Welcome to Short Term Rental Riches.

We’ll discuss investing in real estate, but with a specific focus on short term rentals.

Quick, actionable items to acquire, manage and scale your portfolio.

I’m your host, Tim Hubbard.

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Well, welcome back to the Short Term Rental Riches Podcast.

It’s such a pleasure to have been in the short terminal space for several six, seven, eight years now, because I’ve gotten to meet a lot of truly experts in the industry.

And today we have Mark Simpson with us, who is the founder of Boostly.

He’s literally helped thousands of short terminal owners with lots of different things.

He’s the author of the Book Direct Playbook.

Mark, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

I’m a fan of this show.

Thanks for having me on.

There must be episode 250 now, is that about right?

Yeah, we’re getting up there every week.

Not many people get past episode 100, so well done.

You’ve got a massive background.

One of the things I just left out there is that you also have a podcast and you’ve got a lot of episodes, don’t you?

Man, we’ve just passed episode 800.

So we’ve been doing this for a long time.

We sort of, not cheated, but the year of COVID, we thought, right, let’s go for it.

We ramped it up and we did a podcast episode every single day for like the big rebound just to give hosts a bit of help and support.

So yeah, in that year 2020 to 2021, we did, yeah, an episode every day.

So that’s where 365 episodes cranked out.

Man, that is a lot of work.

Well, hey, I appreciate it.

I know me personally with my portfolio, I’ve picked up a lot of tips from you and the content that you put out and your book, the Book Direct Playbook, which I read and it’s full of nuggets.

And so I think maybe we could start this off with, we know every business essentially comes down to marketing, right?

If we’re not marketing our business, right?

We don’t get sales and in the case of short term rentals, we don’t get bookings, right?

And you truly dive deep when it comes to marketing in all sorts of different ways.

Can you talk, I guess, a little bit about the book that you wrote and just a little bit of your background?

Yeah, 100%.

So you’re right.

Sales at the end of the day is the lifeblood of every business.

If you aren’t making money, there’s no business to power.

And the whole reason why Boostly started was because I saw in my little community, which is Scarborough in the United Kingdom, this accent is from England.

And in my little community, I could see that there were too many people were over relying on third parties to bring their bookings in.

And this is like 2015, 2016.

And at the time in the UK, that was booking.com and Expedia.

Airbnb was just getting going, but it wasn’t really that popular in England and the United Kingdom that year.

But still with the OTAs and third parties, people were too reliant on them.

And their sales, their marketing was just putting their business on a platform and waiting, hoping, praying for Bookings to come in.

And I was saying to these people back then, and I say it pretty much every single day, every podcast, every webinar I go on, is that we are very lucky in this industry because the career that we’ve jumped into is one where we make memories.

And we make memories because of that, it’s very in demand.

And there’ll be people listening to this, watching this going, oh, well, I’m not in demand.

It’s because the problem is on the back of COVID, is that there is so much competition now.

It’s a bit harder now because regulations and laws are coming in, but back in COVID, there was barely any regulation.

There was no barrier to entry.

It was like a step up from like MLM campaigns, you know, working for the AVA or clean, you know what I mean?

And so because of that, you could literally go down the street, go to a house, get that house, go to the landlord, say, hey, I’ll take this off your hands, pay the rent and by the next day, get it on Airbnb.

That’s how easy it was.

And because of that, people were just putting all of their eggs in the Airbnb basket or putting eggs on the booking.com basket, et cetera.

And the problem is when you do that, you become so over reliant on these platforms, what happens if they stop bringing you bookings?

And that is what’s happening now.

And that’s happening in many different ways.

For example, suspensions.

I’ve just seen today a prominent Airbnb fan, somebody used to work there, has had his Airbnb listing suspended.

And it happens all the time.

And that is when people go, oh, my whole thing, my mission is to help every single host have multiple revenue streams into their business, to not over rely on on airbnbbooking.com and to build a business on their own land.

And it does fall down to sales and marketing and to bring it back to the book.

So by 2021, I had done over 500 podcast episodes, done over a hundred hours of videos on YouTube.

And I had amassed this big box and catalog of marketing tactics and tips.

And I was seeing questions in Facebook groups.

I was getting questions in my DMs about X, Y and Z.

I was like, right, it’s time to do a book.

And I’ve always wanted to write a book because I love having multiple revenue streams into Boostly, which is my business.

And Amazon is a revenue stream and it’s an untapped revenue stream.

So many people don’t put, don’t list it on there.

And I thought, right, let me get a book.

I did a book writing course.

I knew the skillet and I knew what I was going to do.

I’m a massive fan of Tim Ferriss.

The Tools of Hiding book is behind me, just over here somewhere.

And the way that that book is laid out is it’s interviews with his most favorite podcast episode.

And it’s not a book that you open up on page one and you read all the way to page 300.

