1st of the Month Bonus Episode: Mark Simpson of Boostly Announces New Documentary

Alex Husner: 0:39

Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex.

Mark Simpson: 0:42

And I'm Mark.

Alex Husner: 0:44

That's right, Mark Simpson. Welcome to the show. So good to see you today.

Mark Simpson: 0:49

Thank you very much for having me. I'm always a pleasure. Big time listener, big time fan, long term listener, big time fan, I should say.

Alex Husner: 0:55

I love that. I love that you have a little bit less hair than Annie does, but unfortunately Annie was not able to join today, and this is a timely episode that you have a big announcement coming up and so we wanted to make sure that we got this in. So this is going to be a special one and we're super excited to hear about what this project is that you've got coming. That's going to take the book direct world by storm. But before we continue, Mark, tell us a little bit about your history and your company Boosley, for our audience that may not be familiar with you.

Mark Simpson: 1:28

Yeah, absolutely so. As you can tell from the accent, I'm over the pond in the United Kingdom, born and raised on a family 200 acre basically bed and breakfast, boutique hotel, as people like to call them now, and vacation rentals all in this 200 acre land in our family for many, many generations. I came into it full time in 2011. We sold and exited in 2021 and during those sort of 10 years I started a little company called Boosley on the back of the fact that there was nobody in our area who was helping host or managers or homeowners when it comes to market in their vacation rental properties and set up this little group called the hospitality community Facebook group way back when, and it's just sort of grown and snowballed and really sort of taken a lot of traction over the last couple of years as the book, direct message and movement has got more worldwide and especially over in America and Canada. And yeah, now I think we're mostly best well known for doing websites, website design. We've got some really cool partners out there and, yeah, we've got over 2500 customers. We've got 10,000 listings that we power and over the last year, we've generated just shy of 50 million US dollars in direct bookings via our websites, which is really cool, and I get amazing opportunities now to speak in America and all these cool places. And, yeah, which brings us into the project that we've been working on this year in 2023.

Alex Husner: 2:53

That's incredible. I didn't realize that you had 2500 clients. That's a pretty big portfolio, and so how big is your team?

Mark Simpson: 3:02

So we just passed 50 members of staff. We're all virtually based all over the world. We've got like a chunk in America, we've got a chunk in the Bali, philippines, in the UK, et cetera, and it's an ever-growing, expanding team and, because of the work we do, is very much done for you. We need to have a lot of developments, a lot of project managers, a lot of touch points, because we like to take our customers and our members on a bit of a roadmap. My roadmap for everybody is to get to 65% direct bookings, which leaves 35% other parties for their bookings, and so we can definitely do that. We can definitely achieve that. But to do that it needs to be like a lot of touch points along that roadmap, along that journey, which is why we've just passed 50 members of staff, which is crazy. Crazy to me to think of, because it just literally started as me on a table in our kitchen back in Stockton of Tupontese all those years ago. But here we are.

Alex Husner: 3:55

And how many years ago was it? When did you first start the company?

Mark Simpson: 3:58

So basically, october the 5th 2016 was the day I walked into the bank and I opened up a business bank again. So seven years now.

Alex Husner: 4:05

Wow, that's a relatively short amount of time to build up that big of a book of business, so that's pretty impressive.

Mark Simpson: 4:13

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Alex Husner: 4:15

So tell us a little bit about what the framework is of what you provide these clients and you know I know you said the website, but email marketing I know you're a big proponent of that Are you using? Is it your own tech that you've developed in this, or do you have different softwares that you prefer and that your clients use? Or what does that look like?

