Converting one-time bookings into repeat guests with a mid-stay call with Dave Goodfellow

Summary and Highlights

In our latest podcast episode, we had the pleasure of sitting down with Dave, a seasoned property investor who has navigated through various sectors of the industry over the past 14 years. Here’s a recap of Dave’s journey, insights, and strategies that have propelled his business forward, especially during challenging times like the COVID-19 pandemic.

Dave’s Background

Dave began his career in property investing with fix-and-flips and long-term rentals. However, six years ago, he pivoted towards short-term rentals and serviced accommodations. Today, he manages a diverse portfolio of 75 properties, including owned properties, rental arbitrage units, and properties managed for others. Dave is also expanding into building small hotels and apart-hotels, showcasing his dynamic approach to scaling his business.

Business Evolution

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dave’s business saw rapid growth by catering to NHS staff and key workers, expanding his portfolio to nearly 100 properties at its peak. However, as the landscape evolved, Dave strategically scaled back on managed properties, focusing more on owned properties and rental arbitrage. This shift allowed him to maintain greater control over operations and adapt to changing market conditions effectively.

Direct Booking Strategy

One of Dave’s standout achievements is his direct booking strategy, which currently accounts for 50% of his bookings, with a goal to increase this to 65%. His approach revolves around personalizing guest experiences through a “mid-stay customer care call” conducted the day after check-in. This not only ensures guest satisfaction but also encourages repeat bookings and referrals, especially from business and contractor guests who appreciate personalized service.

Systems and Processes

To streamline operations, Dave leverages technology such as Monday.com for tracking inquiries and follow-ups. Integration with his Property Management System (PMS), MailChimp, and Monday.com through Zapier has automated many processes, allowing Dave to focus more on enhancing customer experience and nurturing high-value repeat clients.

Advice for Others

Dave’s success is rooted in understanding his client base deeply and actively engaging with them. He emphasizes the importance of networking with industry leaders and investing in continuous education to stay ahead. His top recommendation for fellow property managers and investors is to prioritize direct customer interactions to convert OTA bookings into direct bookings, thereby building a loyal customer base.

Conclusion

Dave’s journey from traditional property investing to innovative hospitality solutions during the pandemic offers valuable lessons for anyone looking to thrive in the property sector. His strategic adaptations and focus on direct customer relationships underscore the importance of agility and customer-centricity in achieving sustained business growth.

Transcription

Gil: Hey folks, welcome back to Direct Booking Simplified, where we break down the tactics and strategies to win in direct bookings. On today’s show, I have Dave Goodfellow. Hey Dave, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. Really 

Dave: appreciate you having me and giving me this space to talk.

Gil: Yeah, you’re all the way across the sea. One of my furthest guests that I had so far. Um, so it’s welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to the show. Um, yeah. Why don’t you, uh, introduce yourself to, to our listeners? 

Dave: Yeah. Happy to. So I’m Dave Goodfellow. I’m the owner of Nokia stays over here in the UK. We are a serviced accommodation, Airbnb, short term rental, whatever you want to call it, kind of operator.

Dave: Um, I’m a property investor at heart. Um, I kind of got into property about 14 years ago and was, you know, Refurbishing properties and selling them and had a small buy to let portfolio or a rental prop, um, a rental business, um, and then six years ago, I decided that I wanted to get into the short term rental market and switched my, my property portfolio into this.

Dave: And then I’ve grown, uh, A nice business over the last six years where we, we, we rent or rental arbitrage, you call it in, in the state. Um, we manage for other people and we build our own stuff and we’re now building kind of small hotels and apart hotels and stuff like that too. 

Gil: So you’re, you’re, you’re now building your own hotels.

Gil: Yeah. Uh, what’s, what’s, what’s been the journey through that? Have you launched your first, uh, build yet? 

Dave: Uh, so I’m in the process of building one at the moment. Uh, it’s called what we call, it’s a concept called an apart hotel in the uk. So yeah, we’ll purchase a, an old sort of hotel. Um, yeah. We’ll then take out all the operational space, like the, the bars and the restaurants, and we’ll put rentable space in there by changing them into apartments.