You pick it up and you jump to different chapters, different guests, et cetera.

And I wanted that to be the layout of our book.

And the book that we put together is 101 Tactics and Tips, Market Tactics and Tips and how you can build your business on your own land.

And that was the blueprint behind it, so to speak.

And you write the book, you send it off to the copywriter to check, it goes out and you sort of hope that it will do well, but I’d never anticipated it would do as well as it has done.

It sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

I still get messages to the day two years later in my inbox saying, hey, I’m reading the book, I picked up the book, which is unreal.

And yeah, it was definitely like the launch pad of a lot more people becoming aware of the Book Direct Movement, but obviously Boostly as well.

Yeah, gosh, a lot of work into all that, right?

You can’t just pick up a piece of paper and write a book.

And so a lot of good nuggets in there.

And I really like the layout.

I mean, it’s similar, I think, to the way our show is, we’re quick, actional tips.

I mean, you really just laid out a lot of real world practical things.

And those are all really helpful.

I guess they’re not helpful for direct bookings, though, if we don’t start with sort of step one, which is having a website and a place for someone to actually book first, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, what I was realizing while putting the book together is there was so many people who didn’t even have a property management software tool, you know, Lodgify Guest, the owner, etc.

And there was so many people who didn’t have a direct booking website.

And they were coming to me saying, hey, we want to do direct bookings, we want to book direct.

Where do I get started?

And I was just, you know, I would always ask the question back, well, who’s your PMS?

What’s your website?

And the amount of times people were coming back to me saying that they didn’t have it was crazy.

So that’s why I always say one of the most important things that you can do even before you go and get a direct booking website is you got to get a PMS.

The problem with that is that there are over a thousand to choose from.

There’s loads and 50 new ones every day.

And you can go into any Facebook group out there and you can ask the question, which PMS should I go with?

And out of 10 answers, you’ll get 10 different software solutions, which is a bit of a problem.

I mean, the good news is that consolidation is happening.

They are buying each other out.

They are turning into maybe like the top 30 people.

But even still, what works best for yourself will work different to me because I’ve got maybe different needs.

The best advice that I would give anybody, and we’ve got a free blog on this, is we interviewed over a hundred people, the pros and cons of their PMS provider, and we put a blog post together.

So you can go check that out.

boostly.co.uk, boostly.co.uk/pms.

My main advice would be go and book a demo with them.

A lot of them now give free trials for like a week or two weeks.

So you can have a play with it.

See which one suits you best.

Figure out what your main unique buying issue is.

For example, there’s some people who do the management model and they have to have really accurate reporting tools to give to their homeowners.

That’s going to be a driver for you.

Maybe your driver is you want to have, you know, US customer service reps.

That’s a big one for a lot of people.

Maybe some it’s got to have an app.

People love an app.

So whatever that is, go on that factor alone.

And that’s the main one with that.

And then obviously once you’ve got the PMS, that is the main place.

And then you can have a website on the back of it.

You can take strike payments.

You know, you can link to all of the OTA, so there’s no double bookings.

But yeah, it was crazy how many people didn’t have that.

Yeah, things have changed a lot though.

And I, gosh, it’s like every conference we go to, there’s just so many new tech providers and all.

Yeah, a lot to choose from.

So yeah, check out that blog.

If you’re out there listening, and you haven’t yet used, jumped on a property management software.

I mean, that’s mandatory.

Step one.

So Mark, you’re an expert in marketing.

I’m just gonna say that.

I think you, your whole team knows that.

I mean, you really, really do a good job with that.

And there’s a lot of pieces that go into marketing.

And there’s a lot of pieces that go into getting a lot of direct bookings.

You talk about a lot of them in your book.

And I know you got some new products and stuff coming out that we’ll jump into a little bit later.

But I’m curious if you could just talk a little bit about how you find social media fitting into direct bookings.

Social media is your shopfront, I would say, to your business.

If your website is your business card, then the website is your shopfront.

It is amazing now in 2024, and the recent stats and the surveys have shown exactly how much percentage of your guests are using social media to find a place to stay.

This new generation, this Gen Z generation, Gen Y generation, they are using TikTok and Instagram before they’re doing a Google search to find a place to stay, which I find is crazy.

And that’s not to mean if you’re a host and you’re just getting started, you got to think, you got to create this amazing aesthetic, videography and photography.

You don’t.

All I would recommend everybody starts doing is that you start documenting your journey.

I see it more and more now.

People that are opening up glamping sites and, you know, different properties and locations, boutique hotels, or even just your stand alone short term rentals, documenting the journey as they’re getting going.

And people love to follow a story.

You got to think about social media.

When you open up Amazon, you are opening up that app because you want to buy something.

When you’re about to perform a Google search, you are doing that because you want to take action.

