Welcome to Boostly Podcast Season 11 Episode 3. This is a recap of the Boostly Business Roundup last February 5th.
Here's the audio for this episode:
Here's the video for this episode:
Timestamp
06:30 Wins
09:50 The beauty of preparing
10:30 How to say no nicely
11:50 20,000 words
13:00 The week that was
25:00 Boostly Content Creator
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Audio – Boostly Podcast
Transcript from the Episode
What I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to share some wins on my business. I want to do a follow-up. I'm going to give one host that I've been following on social media this week that I think everybody would get inspiration from. So I'm going to do a shout out as well.
It's a blessing and a curse that my business is growing at the rate that this is growing. It's a blessing because my messages spread in the book, direct messages spreading, and I'm getting to have some amazing conversations with amazing people. And there's a couple of apps that are the reason for it. There's a couple of channels, and I'll talk about them. And I've already mentioned them before, but the curse is that there's a lot of people who want my time. I've just come out of it to our clubhouse room. And the guy who running JP is a great guy. I've met him in London at the Shorts Stay show, you know, I've got a lot of time for him. And he's never asked me to do anything before. And he's asked me to do this.
And you know, it's great for my business because I was able to talk to a whole new people, property, people who, who maybe never have heard of the term direct booking before. But I was able to say a few things. And I know that there was a few moments that they took away, because I had messages from Instagram on the back of it, which is great. So I've been able to help and influence maybe a handful of people. But at the same time, because I'm saying yes to a lot of things. Well, I'm fine. And it's taken, it's taken me away from doing a lot of what should I call regular tasks that I structure. And so I'm a very structured guy, I'm a very structured person. I have my calendar laid out on Sunday, and nothing gets in the way of that. I do leave a room for a little bit of flexibility. So I could do something like I did do tonight. But for the most part, if you once I got my Sunday planning to what I do on a Sunday for those who don't know, Sunday evening, once the kids are in bed, I look at the week ahead, I look at all my tasks. And I I write them down on a piece of paper. And I've got this tactic from Dan Meredith, all you need to do is to go on to YouTube and type in Dan Meredith 531 system, and I pretty much use it, I adopt it slightly to my style, but it's the basis is that if you want to try and mimic it, and what I do is I look at everything I look at the whole week.
And you know, I've only got five days in a week when you've got four hours a night because I work 6pm to 10pm in Spain here. The rest of the day is dedicated to Frankie, the boys being the school bus driver. And you know, being a husband and you know, live chat top chores. So I cram everything into four hours. So I want to make sure that when I am sat down at the desk at this desk or wherever I'm at my co-working office, I know exactly what I'm doing every single minute.
The beauty of preparing for your business
And so the reason why I know that is that I plan on a Sunday, so I don't know what when I was in my soccer coaching days there was a guy who was coaching me always used to say this to me to prepare/
Preparing to fail is failing to prepare, I always remember or the number one, but basically get prepared. And so what I do on a Sunday evening, as I lay out the whole week, I look at what interviews are coming up, what podcasts are going to be done. And then I block in everything else around it the important tasks that need doing.
And so that means that when I sit down to do is that and do these tasks for my business, and then I get people messaging me emailing me saying, do you want to do this, you want to do that? I mean, it's super exciting, I'm super honoured.
How to say no nicely to protect your business
But the next part of my business learning is to be able to say no, say no nicely. Because, you know, I think that I always feel by saying no to a lot of opportunities, it's, it's gonna hinder me in some way, shape or form. And I need to snap out of that. So I've set a rule for March for the whole of March, no phone calls, no podcast interviews, because I'm going to be doing another five-day challenge, I'm going to be running on a five-day challenge. And that takes a lot of work, a lot of preparation, I feel like March is going to be a really, really good time to do it.
Especially in the UK, all over the world to do it. But I think especially in the UK, because I think that a lot of business people will be starting to look at the next steps. As in when lockdown ends, whatever this lockdown is, vaccine and all of that. I think there are so many good news stories coming out right now.
And I want to give a special shout out to Gerant Jones. He is always posting articles in the Boostly Academy group, our private training group, about what's coming up and what's been happening. And it's, it's, it's really exciting to see cuz I don't read the news. One thing that I don't do is I do not read the news, or look at the news, or watch the news or hear the news. I just focus on what I can control. So I need to come in and just sort of share this, share this with us, because we know what what's coming. And that's really important. So I'm gonna be doing that in March.
20,000 words
So with that in mind, if you are watching this, or you whoever do watch it, or listen to this as the podcast, in March, I am unavailable because I need to focus because not only am I doing a challenge, not only am I running beautifully, but I'm also writing this book 20,000 words, I've got two now, which is amazing releasing everything that's been going on, I started writing this book, The day that I found out that we've got COVID. And that was about three weeks ago now. So we've come out of isolation have done this course. And I'm still plugging away. Even with so many things that are going on behind the scenes outside of work that I'm no way going to share, especially on social media, there's a lot going on, outside of the work that is good and bad.
The week that was for the Boostly Business
Let's just look back at the week that was so like I say, I have been able to write 20,000 words, which is fantastic. If you want to find out more about the book. It's called the Book Direct Playbook. Just go to www.boostly.co.uk/book and we've got about 100 people who are part of the pre-release squad. And again, thank you to those who have taken the time out to read the chapters I've done already.
On Monday I had a really cool session with Flying Cat Marketing. She works really well with hospitality business based in Barcelona and she's worked with a couple of people that I know really well.