Dave: Um, so I’ve got one at the moment over in North Wales, a little town called Llandudno. Um, and that’s 11 apartments under one roof, uh, in this old sort of Victorian, uh, building that’s, uh, been now made into an apartment hotel. 

Gil: And that one’s already live. 

Dave: No, no. It’s in the process of 

Gil: being built right now.

Gil: Oh, okay. When, when do you, when do you plan to complete and start having your first few guests in there? So it should have been may just gone,

Dave: but as with all developments, they all run over, they’re all over budget and they’re all a nightmare. Um, this one should be, we should be opening kind of back end of August, beginning of September. So we totally missed the summer over here. 

Gil: I know, I know. What was your biggest learning and that whole process there?

Dave: don’t do it. 

Gil: I’m joking. 

Dave: No, my biggest learning is what’s my biggest learning from the apart hotel. There’s quite a few different learnings from it, but I think the biggest one is, um, just make sure you’ve got the right team in place and the people that you get involved with. Uh, uh, you know, who you want to get involved with, should I say?

Dave: Cause I’ve had a few, few ups and downs in the, in the process. I’ve had to get rid of business partners, purchase it myself, gone through a legal battle with it. I’ve done all sorts of different things with it. There’s just been, yeah, a few learning curves. I see. Would you do it again? The main thing, I’ve just done another one next door.

Dave: Um, that we’re developing at the moment here where I’m sat. Um, so it’s more different, slightly different type of building. It’s an old office block that we’ve converted into apartments. So definitely do develop, we’ll definitely do more developments and continue to do them. But the, the apartment hotel in Llandudno was more of a tricky process.

Gil: Yeah. Dave, talk to me about your growth. It sounds like you’ve done some, what we, what we call in the United States, like fix and flips and then you started doing long term rentals and eventually into, uh, uh, short term rentals or, um, or service accommodations. What led you through that journey and kind of Um, why did you pivot kind of throughout the, throughout your career there?

Dave: Great question. So I suppose when I, when I first started with my flips, we, we called them flips in the UK, so purchase a property, refurb it, um, do it up, sell it on and, you know, make, make a margin on it. Refinance it or not refinance it. Sorry. Just sell it on and make the, make the margin for a number of years.

Dave: I used to work for a home improvements company, um, a big blue chip home improvements company in the UK. So I had all the kind of, I was a project manager for them and I had all the trades around me. So I kind of knew how to build or injuries and houses, not houses or injuries and conservatories. And we were, we were fitting sort of.

Dave: Orangeries and big conservatories to celebrities houses over on the Isle of Man, which is a little, little, a little island just off the UK, a bit of a tax haven while I was doing all that stuff. I had lots of trades around me and I kind of knew how to do all the things to renovate a house. So it just made sense for me to.

Dave: use my cash that I was kind of storing up to buy a house, renovate it and make some more money, right? So I did that. I did about five of those. Um, and then I started buying smaller properties and built a small buy to let portfolio. We call it buy to lets in the UK. I think you call it, what do you, what do you call it when you rent a property in there?

Gil: Uh, we call them long term rentals. 

Dave: Long term rentals. There you go. So we call them bite a lets. I did that and some of the, uh, the legislation in the UK changed. And, you know, people were in my houses, not paying me for staying there, and I couldn’t get them out. You know, trying to get somebody out of your property.

Dave: That’s not paying you, you know, not being able to do anything about it really was something that I didn’t like. So I wanted to take back control. So I did some education. Um, and I decided that I wanted to change from the buy to let portfolio into certain accommodation, because that gave me the control back over my.

Dave: My portfolio, you know, I had guests instead of tenants and if guests don’t pay, they don’t get in and then, you know, so it just, there was a lot more leeway in the UK over being able to get guests. Well, number one, if they don’t pay, they don’t get in the property. Number two, if they’re in the property and they don’t pay, you just get them out, right?