Mark Simpson: 4:33

So we have three T's. So we've got the tools. We have the tactics and the tribe, and the tools are very much, like you said, WordPress websites. So we started doing websites quite a while back when we realized there was a need for it, but in 2020, I realized that there was something very broken in our website booking process is that a huge potential guest would land on one of our sites just like they do on any of a WordPress website that's not connected to a PMS, and when they come to hit the book now button, they have to start their journey all over again. So they have to leave your WordPress website, go back to, let's say, guesties website and they have to go through that whole process. So it's very broken. What I wanted to do is I wanted to make that booking process as smooth as Airbnb or bookingcom or Verbo, and so we reached out to the biggest PMS partners host away, guesty, host fleet, et cetera and we asked if we could get access to their API. They all turned around and said no to me. So we just went ahead and built it anyway, and we used our members at the point of time to sort of force these PMS providers to pay attention to little old Boosley Again in 2020, we were nothing, we were nobody. Nobody really heard of us and so, as a power out of community, that helped us get access to these APIs. And that's what really set us apart and I think that's one of the reasons why our growth has been so huge these past few years is that our USP is that we connect into the property management software providers directly, so when a booking comes from our site, they don't ever leave the website, and that's a big part of it. And another thing that we can do with it, with this API connection, is, as you mentioned, get the data and we can send it off to CRMs and email marketing providers. So this year we started building our own CRM, which has got email built in. It's got social media scheduling tools built in, which is like a big, like a big win for our members and customers and clients, and it just everything that we've built is on top of this, this API. So the email isn't just a case of that you sign up and then we leave you to set it all up. It comes with automations built in, workflows, templates that's been built out by copywriters and now, with the emergence of AI, we've actually been able to build our own generative AI bot, so it's learned everything that we've ever done all of our SOPs, our API docs, every podcast that I've ever recorded, and we've got about 1000 videos on YouTube. We've plugged it all in, so this bot is just learning everything called Boosley. We call it our Boosley bot, so our host can come on at any time and ask it a question and, instead of it being generic response chat, gpt or cloud or whatever we'll give to it, it's just based on everything that we've ever programmed it into do, which is really cool. So someone can come in and say, hey, I want to create an email to send out to people for new year specials. Can you create one for me? By the way, my context is that I'm a coastal resort in Middle Beach. I've got a single family home, it sleeps for people next to it and it will literally give you a base like it's just like you're talking to me, which is really cool. Wow, so I'm going to need to see a demo on that, yeah.

Alex Husner: 7:26

I'm really interested to see that. That's really cool.

Mark Simpson: 7:29

Yeah, absolutely. I'll share the link with you and you can feel free to pass it around. And share it around because it is really cool. I'm really proud of this one. And then the other. T is training. So we learned very early that if I was just to give you a website and just go all the best, you'd be like this is great, but now what do I do with it?

Alex Husner: 7:44

Yeah, it would just sit there.

Mark Simpson: 7:46

It would just sit then and they were. They're sat there, dormant Again. Everything that we've learned is from our errors and failures in the past, and so we've realized that if we do this, you've got that accountability buddy, the sort of the training, and so we've got we've got coaches that are not only boosted customers by our hosts but are also very good at coaching now as well, and so you get plugged into our mastermind. We've got two calls every month and it is that sort of accountability. You turn up to the zoom calls and it's like what have you done this week? What have you done this month? What do you need to improve on? What questions do you got? And that's the training. And you get, you know, all of the recordings get put into again this bot, but they also put all the recordings into a vault. So if you ever want to come back to it in a quiet period now, for most people in the Northern Hemisphere coastal areas, this is what's coming into your shoulder season Now. So this is the time that we know is that a lot of people log in and they go okay, what do I need to learn? What have I missed in my busy time? And then the final tea is tribe. This is the one that I'm most proud of because we've built up, like I say, 2,500 members, customers, team, boothly members and we plug everybody into a Facebook group. We've got WhatsApp groups. We've got, you know, open chat and I see it every day people having a chat from people from all over the world and sharing their wins, sharing their questions, their frustrations. You know, people come in and ask a question and they know the answer they're going to get isn't just from a random on the internet. It's somebody who is in the same position, same business model, but maybe just another part of the world. And, and that's really cool, we're all about to meet up. Next week in the UK I'm hosting something called the Big Bash. I'm having just one big party. So it's amazing to see 400, 300, 400 people coming together and having a big, a big party and meeting up in real life and and sort of like cementing seven years of doing this virtually to all be able to come together online. So that's, that's what we do the free teas.

Alex Husner: 9:28

That's a lot. I can see how you've become so successful. A couple of things that I wrote down that I wanted to touch on. That, I think, is just interesting when you compare the the types of clients that you're working with, which it sounds like it's more, it's the more the Airbnb type host that has come into this has a smaller portfolio but it's maybe growing. That is, on a host fully or a guesty, like you said, or host away. And it's it's interesting to me because in the background that I have here in Myrtle Beach it's like your software is your booking engine, is your website. I mean, that's how a lot of these enterprise level systems were built. But some of the newer softwares just were not built that way. I mean they were built to really manage Airbnb and maybe verbal listings, but really Airbnb and what you came up with was, I mean, a necessity. But it's just surprising to me that in the early days of how they built these softwares that that was not more top of mind Just didn't even watching what else was going on in the vacation rental technology industry of this is not going to be the only way that your clients get bookings is for these channels, but in hindsight, I'm sure they probably are wishing that they did think that way. But do you work with any of the traditional softwares like a track or streamlined or barefoot or LNPM Any of those?

