems, we're constantly fine tuning them, we're constantly reacting to any changes in the marketplace. And this is a fully trained team with a lot of experience who knows how to deal with situations. One member of my team, he used to run his own business. He ran a courier firm in Australia for about six or seven years. He only came back to India because he needed to spend time with his family. He will convert a lot of my bookings from booking.com, he will convert them into direct bookings. He will come to me and say, I think I can convert these. I'll say, brilliant, Aman, go ahead, do it. And he does. These are fully trained people that understand the business. They know what to say, they know what to do. They make suggestions to me about problems that they notice, common queries from guests or common complaints. And they will come to me and inform me what's going on so that we can discuss putting a system in place for it.

I don't suppose you would know just off the top of your head how many bookings that this particular Viha has been able to convert from an OTA book into a diary booking in the last sort of three, four months. Would you.

He's converted about 20. Because an awful lot of people come over for the football or the cricket and they will phone them up and they'll just convert. And he also, they also know how to recognise a company booking. They know what a company booking looks like, you know, when you've got the address, which is a unit 5, something, something, something. They know that's a business booking. And so when they phone up to check that they, you know, that they're coming, that they know to check Wishbox, to have a look at their own personal guest area, that they know where they're collecting the key from, that he will try and convert bookings then. And he's converted quite a lot. He's made thousands, really. And these are, these are bookings that quite often come back as well because they get that personal touch from Aman speaking the language.

Amazing. I really, really like that. And that's an area that I didn't even think about when it comes to outsourcing. So I'm really glad that you mentioned that. So, okay, so somebody's now watching this. Whether it is somebody in service accommodation who hasn't yet outsourced, or it could be a B and B owner, hotel owner, rental owner. Where do you recommend that they get started? What's the first thing that they need to do to start this outsourcing journey? If they were to do it by themselves, what was the first thing that either of you could recommend that they do?

I think they need to break down their tasks. They need to look at what they do in the course of a day, because when you're doing it yourself, it's just a blend. It's a blur of stuff, isn't it? I think they need to look at what tasks they do, break it all down, identify separate tasks and then choose which ones they would be willing to let go of. Then either go out and find a VA to just do those and let that. And I hope that, you know, they don't disappear on you, or you would go to a team that are already experienced who can give you that comfort and confidence that, you know, we know what we're doing, we just want to know just how you would like it done, but we can make some suggestions for you as well and just relax. Might continue to want to build the relationship with their guests on their own because that's something that they really enjoy, but they know that everything else has been dealt with by somebody else. That might be the element that they really like because they want to convert those bookings themselves.

Like how you have to break down the tasks. My advice that I gave a friend of mine is basically got a 1, 2, 3 system. So for one week, just write down at the end of every day everything that you did, you know, and it can be literally anything when it comes to what you've run done in your hospitality business. And then after that week, look at everything and you can put it on a massive whiteboard or a massive piece of paper and just number everything, 1, 2, 3. So 1 is only you can do, and then 2 is something that's important, but someone else could do it. Shove. And a number three is something that you don't like doing and something that you could easily outsource. And then just to get started in the journey. And this is What I did when I first discovered upwork is I got my number three tasks and I just did some couple of one off jobs. And it's like you're saying it's just whether it's a design and an image or doing something like that. So, yeah, really good. So if somebody doesn't want to do it themselves, if somebody wants to reach out to yourself and the SA Angels about potentially working with you, what do you look for in a potential person to work for, potential client? Is there any questions that you ask, like are you quite picky with who you work with? How do you go to sort of deciphering who is the right fit to somebody to work with you?

Yeah, I mean, this is a very pertinent point for us at the moment. Like most businesses, you take on everybody that'll have you, don't you? And then you get to the point where, you know, the 8020 rule, the parrot principle, the 8020 rule. You realize that sort of 20% of your business causes like 80% of your problems. So we do try and talk to people now to get some understanding of their expectation and what they think we can do to help them and also find out how receptive they are to suggestions. You know, we've introduced software to a lot of people. For example, Wishbox, it's a great piece of software. We've introduced that to an awful lot of people. It's helped them tremendously, but it's, it also helps us because it's a software that we're familiar with. It helps us to help them.

So, yeah, what is Wishbox? Sorry, you just explain it. For those of you don't know it.