Dave: All 

Gil: right. All right. That’s, that’s, uh, that’s a kind of nice, like transitional story there. Um, uh, what, so what’s your portfolio look like now? 

Dave: Yeah. So the, the portfolio at the moment is a mix of sort of rental arbitrage, managed clients. So we just take a margin of the gross revenue and our own property.

Dave: I’ve got around 75 properties now, about 30 percent of that we own. And the idea over the next few years is to just move towards having more control over our portfolio, reducing the management clients, building our own stuff and growing our rental arbitrage business. 

Gil: Interesting. So you’re actually going away from the managed clients, what we call a co hosting on our side.

Gil: Yeah. Um, and you’re moving more towards arbitrage. Why do you favor the arbitrage over the co hosting model? 

Dave: A great question again. So when I, when I set out doing my property business, it was to get away from having, having a job and having to answer to people 

Gil: and I 

Dave: find that, you know, we, we grew our business to around about a hundred properties in 2023.

Dave: And it just got to the point where I felt like I was answering to people again. Manage clients that we had. Um, the managed clients that we had that we were, that were tricky. We were constantly on the phone and it was like having a job again. And I wanted to take away and, you know, it’s this control thing.

Dave: And you’ll hear that, hear that word quite a lot with me, the control over my own portfolio, the control over what I do with my lifestyle, the control over whatnot. Um, I just wanted that back. So, and the first quarter of this year, we, we dropped around 30 percent of our managed clients. told, told them that we weren’t doing it anymore.

Dave: And kind of we’re aiming towards reducing that sort of managed client base as much as we possibly can over the next couple of years, we will keep some of our really good clients that have been great to us over the years, but the ones that are kind of on the B list, if that makes sense, there’ll be, there’ll be, we’ll be moving them on.

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you see yourself ramping that back up and being a little bit more picky on those clients or do you rather just go full into kind of the arbitrage model? Um, 

Dave: that’s a good question. So I think when we’re taking deals on, if we’re looking at anything now, the first thing that we look at is the people that we work with, 

Gil: right?

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. So, um, if we get any hint of that, they’re going to be. Difficult customers, or, you know, we just have that when you first start a business, you don’t have the beauty of being able to pick and choose your customers. You, you, you generally take what you can. Right. Right. When we’re not in that space anymore and we, we tend to want to pick and choose who we work with.

Dave: So if we’ve got a customer that’s not where we want them to be, and they’re not, they’ve got the same values as us or. Or operate in the same way as we do, then we, we, we won’t take them on. 

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. I’ve noticed that a bit more on the coasting sides where folks would. Actually refer people to different co hosting because it just doesn’t fit them.

Gil: And usually for two reasons, one, there’s not a portfolio fit there. The types of properties aren’t the types of properties that you want to own and that you want to market and you kind of want to have your niche. And the other one is really like, these are probably hosts that doesn’t really work well with you as a co host and that maybe someone else, it may be a better fit, but it’s not necessarily for you.

Dave: Absolutely. Absolutely. You see people and look, um, it’s like I said before, you know. It’s nice that you can’t always have that choice, you know, especially when you’re starting out and you grow in a business, but when you get a bit bigger and you, you go over these hurdles and these bumps in the road, then you do change.

Dave: And you know, the way that you run your business will change and the people that you want to work with, you want to, I want a nice working environment, a nice lifestyle, and I don’t want to be coming in and feeling like I’m working for somebody again. And so. Yeah. Yeah. 

Gil: Yeah. So you now have 75. You sound like you had over a hundred at one, one point, uh, over the last six years.

Gil: What was that progression? Like in, in that six years, did you ramp up really, really quickly or did you kind of get there kind of paced? 

Dave: So we, the first year we did 13, 13 properties or 13 deals, if you like. Some of those, my, um, my bite alerts, um, and others were. Um, rental rent to rent or rental arbitrage.