When you open up social media, you are doing it to be social.

You’re not looking to buy.

You’re going on there to, you know, check in with friends, check out what people are doing, et cetera.

So if your content that you post out is last minute availability, buy now, book now, da da da da, you’re instantly just going to pot off the person that is viewing it.

If you can tell a story, document your journey, maybe throw in a couple of memes along the way, then people will really, really appreciate what you’re putting out.

The best example of this, and I think a book that I read a long time ago and I took a lot from it was Gary Vaynerchuk’s Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.

Perfect example of how to put content out, how to do any sort of marketing out there is give education, education, education, document, document, and then Right Hook is the sale.

So whatever your sale may be, that last minute availability, etc.

And you can take that sort of framework and you can put it on Instagram, TikTok.

You can apply it to Facebook groups.

In the book, I’ve got a whole chapter on Facebook groups and how there is a goldmine of reservations that are just sat there.

The problem is, is that people go for the spray and pray approach.

And when they go into Facebook groups, they’re literally just peppering ads upon ads upon abs in these groups every day.

If you take the approach I put in the book, it will show you how to turn lookers into bookers easily.

Yeah, great advice there.

And I think there’s a lot of avenues with social media, right?

And it can definitely be a lot of work and it is a lot of work.

If you want to get good results, we have AI, of course, that can help assist with a lot of these things.

And if we have time, I’d love to pick your brain on that for a little bit.

But I guess before we get into that, social media can be super, super helpful.

But we are sort of at the mercy of the platforms, right?

Facebook changes their algorithm or something, or Instagram changes their algorithm.

Similar to the way Airbnb can change their algorithm, and then all of a sudden our property is not in a category or it’s not showing up as much.

We’re sort of at the mercy of these big platforms, but there’s another approach to marketing or one that I guess it’s a little more secure.

And you talk about this and you mentioned it earlier, never building your house on someone else’s land.

Can you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, so my favorite form of marketing without a shadow of a doubt is email.

I know what they were talking about, StayFi and Arthur Colker and what he’s built there.

But you’re right, social media, you are at the beg of the mercy of the algorithms.

One thing I would say about that though, and I think that so many people get caught in the comparison on this is that they’ll go on to Instagram and they’ll see a competitor who has got 200,000 likes on a post and I’ll go, I can never do that.

And I’ll go, well, let me see your social.

And they’ll say, they’ll have like 200 likes on a post.

And I go, right, well, you may feel a bit downhearted, but just imagine right now in front of you, you were 200 people stood in front of you who were wanting to come and find out more about you or stay with you.

You’d feel a little bit differently.

You’d feel a bit overwhelmed, right?

And they’d go, yeah, a hundred percent.

Well, you know, don’t get that comparison.

If you’ve got 200 followers, for example, but you’ve got 200 people that are engaged in you, 200 people that when you post, they are always communicating, always active, et cetera.

Then the social media algorithms actually favor you over a post, over a page that’s got 200,000 followers.

But when they post, only a thousand people engage.

It’s all about quality over quantity.

That’s number one.

Bringing back to email.

Now there’s the slow lane to marketing and there’s the fast lane.

So just imagine now you’re on the highway and you want to go from A to B and you want to get to B as soon as possible.

Slow lane is obviously posting on social media.

Slow lane is doing all of the things that aren’t guaranteed to work.

One of the fast lanes and the fast way of getting there is email.

And the reason being is that when you do a post on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, you are throwing it out into the void.

Right.

And there’s so much noise.

When you post on Facebook, you’re right.

Algorithm means 0.1% of all posts that gets put out there gets seen on the newsfeed.

It’s so hard to get on the newsfeed unless you’re going to give them money.

Right.

It’s the same with Instagram, same with TikTok, etc.

When you have a listing on Airbnb, even if somebody lands on your listing, there’s still a ton of noise.

Airbnb are going, right, you like this, check out this.

When you send an email and I send an email to you, Tim, right?

You open it up, it’s a one-on-one communication.

As long as you put that email together nicely, you can get someone to open it up and to read all the way down and to take action.

There’s no noise.

An email is unbelievable because for every $1 you invest in it, you get $42 back.

That’s a 4,200% turn of investment, which for everybody who likes numbers, that’s a nice little stat for everybody.

The problem is that I would argue that only 1% of the whole industry actually invest time, money and effort into their email marketing strategy.

I’ll go to a host and I’ll say, right, how many emails they sent in the last year?

They look at me blankly and it’s like, okay, well, this is a problem.

Tools like StayFi are fantastic for helping hosts start to gather an email list.

Then once you’ve got the list, it’s like, well, what are you going to do with it?

That’s all about education.

So that’s what we do at Boostly.

Yeah.

You help take advantage of that and lots of really good ways.

Awesome.

Love that.

Never build your house on someone else’s land.