Wishbox is a standalone piece of software. You can integrate it with Booking.com, airbnb, you can integrate with iCal links. All those bookings will feed through onto Wishbox and each guest will get a confirmation email. It will have a link to their own personal guest area and they can start the check in process. In the guest area. In the guest area, they can say what time they're coming, how they're coming, if they're coming by flight, it'll ask for their flight number. So that gives you a heads up on what time they might be arriving. You can also upsell. So if somebody's coming earlier, you can give them the option of buying, say an early check in and they can pay for through Wishbox. They can start, they can use the feature, there's like a chat feature in Wishbox where they can send messages to you and you can Reply. You can have automated messages in there, you can have canned responses where you can just send it through on chat. Parking queries, the usual queries you get all the time. Where can I park? What time is checkout by? You can send all of that through. A huge amount of time saved. But what I really, really like about is this personal guest area that they can open up on their phone, gives you the location, you can give them the plus code, exactly where your front door is to help them find it. That's supported by Google Maps. You can put a guidebook on there, you can have frequently asked questions on there. And the idea is, is that it prevents or reduces or all of those questions that guests are always asking and needing response to. If you give the information to the guests so it's in their hand before they get there, they've got time to digest it. They're already being welcomed by this app, this personal guest area. They already feel a bit special. And you can send all arrival information through to them through there as well. You know the arrival code. But they can also upload their passport, their ID through it. Guests are very, very responsive to it. It's a great piece of kit and it's so cheap. It's well worth it. Amazing, I think. Very responsive to it. Yeah, great.

Thank you for that. So, okay, so if there's somebody who has watched this and has found out a little bit more about outsourcing and they like the idea of somebody coming on board to helping them, which is virtual, and if they don't want to go alone and they wanted to come to the angels, what's the best way of reaching out to you? Virtual for like an initial chat.

Initial chat. Facebook's usually the best way to get us because we're always on there. We love Facebook, don't we? I've got a group serviced accommodation with AWF they can get onto. Link to. That is our page for the SA Angels. We could just make a friend of me, Amanda Walker Fernley, on Facebook. I would have asked the initial couple of questions and then we would get an email and that would go through to Hardshot. And then Hardjot can discuss what the packages are, what the prices are and whether that's something that's, that's suitable for people.

Final question. Then all the people that you've had come through, all the people that you do work with, with the initial questions that you ask what seems to be their biggest pain point, that they come to you and they go, david, Amanda, I need help because of what's that.

Time, time, they just want their life back. Hospitality is, it's an all consuming beast, isn't it? Guests are very demanding, they want answers and you give yourself, you give more and more of yourself and they usually come to us in desperation, which is, I just need my time back. I need to spend time with my family, I need to be able to switch off or I need to be able to scale my business. And I can't do that if I'm constantly replying to emails or picking up the phone or, you know, dealing with guests that want more towels or there's not enough toilet roll. So, you know, they, they just, they just want their time back. And this, and this is what it is, this is the Angels. It's a team of. It's a team that I'm using to leverage my knowledge and experience and that will help other people as well so that they can leverage my time, knowledge and experience so that they can go out and scale, build their business and make more money.

What I really like is that you're talking about SA or property as hospitality. I think one of the big things that so many people in service accommodation that I've chatted to don't realize is that they're now in hospitality whether they like it or not. They're no longer in the property game, they're in the hospitality game. And I think there's so many people, they go on these weekends or they get these sales pitch and they just get this word or two words, passive income, and it's nonsense because it's not passive income, it's anything but. Like I say, this is why it's so good to have businesses like yours and the SA Angels, because it can get a bit overwhelming. You just see in the Facebook groups that we're a part of and you see the stories and it's just, it gets too much. And if they properly structure their business, they take themselves out of the business and they work with VA's properly, then it means that you can do the most important thing and that's grow your portfolio, grow your business, grow your brand. So amazing. Thank you very much, both of you for coming on and for taking part in this episode. I know that there are going to be a lot of takeaways. Okay, you two, it's been a pleasure. I really love that you guys have come on tonight to chat about all things service accommodation, all things outsourcing. Thank you very much to everybody that has listened and if you have got any further questions on this episode that you would like to ask, then please just drop a comment below. Or if, like I say, reach out to Amanda or David directly. And if you want to go and watch and listen to previous episodes of the Boost Hospitality podcast, go to boostlead.co.uk there's five whole seasons that you can download now and listen to. I'll be back very soon for episode four of the Boost Hospitality Podcast Season six. We're talking everything Serviced Accommodation One final thing before you leave. Before you turn off your podcast, please can you go to itunes and go leave one of those lovely five star reviews so more people can hear about this.