Dave: Right. Um, and then after, kinda like our first 18 months Covid hit and we, we went, we went into covid with a, with a roundabout. Yeah. 15 properties. Something along those lines. Yep. Um, and we thought at the time that, you know, no business travel, no tourism, all that we thought we were gonna have to close or we didn’t.

Dave: We, we kind of adapted our business to, we got the NHS in, in the uk, which is the National Health Service. Okay. And they were, if anybody was contracted COVID, they needed to self isolate. So we did the NHS where we took a 50 percent of our properties and filled them with NHS staff. And then we had like what we call a key worker register.

Dave: So people that were still allowed to work and travel around the country and be on construction sites and you know, power plants and all that sort of stuff. I downloaded the register and filled the rest of the 50 with them. Okay. And then I started getting inquiries in and I, um, when people were kind of passing their keys back on their rental arbitrage, because they couldn’t fill them, we would take off them and fill in and we quadrupled the size of our business during, during COVID.

Dave: So we, we had this huge jump. Um, 

Gil: And then, so you went from the 15 to what, 45 at that point around there? 

Dave: Yeah. Wow. We came out of the back of COVID with around 45 properties. And it was fair to say that, you know, when you’ve got longer term bookings with NHS and key workers, they’re not like leisure client, leisure customers.

Dave: So when we, when we came out the back of it, you know, our system started creaking a little bit and 

Gil: our 

Dave: service levels weren’t quite there. So we, we then took a, took a view, look, we’ll, we won’t take any more on for the next sort of. Six months, we leveled, we kind of went like this leveled out for a bit before we went again.

Gil: Right. 

Dave: So then we went again and we took on a load more and we did a whole load of managed, managed client stuff because we thought that was the way to grow our business. Um, and then we bought, bought, I bought the hotel and we bought this, the, the, the office block here. And yeah, I suppose then we just kind of grew.

Dave: Up to the a hundred properties decided that too many managed clients weren’t for us, got rid of a load. And now we’re, we are where we are today. 

Gil: That’s um, so it sounds like not necessarily growth is like your, your main end goal. What is your end goal for you? 

Dave: What’s the angle? So I suppose quality of life, um, control over my own portfolio to do what I, what I want to do with it.

Dave: Yeah. Yeah. And just a nice working environment, you know, people that I want to work with and. Making a few quid at the same time, right? 

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it sounds like you’re, you’re looking for not necessarily massive growth, but something that fits kind of your lifestyle that you can feed into and really have a stable.

Dave: Yeah. I think define growth. So I would say growth is, you know, having our own properties that we, we purchase and we buy and we’re making bigger margins on that. Um, rather than, so that might be a smaller portfolio, but we also found that when we had to manage clients, that we were doing a hundred properties, but it’s actually making less money than when I had 45.

Dave: Yeah. Because of the staff and all that sort of stuff. So I suppose if we define what growth is, I would say growth is actually looking at where I’m at now and going, you know what, actually growth is stopping, not having the ego thing of like, we’re going to get to 300 properties and thinking a bit more, working a bit smarter rather than harder.

Dave: So, you know, having our own control. Keeping our own rent to rent, developing our own stuff and having larger margins on that stuff than the managed and not having as much headache is growth in my eyes, if that makes sense. Yeah, 

Gil: yeah, yeah. That does make sense. That does make sense. Oh, what’s been kind of like the, the mindset behind you as you grew your portfolio?

Gil: How did you, I actually maybe step back a little bit. How did you become so successful in growing that 75 portfolio? What, what led you to that? 

Dave: Again, to find the success that I don’t. I don’t sit here and feel like I’m successful. I’m the sort of person that’s always looking for that next, next step or the next level or something else.

Dave: And I think. If I go back a couple of years that there was like an ego thing with me where I had to have the most properties or the most units and be able to tell everybody, you know, drive fancy cars and all that sort of stuff. And that’s kind of moved on from that now. Um, so the, the, the, the, the kind of mindset shift and to answer your question,

Dave: I don’t know, I don’t know. I guess maybe ask a little differently. This is going deep Gil, isn’t it? It is. It 

Gil: is. It is. Well, I think it’s like a therapy 

Dave: session for me. 