Start building that email list if you’re out there and you have not, make sure you get started.

If you missed our episode with Arthur Colker, StayFi, which Mark has been mentioning here, that was episode 245.

Really easy way to get started with your email list and it’s essential.

Awesome stuff there, Mark.

Let’s see.

Let’s talk about AI real quick because I think that’s something that you’re quite interested in.

And yeah, what are your thoughts on AI as they relate to our industry?

I absolutely love it.

And one of the reasons being is that small business owners, they always come at you with two reasons why they can’t grow and scale their business.

Number one is time.

Number two is money.

With AI, time, it just goes out the window because you have got, for free, a intern that is 1,000 times cleverer than anybody else on the planet, literally in your pocket 24 7, never complains, never sleeps, doesn’t ask for money, doesn’t ask for time off, it is there.

And I can’t remember the last time that I crafted an email campaign or if I crafted a social media post and I didn’t tap into AI.

It’s been around for over a year now.

It’s getting much more smart and much more clever within every week, with every release.

There’s not just OpenAI’s ChatGPT, there’s now Cloud, X have got their version with Grok, Meta have got their version with Llama and so many more large language models, LLMs, are being created on a daily and weekly basis, it seems.

And because of that, there are now more unique case studies.

For example, there is vendors that have been set up in our industry specifically designed for hospitality and more importantly, specifically designed for customer service.

I would argue that customer service and speaking to your guests is one of the most mind-numbing tasks that you have to do.

And I’ve been in this industry since I was born, right?

I’ve tried my hardest to escape, but it keeps pulling me back in.

And I do have that PTSD of 11 o’clock at night, getting messages from guests that I have to answer, whether they’re asking for Wi-Fi code or the water is not working X, Y, and Z.

So the first use case in this industry is where AI is being brought in to create these chatbots that are very clever, very smart, very receptive, and can have a human conversation with people.

Boom, AI is one.

You’ve got Get Bestie, Host AI, Hello Hosty, Guest Guru.

There’s quite a few.

You can just go and do a bit of Google search.

In fact, I interviewed, I did a big roundtable.

It’s called the AI Roundtable.

And I invited all of the founders of these companies in.

And bearing in mind, it is a very competitive market, but they were all well behaved.

There was no sniping, no bitching about each of his products.

They were very good, very well behaved.

And it was an insightful two-hour conversation because they showed what they’ve done, where they are, but most importantly, what’s coming next.

And at the moment, it’s text.

So text in, text out.

Next is voice.

So for example, a guest will be able to call this AI bot who is acting on your behalf, and they will be able to have a conversation with them in real time, which is fantastic.

And I was talking to you off there about Delphi, D-E-L-P-H-I, which I’ve been using now for six, eight months.

I was one of the first early adopters, and we’re about to add in video, a video clone, which is crazy.

So someone can video message me, have a video conversation with me.

Every question that you ask is trained on Boostly, is trained on this industry, is trained on the book that you were talking about, all the podcasts that we’ve done, the YouTube videos, et cetera.

So you can ask me questions 24 seven in a video as well as voice, which is active now and text.

Yeah, it’s amazing.

Well, good to know in the future, if we want to do a follow up interview and you’re busy, we’ll get your bot video clone on and we’ll go from there.

That would be interesting.

You can just line up.

Yeah, amazing.

We’re excited.

Everything that we’re doing too, we’re really excited with AI.

And I’m kind of a techie guy just at heart too.

I used to work for a software company for a long time and it just has so much efficiencies, with guest communication, with all kinds of things, with building listings, and doing research and marketing too, like you said.

Research as well is untapped.

There was a project that I don’t know how far it got down the line, but it’s called Adept.

And one of the examples they were showing on the site, it was an agent, so agent AI.

And this agent AI, the guy went on the computer, loaded up Zillow, and he was acting as an investor.

He was like, right, I’m looking for a free bed property in Houston, Texas.

It needs to have this, cash on cash, da da da da da da.

And he literally hit send, and you could see the computer was doing it on the site for him.

Now, this was the demo, it was a while ago.

I don’t know if you ever get out of a beta stage, but that’s the sort of thing that you’ll be able to do at mass scale.

So it really is exciting.

I feel like we’ve got, what, three, four more big months left of one big quarter left, two big quarter left of 2024.

I feel like we’re about to see the next iteration of ChatGPT.

And then at the start of next year, we’ll probably see GPT-5, which will just ramp it up another notch.

And then who knows where we’ll be.

I think the next sort of level and stage to this where, you know, it starts to get in people’s houses a lot more.

I think we’re going to start seeing more robots being produced.

I think there’s already started rolling those bad boys out.

Amazon have said it, Tesla have said it.

And I think they’re going to be made more mainstream where you’ve got like your AI robots and the house helping you doing little chores and whatnot.