As always, and I've actually hired her agency business to help put together some really cool articles over the next three months Plus we're going to give it a go for free once and go from there but it was an amazing call on Monday she's going to be putting together some really cool content specifically for Hospitality owners. And it's going to be coming from the Boostly website so I'm really looking forward to that.
And then I had a conversation on Monday with Wheelhouse so you may have heard me if you've been on my email list so if you're on the Boostly email list, Wheelhouse is a really exciting pricing tool that is getting a full relaunch or launch in a couple of weeks time depending on when you're listening to this. I had a chat with him, he gave me a full demo I've been playing around with it. And I there are a couple of business tools out there. I believe that this has got the potential to be the best.
It's faster, it's quicker, it's stronger, it talks in human language which is key for me I think the problem with these pricing tools and reports is that they can often sound like robots when they're trying to give you graphs and stuff so it's really easy to follow. But the most important thing is because it's got more depth to it it can make you more money per booking and right now it's free to join so go and grab your free listing lineup one of your accounts Airbnb your channel manager for adding in places and things all the time. So please do go and check it out.
On Tuesday, we had the Boostly Academy and the Boostly Podcast. The first Boostly podcast was the roundtable. We were talking about PMS, property management software's or we now call it BMS booking management software's. And because this is one of the core parts of the business. And again, it's a chapter in the book. And I want every roundtable discussion or as many as possible to be about chapters in the book because it just helps me to know what I'm going to talk about. But also as well, I think this is so important. And so many people still don't have a PMS, we have so many people who book a call in with with with us for websites. And one of the questions is, who is your PMS, and so many people put, we don't have one.
The feedback was amazing. I know that at some point in that conversation, it got really highbrow it got really I mean it got technical for me. I always strive when I'm doing any sort of things to be the stupidest person in the room because that means I'm gonna learn and grow. And like I was at times I was like, wow, this is intense. And so I tried to like, I tried to like bring it back because they were talking I like they're talking basically just like we're in the pulpit in a roundtable. And I wanted to bring it back so everybody could understand mainly me, I could understand what they're talking about. But it went over well, the response and the feedback was great.
So I'm going to do another Boostly Roundtable. And the idea is, I want in a couple of weeks time to feature hosts that are using clubhouse. I've got people in mind I'm gonna be messaging but if you're brave enough and you want to come forward, let me know hosts service accommodation property people whoever to send me a message on Instagram, Facebook or wherever.
Two days ago, we did a webinar. So I've had this webinar idea for a while, where I wanted to talk about the future of hospitality websites in the future. For those who didn't watch it, that the main message was simplicity, you've got to have simplicity in your websites moving forward, if you confuse you're going to lose, which was like a very good way of summing up the hour. And we also launched a Boostly one page. So one page Web Designs by Boostly is something that we've been cooking up since November, we are going to have so many different variations of this one page.
It's ideal for everybody who is looking to target mobile one customer avatar. So you may have a main website now, but it's catered to leisure guests. But because of the pandemic and everything that's going on, you've needed to pivot to offer work for contractors and business people. So we've got Boostly one pages that are specifically designed for that. And again, they're working really well. If you want to go check out examples.
Now Wednesdays, I normally only work a couple of hours simply being that on a Wednesday is my turn to put Frankie to bed. So I work from home. So I normally get in about 830 pretty much after I get him to sleep. So that was the main thing I did.
Thursday. And there was a lot of things that needed doing. I went live to document the winds from the Boostly Academy members. So if you've missed that, there are lots of people, everybody who is sharing their wins from email marketing.
Because of what I do, I don't really do any one on one work. Because of the growth of Boostly, we've got over 1000 clients, I haven't got the physical time or the mental wellbeing to offer a one on one marketing service. So what I am doing now, because there's so many people in my world who would really benefit from that I'm looking to reach out to people that do.
And that brings us to today. So like I say I've just done a two-hour Clubhouse room talking to mostly property people, but I definitely brought it back to hospitality and marketing. And you know, and how to educate your guests in direct booking, which was lovely.
Boostly Content Creator
So if you don't know what we're doing with content creators, something that has been really popular this week. With it being book direct day on Wednesday, it was a massive day for the world of hospitality, a massive day for hosts all over the world. This is where we get to talk about the benefits to our followers, to our customers and to potential guests.
The benefits of booking direct. And what I did is I took some of the content that we created for content creator, and I gave it to hosts in the hospitality community and people on the email list and people who are part of the Boostly WhatsApp channel. And they were able to take that and they spread it everywhere on social media, it was amazing. I was getting tagged as left, right and center, I was following the hashtag book direct on Instagram. I was following it on Twitter, I was following the hashtag Boostly and it just to see, see the content go everywhere was amazing.
So what we do with content creator, we create 30 to 40 pieces of content every month, and we give it to hosts. So this means that they don't have to think about content, they can just literally copy, paste, download the image and upload it and it's Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, tik tok, you name it, you can use it. And it's amazing to see, it's so cool when people tag me in or share the links to see in the wild.
So it's five pounds a month. And it's and the reason why it's so low is that I want everybody to be using it. I say I want everybody to use it because I do a lot of mock interviews. And I always ask why the Facebook page isn't posting daily. I want there to be no excuse from any host to why they aren't posting on all the channels every day. Because they always say, Well, I don't know what to post, or I haven't got the time. The cool thing about this is that you can schedule it on the first of the month. And you don't even have to touch it again, which is so cool. And it's all done for you. So it's really cool. And there's email templates in there. And there's something else that I'm working on. So it's really exciting. So if you don't know what that is, please do go and check out Boostly Content Creator, we'd love to have you on board.
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