Gil: Well, maybe ask a little differently. Like what are the, some of the resources that allowed you to, to do the growth that you did? 

Dave: They’re having good people around me, I suppose.

Dave: Um, you know, getting educated, getting educated when I got educated, having the right mentors around me, having, you know, people in a clubhouse room on anybody knows what clubhouse is anymore. Not anymore. It was huge at one point. We still do it today and it’s, we still do a Monday, Wednesday and a Friday, 7.

Dave: 30 to 8. 30. Um, and you know, we still get about 60 people come in the room every time, which is, which is still good. And just having that kind of network of people around me that I’ve been able to, No lean upon when I’ve had down moments, lean upon when I’ve had good moments, when I’m looking to finance stuff, just having the right people around me to give me, you know, the, the guidance or the, the, the, the leg up, you know?

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I like that a lot. Uh, maybe moving over to kind of. The second kind of big leg of our show is really around the direct booking side. Um, when we, when we tried to last, you actually have a pretty impressive direct bookings, um, engine going on right now. Do you have, uh, maybe, uh, first off, like a high level overview of how you think about direct bookings and why that’s important to you?

Dave: Well, yeah, direct bookings, uh, the life and soul of your business. Um, you know, if you. If you only rely on the OTAs and so that, you know, your booking. coms and your, your Airbnbs, then you’re kind of building the foundations of your business on somebody else’s land. Um, and that can be taken away from you.

Dave: You know, we, we saw that in COVID, we saw Airbnb and booking. com close the doors, literally close the doors, cancel every, cancel every booking. And, you know, after that, that was kind of a real reality Check for me. And, um, you know, now I, I try and wherever we can is have as many direct bookings in my business as we can.

Dave: So, you know, at the moment we’re at 50 percent direct bookings, um, which is a decent number, I think we want to get 65. That’s the kind of the Holy grail for us, if that makes sense. Um, towards that, um, yeah, so, um, look, I’m happy to take any questions on how we do that. What, what kind of our main strategies are around that if you want me to jump into that, I’m more than happy to.

Gil: Yeah. I guess maybe diving directly into, into that specific question is like, what led you to take success of 50%? 50 percent is actually pretty. Pretty impressive already. Um, it’s an even better goal of having 65. Um, but what led you to getting that 50 percent direct bookings? 

Dave: So I’ve tried pretty much everything in marketing.

Dave: Um, paid a lot of money for marketing and all the, you know, your Facebook ads and Google, Google stuff, um, you know, website building and SEO and all the, all the, you know, the, the kind of cliche marketing things that people do, email marketing. I’ve tried all sorts and for me and my business, the, the most, you know, the most value that I get from creating direct bookings is, is, is using this process.

Dave: So I’ve tried going up against. OTAs and going against them and trying to outbid them on stuff, but you’re never going to do that. The size of the companies, they’re going to take the market space when it’s, you know, online. So what we do is we use the OTAs to get our foot in the door. So, and when I say get the foot in the door, they, they get our first customer.

Dave: I’m more than happy to pay them their 15, 18%, whatever it is to get that customer in my property. But then that’s over to me then that’s on me. Right? So I’ve got to then change their customer into my customer. So we go through a process, very simple process, which is, and we call it a mid stakeholder or a customer care call.

Dave: There’s essentially a sales call, but we call it a mid stakeholder customer care. And on the, the, the day after they check in. We make sure that every single one of our customer gets this mid stakeholder and we ask them a series of questions. The first question is, you know, just making sure that everything’s okay for you at the property and it’s what you’re expecting.

Dave: The answer to that question is yes. We just then go through a couple more questions, ask them what they’re doing in the area, ask them if they’re likely to return and when they’re likely to return and book them in again, straight away. If they are likely to return at a reduced rate from airbooking. com.