And then who knows from the AGI, ASI, interesting times ahead in that front.

Indeed, indeed.

Sky’s the limit.

It’s coming in from all sides.

As long as it’s not the Skynet.

That’s what I say.

As long as it’s not the Skynet.

And then we’re all right.

Yeah, we actually, we watched the original Terminator the other day.

And it was like when robots take over the world in 2030.

And I was like, oh my gosh, that’s in like five years, you know.

And so many of these things are already happening already.

Well, awesome, Mark.

Let’s see, so we talked about having a direct booking website, super important.

We talked about social media and its importance.

And I loved your perspective on that too.

Or, you know, if 200 people are liking your post or whatever it happens to be, 200 people is a lot of people, you know.

And if you envision them standing in front of you, that’s a great way to look at it and to not get discouraged.

If you’re out there and you’ve been trying forever and you’re not getting a lot of, or as many likes comparing to someone else.

So I guess the lesson there is don’t compare, right?

We talked about not building your home on someone else’s land, so building the email list.

We sort of just dipped our toes in AI there.

This podcast, you know, we’re trying to provide actual tips.

You’ve already provided a lot and your book certainly has a ton, but there’s someone out there and they’re kind of lost in the marketing space.

What would be the place you would recommend starting or maybe the one most important thing that someone could spend a little more time on right now?

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, then you know that I’ve been managing my properties virtually for years and years.

My team and I have managed thousands of guests.

We’ve learned a ton and I’m really happy with the progress and the growth we’ve made.

In fact, we’re now big enough to help manage your properties as well.

Our team has a ton of experience from the inner city apartment to the large lakeside retreat.

We’ve worked with all types of properties across the nation.

We’ll help to take the management workload off your plate while earning top revenue and excellent guest reviews, all while charging an industry low fee.

If you’d like to find out if your property fits with our program, just head to strriches.com.

There you’ll see a property management button.

Again, that’s strriches.com.

Just click on the property management button and we look forward to chatting with you soon.

If I feel lost and let’s just assume that they’ve got a couple of properties, let’s say, and you’ve got a PMS and you’ve got a website and you’re still 90% plus reliant on Airbnb, safe for your bookings.

One of the best things that you can do right now is you can go into your PMS, go to your reports and just get the last six months worth of bookings with you.

If you’ve got like an average 70% occupancy, let’s just say, then you should have a decent amount of bookings in there.

You should have at least 30 to 40 to 50 people.

What I want for you to do is I want you to pick up the phone and I want you to give them a call.

Now, this is uncomfortable for a lot of people, but the best times in your business growth is when you are uncomfortable, is when you’re out of your comfort zone.

What you want to achieve with those calls is you’re not going to try and sell them.

What you want to do is you want to try and find out, A, why they booked with you, B, where did they go during your stay with you, and C, would they be able to recommend somebody to stay?

Do they have a referral friend, co-worker, et cetera, somebody could stay with you in the future.

Now, the reason for those three things is, number one, if you’ve got a case set of about 30 to 40 people, and let’s just say 10 people pick up, right?

Out of those 10 people you have a conversation with, if seven people are talking about one thing about why they booked to stay with you, let’s just say it’s the view, let’s just say it’s the proximity to an event venue, let’s just say it’s because of your price, right?

Let’s just say because of X, Y and Z, then you’ll have a very good idea of what your avatar is, why the guests come and stay with you, right?

Because for the most part, especially when you’re getting going, you’re guessing, you’re making an estimated guess about why people come and stay with you.

But if you can actually talk to the people who hand over money to come and stay with you, and if you can get six, seven out of 10 people talk about one thing, then that’s something to go all in on and that becomes your niche.

So I would go, let’s just say that you’re near a hospital and there are guests staying with you because they’re visiting sick ones or maybe they’re working at a hospital, et cetera.

But you go, okay, this property is good for this.

And you look at the actual property and go, okay, so what is it about my place?

What am I doing?

Let’s just say that the people who are staying with you are working at a hospital, right?

These are people.

And again, go check out Jesse Vasquez, because he talks about this a lot.

He’s one of the best when he talks about medical stays, etc.

But it’s like, can you get blackout blinds?

How can you make the people who are working at hospitals lives easier?

Can you get bus routes?

Can you have recommended taxi drivers that could come and help and get in to and from the hospital?

What can you do to make that property stand out more to that niche?

And you go all in on that niche.

Now, that is scary for some because they go, well, if I go all in on this niche, I’m ruling out all these other people that could give me money.

But the riches are in the niches.

And my key for everybody moving forward is you got to bury yourself so far down in a niche, there’s not room for anybody else.

And the thing about that is, if you’ve got one property, and let’s just say you’re 70% occupied, and let’s just say your average stay is about seven days, let’s just say, then you’ve only really got to get 20, 30 bookings a year, right?