Dave: So that’s kind of like the first, the first step, booking them, getting them from an Airbnb customer into a direct booking and booking them for however long it is that they want to stay for. There’s one really important question that I always ask our, um, guests that come to our places. And once I’ve got them in a place where they are happy to come and book with me again, generally, so a lot of the things that a lot of the, some of the contractor based, um, stays that we do that are longer term, they will generally be working on a site with other contractors.

Dave: Right. Or business people will be working in a business with other people that need accommodation. So the really important question I always ask them at the end, once they booked with me again is, do you know anybody else that’s looking for a similar type of accommodation that we could help, um, accommodate in the next couple of months, the next couple of weeks, if the answer to that question is no, great.

Dave: If the answer to that question is yes, then we take their information. We give them a quote and we book them. And I’ve done this for years now. And it’s been the single most important move that I’ve made in the business to get me those direct bookings. 

Gil: Wow. You’re the only person that I’ve, I’ve heard on our show that talks about picking up the phone and calling the customer.

Gil: Um, there’s a lot of,

Gil: how did you, How did you, how did you even have this idea in the first place? There was a by accident or was it deliberate? 

Dave: No. So it comes from my, it comes from my background in home improvements because we used to call every single customer and make sure they were happy with their product when it was installed, you know, and if it, if they weren’t happy, we’d do something about it really quickly.

Dave: And we still do that today in our business. So the other thing that I find when you, when you speak to people. If you have a problem, you know, a lot of people won’t even tell you about the problem until you see it in full view. But if you make that call and they’ve got a problem and you fix it for them straight away, guess what?

Dave: You’re going to get a better review for fixing something quick than you would if you just left them to it and they don’t know what they’re doing. So we find it gives us two, two angles. It gives us much better customer reviews and it gives us, um, more direct bookings. And it gives us that relationship with our customer and we’ve used all these kind of emails.

Dave: We’ve used messaging, all the automated stuff that you have for your PMS, but people never, ever look at, well, they might look at it, but they don’t, they don’t read it properly. The only thing that I found that works in any kind of, and gives you any value in direct bookings is just picking up that phone.

Dave: And speaking to them that it’s the easiest thing to do. Doesn’t cost you anything apart from your time. 

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Do you give folks a heads up that you’re calling or do you basically surprise them on day two? 

Dave: Just surprise them on day two. 

Gil: And I’m guessing it’s well received. It sounds like it’s well received when you do.

Dave: Why not? I think, Oh, this is, this is, you normally get from them that this isn’t, this is, this is great that you’re phoning your customers, making sure everything’s okay. You know, especially if there’s something wrong in the property, which, you know, happens. 

Gil: Yeah. 

Dave: That’s straight away for them. They, they love it.

Dave: They absolutely love it. And what I tend to do if I’m, if I’m doing, I still do the calls myself. Cause I love doing it. I’ll do as many as I can and I’ll pick up the phone and I’ll, I’ll speak to them about the area. I’ll talk, I’ll ask them what they’re doing. I’ll ask, they’ll tell them the restaurants to go to.

Dave: I’ll speak to them about, you know, what they’re doing for the week. I’ll give them some recommendations. They love it. 

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. You’re, you’re, you’re definitely building rapport with, with that, with that guest there. And I can see why they’re likely to be rebooked with you. What do you do when someone is like they’re on vacation at that point, or they’re traveling at that point and they’re not sure, do you have some system or some way to follow up with them if they’re kind of, they’re, they’re considering it, but, um, they weren’t committing then?

Dave: So we use a piece of software called monday. com, which we, any, any sort of contact that we make, or any sort of inquiry that we get, or, you know, if we send a quote out, we’ll log it in a, in a Monday board and then they’ll have a review date on it. And it’ll then go up into our, our CRM, or we’ll log their emails anyway, through our system.