20, 30 people.

And we talked about this.

You don’t have to get millions of bookings.

You just have to get 20 or 30 people to see your business and go, I want to book and stay with them.

I mean, if it’s a really good one, it could be that you just need one or two bookings.

But to do that, you need to have a niche.

You’ve got to be able to speak to the person who is searching on your listing, right?

That’s the key of that.

The second one is where were they visiting?

Where did they go and check out while they were staying with you?

That’s an opportunity to network.

So if you ask 10 people and seven of them go, Oh, I went to go and visit this restaurant, this coffee shop.

The first thing I’d be doing, I’d be calling, walking into that restaurant or coffee shop and saying, Hey, majority of my guests, I send them to you.

Do you have like a voucher scheme?

What can we do to send more people your way?

Can you do anything you can offer to our guests to give them a bit of a discount?

A, that business owner would be stupid to say no, because you are literally sending in free marking, right?

B, more often than not, we’ll give you a voucher code of some way, shape or form.

So C, the guest absolutely loves it because they’re saving money to go in there.

We did this at our family business and we had like a little map together, pinpointed in the local area of places that they could go and visit, which is around our niche, which was families, that they could go and get 10% off, et cetera, et cetera.

And it was such a win, win, win.

We sent so many people every single year to this open farm, but you could go and visit for the day and ride on tractors and stuff.

They started doing weddings, but they had no accommodation and they had the bride and groom that was saying, listen, we’ve got loads of family coming in from out of town.

Where do you recommend our wedding guests stay?

And who do you think was the first place that they said to go and check out?

It wasn’t booking.com, it wasn’t Airbnb, it wasn’t Expedia, it wasn’t a local big chain, it was us.

And we would get full out weekends, sometimes weeks with these wedding guests, which was only on the back of us picking up the phone and giving a phone call to them and sending people their way.

And then the final one is the referral.

And this is simple, right?

And bearing in mind, every single thing that I’m showing you right now is free to do, costs you absolutely nothing, right?

But the referral, so when you call the guests and you speak to them, you’re not asking them to spend money with you again, because that’s a little bit sleazy.

But if you frame it like this, do you know anyone who is coming to X?

Now, if you pick up the phone and you speak to a business guest, this is unbelievable, because the business world is very ancestral.

He could have people in his company who are actively coming to your town, your city on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, but just don’t know about your property.

He’s never told them, right?

So if you say, hey, Tim, is anybody else from your software company that’s coming to the area at all for any conferences or events?

You go, actually there is.

Let me put you in touch with our manager, our accommodation manager, our accommodation specialist, and you’ll be able to get on to our little black book.

Those sort of things are goldmine.

But even if it’s just your vacation traveler, just say, hey, do you know anybody who’s cool as you, but is looking to come to the area for their next vacation?

And they’ll go, yeah, 100%.

We actually do, this family is looking for a place to stay.

I’ll pass the details on.

You don’t stop there.

You always dangle the carrot.

Just go, oh yeah, Tim, amazing.

So just to let you know, if they booked a stay and they mention you when they’re doing the booking, we’ll send you X as a token of our appreciation.

And X could be anything.

It could be Amazon vouchers, bottle of whiskey, bottle of wine, stick of rock, whatever you want to call it.

You can have it something that’s locally well known or you can just send them hash in the post.

If you dangle the carrot, people will take action.

And those three things there, anybody can do right now, especially if they’re slow on bookings and especially if they’ve had bookings because the data is literally sat on their PMS right now.

Their phone number is there.

The only thing that’s stopping them is them.

Because to pick up that phone and to do a text or do a call, it’s a big sort of hurdle to jump over.

But once you do that first one, it will take you days, weeks to do that first call.

The second call will take minutes after.

Fabulous, fabulous advice, Mark.

And yeah, a lot of you are sitting on little gold mines out there.

And if you’re tweaking your listing title every other day and moving one header photo back to the back and the next one up to the front, and it’s not doing anything for you, just remember what Mark’s saying here.

You’re sitting on a gold mine.

You just got to pick up the phone and put in a little bit of work there.

That is going to become such a redundant tactic very, very soon.

And I’ll tell you for why Airbnb recently purchased an AI company.

And recently they created icons.

And recently they changed the profile section of everybody’s Airbnb account.

Now, the reason why they’re doing all of that is to collect data.

I don’t know if you tried to qualify for one of these free icons where you could stay in the up house or meet Kevin Hart or whatever it is.

To qualify, it was free, but you had to ask and answer a ton of questions.

The only reason they’re doing that is to get your data.

If you log in to your profile now, it asks you what’s your favorite 90s movies, where do you like to go, et cetera.

It’s building its database.

And Airbnb have got one of the biggest data sets probably that is out there.