Dave: Yeah. And we’ll email ’em and there’s, there’s, there’s a few different things that we do to make sure that we follow up with people. Yeah, 

Gil: yeah. Yeah. Do you mind sharing what kind of CRM that you’re using, kind of behind the scenes? So we, 

Dave: our CRM really all, all our. Guest stuff is kept in our PMS and we then move that into MailChimp.

Dave: Okay. So we use MailChimp and then we have monday. com, which is our kind of inquiry slash contacts list that we use. And it all gets uploaded into there and they all link via Zapier. Is it Zapier? I’m not a systems guy, by the way, for me. So if I sound like I’m talking rubbish, then it probably is. But yeah, we have, we have these different things.

Dave: So we have MailChimp. I’ll see our PMS. And, um, monday. com, which, which we store them all. And they all talk to each other through Zapier. So I don’t know how that works, but they, my tech guy does that for me. 

Gil: Nice. Yeah, I’m definitely a systems guy. So I’m thinking like how, kind of like what I’m trying to get to is like, how do you make this scalable?

Gil: How do you make this something that’s repeatable time and time again? Um, because it seems that you’ve kind of nailed that at this point where it’s not a burden for you and your team to do. It’s something that’s somewhat natural and you have systems and processes in place. 

Dave: Yeah. So, so look, um, once you start doing this, the first couple of months that you’re doing it, cause you’ve got so many customers coming through your door, you’re not getting customers.

Dave: It’s all new custom because it’s all Airbnb and booking. com traffic. If you like, it’s all brand new customers. Cause they’re booking with you. Then they’re going somewhere else. Next time they’re booking with someone else. Then they’re going somewhere else. Right. Once you start getting your customer base and your, um, I’d say probably

Dave: customers that are repeat booking customers. So if I see them, I might call them every now and again, but I don’t have to call them every time because they are repeatedly coming back to my property. I don’t need to speak to them every single week. I might speak to them once a month or once every quarter or whatever, just make sure everything’s still okay and they’re happy with everything.

Dave: But your call, your call register, if you like, reduces. as you gain more business, gain more stable client base. If that, I hope that makes more sense. 

Gil: Yeah. It sounds like you, what you’re now focusing on is what we call, like bottom of funnel, which are folks that are likely to rebook with you over and over again, where in the very early days, you’re working on more mid of funnel or top funnel, where these are folks that you don’t know whether or not they’re going to stay with you.

Gil: So you’re going to have to go through. A high volume of calls to figure out who it is. And then over time, you’re really focusing on the people that are the highest value, most likely to re to, to return. 

Dave: Yeah. So one of the, one of the tips I would give people that are, that are listening in would be if you’re looking to get repeat business, most of your repeat business is going to come from businesses, contractor base.

Dave: Um, is the word contractor used over there? So they’re kind of like people that work on building sites and 

Gil: yeah, 

Dave: yeah. Um, but you can, you can see that from their email. If you’ve got a decent sort of setup system where you capture their email before they get into the property, you can see if they’re a business, because if it’s Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, whatever it is, that’s likely to be a leisure client.

Dave: If it’s. Something. co. uk or com or, you know, it’s something that’s a business and you can read that on the email. You know who to target straight away. 

Gil: Got it. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. That makes, that makes a ton of sense. Yeah. Our, our PMS does, does retrieve back the emails and we mainly get it because we have rental agreements.

Gil: So we get it once they signed the rental agreement. I don’t know if your system is the same way. 

Dave: Online check in, right? We call it an online check in. 

Gil: So they check 

Dave: in online, they sign our rental agreement, they put their email address in you’re there. 

Gil: Nice. Nice. Awesome. Dave, was there any other tips that you want to leave our listeners with today, specifically around direct bookings or maybe even hosting in general?

Dave: Um, yeah, I mean the main, the main tip really is, is just understand who your client base is. Understand who your guests are. And the only way you can do that really is by speaking to them. Understand their needs. Know what they want. Know what they’re up to. Understand your market. Understand your areas.

Dave: Know that when you’re speaking to these people, give them the things that they want. You can give somebody what they want. You give someone what they need. They’ll definitely be your customer forever. 