In my opinion, and it is literally my opinion, the search on Airbnb is going to change rapidly, maybe this year, probably next year, where you will load up the app, you will say, right, I want to go to New York, have your dates in.

You will not see the map.

You will not see listings.

It will be like a Tinder where you’ll swipe left, swipe right, right?

Based on your likes, your wants, and what you’ve told Airbnb in the data set, right?

And so all of these tweaking pitches here and there, doing X, Y and Z to like beat the algorithm, there’s going to be no algorithm, right?

It’s going to be exclusively to the person who is using the app, right?

So if I use the app and my wife is sat next to me and we both search for New York, it’s going to show up different things, right?

So all of these little tweaks is absolutely pointless.

So if you’re wasting hours every week doing that, substitute that for what I talked to you about, which is new business activity.

Do that for 5, 10, 15 minutes every day, consistently for 365 days, and your business will be a lot better come 365 days later.

Yeah.

Fabulous advice, fabulous advice.

And all that work that you put in today or tomorrow or the next year, it’s going to stick with you, right?

Because you’re not building your house on someone else’s land.

You’ve got the emails, you’ve got the contacts, and you’re less reliant on these big companies like Airbnb that can change things all the time and are changing things all the time.

Fabulous advice.

Compound effect is real, man.

I mean, when I first started eight years ago, I heard people talking about the compound effect and whatnot, and I was like, but now eight years on and I’m the other side of this, 800 podcast episodes, over a thousand YouTube videos, there is a compound effect of content that is out there.

So when people are searching more often than not, Boostly comes up and it’s a compound effect of doing the referral tactic, compound effect of talking to customers and networking, et cetera, consistently for all these years.

It’s now come to the point where it’s really having its fruition over the last two years.

So you just got to start.

Literally, that is it.

You start.

Stop watching TikTok at night.

Stop watching the Netflix, Disney, Amazon.

Instead, dedicate an hour to doing new business, just an hour, every single day, and that compound effect will reward you in a year’s time, 110 percent.

Totally agree.

Consistency and hard work, and this is something you guys have been doing for a long time, Mark, like you said, and you’re showing up way more because of all the hard work you put in.

So tell us a little more about Boostly and what you guys are up to these days and where you’re headed.

So for the last eight years, our sort of tagline is the tools.

We give hosts the tools, tactics, the training, but most importantly, the confidence to increase their direct bookings.

And a big part of that tool has been website design.

I feel like that’s where we really got to be known as what we do.

We aren’t website designers.

We like to call ourselves a transformation company.

We get you from where you are to where you want to be.

And my goal is to get everybody who works with us to 65 percent direct bookings.

Our niche is that one property owner, management company, etc., up to 20, 25.

That’s where we operate mostly in, which is the majority of the market.

Now, the website tool that we have built has really evolved over the years.

We do everything under WordPress.

The reason being is that it’s the best CMS, content manager solution that is out there.

Google love it, and you can do so much more than a free website on.

Insert your PMS.

The problem is that it’s really expensive to put together.

It costs us, it costs the consumer, and yada, yada, yada.

The more that we have grown, the more customers that we get, the more staff we’ve got to get, the more developers we’ve got to get, programmers we’ve got to get.

So our costs go up, and so our prices have had to consistently go up.

It’s been my worry, seeing that we sit in the one to 20 property owner market, this industry, that our prices have priced out a lot of the early people getting going.

Because not only do we do website, we’ve got CRMs, we do trainings, we do all of that combined in this one package.

So the thing that we’re launching in October, in Q3 of this year, is the plugin.

So the plugin sits on any WordPress website.

Doesn’t matter whether it’s a Boostly website or not.

We’ve had this internal plugin for so long now.

And I’ve started to notice that people are going, well, I don’t want the website, I’ve got a website, I just want that plugin.

Because that plugin is the main connector.

That is what connects to HostAway, Hostfully, Guesty, all of the big PMSs our plugin connects to.

We’re the only ones in the whole industry that have these connections into these PMSs.

And what we’ve decided to do is we decided to turn it from internal to external.

So we’ve rebuilt it from scratch.

You’ll be able to go on to our website just for a small monthly cost of, let’s just say, $80 a month.

And we haven’t decided fully on the price yet.

Instead of paying the six grand to build out your website, it will just be $80 a month.

You can download the plugin, you can have a website up and running within 15, 20 minutes because of this plugin, which is crazy.

Because at the moment, our build time for a website is like 20 hours.

So if you can have a website up and running literally within 20, 30 minutes, it’s going to massively reduce everything.

And anybody, any host, doesn’t matter what the skill level, you’ll be able to be up and running, which is very powerful.

And the second cool thing of this is that we’re able to create it where you can connect to multiple PMSs at once.

So let’s just say, Tim, you’re with Guesty and with HostAway, we’ve got 20 properties in the same area each.

Instead of me just having 20 properties on my site and you having 20 properties on your site combined, we can have 40 properties on our sites.

So it looks like we’ve got more of a portfolio.

So we’ve got more bookable places.

And if I get you a booking from my website, then we can just work out a little cool referral fee and vice versa.

And it doesn’t just stop there with one.

You could create your own little network of hosts.

And let’s just say you get 10 people together and you’ve all got 10 properties each.

That’s 100 properties on your site, creating your own little mini OTAs, your own little mini listing sites, your own little referral networks.

And you’ll be able to mark it and be visible and get more diary bookings that way.

And it’s all powered through this plugin.

And that’s what’s coming in Q4.

So we’re very excited.

It’s gonna massively shake things up.

And yeah, I’m about to go quiet for a couple of weeks.

We’re gonna get in the lab.

We’re gonna finalize it, test it like crazy, launch it and then just go like gangbusters.

That’s awesome.

That’s exciting.

I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Seeing it in action.

I’ll have some demos ready.

Yeah, cool.

I’ve got one other question for you, Mark.

But before we get to that, where’s the best place for people to find out about your new products, to find about your existing ones, to hear you, all those good things?

Yeah, I mean, the best place, Instagram is always good.

Boostly, UK, B-O-O-S-T-L-O-U-K.

Or just grab a copy of the book, the playbook.

It’s literally, you know, the Kindle is like a dollar.

The Audible is like $4.

The print is like $10.

Go there, sign up to the free course that comes part of it.

And then once you’re on the email list, you’ll definitely hear when we’ve got more.

I’m going to plan in Q4, I’m going to plan doing webinars, Zooms, demonstrations, like pretty much every day in Q4, just to really spread the word, because we really want to ramp it up.

You know, my goal is to get to this in front of 10,000 hosts, you know, using this bit of kit.

Awesome.

Well, get out there and grab the book.

I’ve read it myself, like I said, full of nuggets and Mark and his team just have amazing content.

So thanks a bunch, Mark.

Just one last question before we jump off here.

And the title of the podcast is Short Term Rental Riches.

And so a lot of people naturally just associate the word riches with finances.

But we know life is not just about finances.

We can have all the money in the world and we can still be unhappy.

So I’m just wondering if there’s something in your life or some habit or something that you’ve changed or way that you live out your days that enrich your life.

But in a non-financial way.

What I’m saying, and they are all sat on the other side of that door.

I have been in this industry for a long time.

In 2011, when I came back in full time, it was me and my wife and my eldest.

We’re working in the hospitality business with my parents.

And I barely saw my wife or my eldest at all.

It was very much me and my wife, we were working revolving shifts.

And when we came out of that and I started Boostly, we built this whole company to be family first.

And I’ve done that for eight years.

I’ve been very fortunate as this business has grown.

I’ve been able to hire more people that can do more of the work.

That means that I can spend less time doing the work and having more time with the family.

And you’re 100% right.

People associate riches and goals of having as much money as possible.

But for me, I don’t care about that.

I would much rather give all of the money to run Boostly to other people.

And that means that I get paid less, but that means I can have as much time as possible.

I love doing the school runs.

I do like 99.9% of them.

The summer holidays are here now in the UK.

It’s just started.

And as of tomorrow, I’m off for the whole of August.

We’re traveling around in campgrounds around Europe, which is amazing.

And the team doing all of the work behind the scenes.

I’ve been very much impacted by Tim Ferriss’ For Our Work Week, Mike McCallett with his clockwork, Traction by Gino Wickman.

All these books have played such a massive role on me.

And I’ve been able to sort of install that into the team.

So the riches again, not about the money at all.

It’s about spending as much time as possible with these little buggers as they grow up.

Because there’s going to be one day when they’re not going to be here.

They’re not going to be wanting to hang out with us.

And that’s why we do that.

And that’s how I do that.

Great advice and great to hear.

And thank you so much for coming on, Mark.

I know our audience is going to love it.

Full of nuggets, lots to take away.

We would, of course, love to have you back on in the future.

Whether it is you in person or it’s your highly trained AI video bot replica, we’ll take what we can get.

So thanks for coming on and hope to have you on in the future.

My pleasure.

Thank you very much.

If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while, well, then you know that I love technology and we can save a ton of time implementing AI, artificial intelligence, in the right ways.

My team and I have been playing around with this for months and we’ve written the perfect prompts that you can just plug in to your favorite AI tool like ChatGPT to help you uncover exactly who your guest avatar is, help you write your listing descriptions, help you write your photo captions and so much more.

It’s a living, breathing document that we’re consistently working on and I’d love to give it to you for free for being one of our loyal listeners.

You can head over to restmethods.com/ai and get your copy for free.

I hope it helps you along your short term rental journey.