Gil: I love that. I love that. All right, Dave, we usually end with two questions. One’s a mindset question and one’s a, the big takeaway, uh, starting off the mindset question first, what’s one piece of mindset advice that you would give to someone that’s starting something completely new.

Dave: So a mindset shift for me when I first started in, in the short term rental business was definitely surrounding myself with people that are. Either a couple of steps ahead of me or light years ahead of me because they’ve been there. They’ve, they’ve tread the boards and they’ve, they’ve been there.

Dave: They’ve got the t shirts and they know what to do. So my two pieces of advice around mindset would be don’t do it. Don’t think you’re on your own. Surround yourself with the right people and get educated. You get educated. You’re going to streamline things so much quicker than what you would, if you were to just do it alone.

Gil: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I wouldn’t have got, I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did without my peers and my groups. 

Dave: Absolutely. I mean, I’ve spent six figures on, on education over the years easily. Maybe even maybe more now. It’s It’s, it’s taken me from not knowing anything to streamlining me and I’ve surrounded myself with the right people as well.

Dave: And that’s what’s helped me. It’s not, I haven’t done it alone. 

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. All right, Dave. Last, last question. Uh, what’s the one piece of advice that you would, you want our folks to take action on today? 

Dave: Speak to your customers, take them away from Airbnb, take them away from booking.

Dave: com. But the only way that you’re going to do that is to relate to them, speak to them and take, make their customer, your customer. 

Gil: I love that. Awesome. Dave, where can folks find out more about you? How can they follow you? How can they learn more about you? Even work with you? 

Dave: Yeah. So, um, a couple of ways you can do that.

Dave: We’ve, um, uh, if you go on any socials, you type in my name. Um, if you go on Insta, it’s at Dave Goodfellow official, we’ve got loads of stuff on there. I’ve got a Facebook group called Airbnb simplified community. So that’s the Airbnb simplified community where you can go in there. There’s lots of training materials in there.

Dave: There’s six modules in there that will show you how to start set up a service accommodation business. Um, yeah, if you just search for me online, that’s probably the best way to do it. We I’ve written a book as well. So if you want to go out there and have Airbnb simplified, um, that was a number one selling book on Amazon across seven different categories.

Dave: So it did really well. Um, yeah. 

Gil: All those places 

Dave: like this, you search for me online. 

Gil: Awesome. Awesome. Dave, it was really good to have you on the show and having you kind of give us provides a lens into your experience and how you got to where you are today. And definitely next, next time I have you on, I, I, I have no doubt that you’re surpassing that 65%.

Dave: I hope so. I hope so. Well, listen, really appreciate you having me and let me have in this space. I’ve really enjoyed firstly, catching up with you beforehand and being on here today, so hopefully some of the nuggets of information people will put into action and take some of those bookings away from Airbnb and booking.

Dave: com. Right. 

Gil: Absolutely. Absolutely. And apologies for going a little deep. I, I. I actually value a lot of some of those deep conversations because I think a lot of times it’s not always about the little tactics that you learn around the way, but really getting into the investor’s mind and how you think about it, how you progress, how you learn.

Gil: For me, I’m a big learner. I love reading books. I love talking to folks. And for me, like getting to understand how successful People got to where they are, was their mindset to me. That’s one of the biggest takeaways and one of the biggest inspirations I get from listening and talking to my peers. So I really appreciate it.

Dave: Totally opened up there. 

Gil: Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. That makes you a little awkward, but 

Dave: it’s great. I love that sort of thing. And I think that the way that you do the questions, you may feel people feel comfortable as well. That’s, that’s great. So going deep is good. 

Gil: Awesome. All right, Dave. Thanks for being a good sport and playing along with me.

Gil: Um, and thank you for sharing everything. I hope to have many more conversations with you. 

Dave: No problem at all. It’s been great to be here. 

Gil: All right. Thanks. Bye. 

Dave: Bye.