Mark Simpson: 10:45

Not really, and I was recently at Verma and I was trying to sort of strike up conversations, but I feel like they don't really want to focus on the core market that we look after, which, you're right, it's anywhere between one property to about 15 properties. I'd say that makes up 90% of Boosley's core market, which, to me, is always being crazy, because these one to 15 property owners, they take up 86% of the whole market and I definitely see a more of a tide to looking at that sort of part of the industry because it makes up so much of it, and I feel like this is who I work with best those that are in that sort of bracket one to 20. I mean, we do have people who come to us Because when you get listed on the guesting marketplace you are open up to everybody on that platform and just naturally on that platform you'll see people with 100 plus 200 plus. We've got somebody with over 500 properties that's using our service. But if I was to do like a deep dive of all our customers, all of our clients, it is in that predominantly one to 15 property market because we can make the biggest amount of difference. We're very lucky, guesty turned around and now we're really good partners, host away hostfully, hospitable, fantastic partner of ours which are predominantly now looking at the lower end of the market, at one to 15. And they're realizing that this part of the world they don't just want to settle by being on Airbnb, they don't want to settle just by being on verb or bookingcom, they want to be able to build their business on their land. And we've been really nicely placed to be able to sort of link everything together.

Alex Husner: 12:07

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Do you find it challenging to allocate enough time to your revenue management strategy, or do you feel like you may be leaving money on the table for your homeowners but you don't know where to begin? If you're seeking support to enhance your revenue management endeavors in 2024, your search ends here. Reven Research offers a personalized solution that not only grants you and your team more time, but also empowers you with the knowledge to craft an optimal revenue management strategy. With more time on your hands, you can focus on the most important part of the business growth. As an official partner of Key Data, Reven Research clients have access to the data and market trends that help you convert prospective homeowners onto your rental program. In fact, clients of Reven Research report growing their inventory by as much as 20%. Visit RevenResearchcom and mention you heard about them on the Alex Nanny podcast for a free consultation. So let's dive into your big announcement and what you've got coming up, and something that you've been working on for the past year. I know that you're very proud of it, about what it is, and I can't wait to see it.

Mark Simpson: 13:09

No, thank you. So for seven years of doing this, six years of doing this, I knew that what we taught worked and I knew that what we've created worked, and we're very lucky that we've had people come on board all different stages of these six years. And I've done two books the book Direct Playbook, which you're very kind to invite me to come on to talk about the playbook at the start of last year. And then we did the blueprint, which was another big moment, but I've never really got any content online where it's showing it behind the scenes, showing it in action, showing it actually working. And so the start of 2023. I put a video out on my LinkedIn and on my Facebook and on my YouTube and I put a plea out for any host doesn't matter where you are in the world. I wanted to work with two people and I wanted to work with two people and the two, well, the one stipulation was this is that they didn't know who Boosley were, so they're not a client, they're not a customer. They may have watched a podcast, maybe have dabbled in looking at a few YouTube videos, but nothing more than that. And what I wanted to do is I wanted to come into the business and I wanted to implement everything from the book, direct playbook, which is all about marketing tactics, and I wanted to implement everything from the blueprint, which is, you know, the foundations, as in the tech stack to be implemented, and all that cool stuff. And I wanted to put it into these two businesses. And the one thing that I asked is that we documented every single moment of it. I hired a content company in the UK. They'd been on hand, you know, recording it, with all their cool gear and kit and everything that we've done. We took one person in the UK called Justina. Her business was based out of leads and she had three properties and they were all on the rent to rent model, so she would rent them off a landlord and then she would put them on short term rental sites, et cetera. And then the other business was a guy called Kearney and he was based out of Orlando and he was fresh. He had just opened his business two months prior to me virtually meeting him and he had a listing on Airbnb. She had about two bookings at that point and that's it. And so what we did over the course of the year I worked behind the scenes. I didn't really talk about who I was working with. I just let everybody know on the socials we're doing something and we've documented every step, every minute, every, every zoom meeting, every zoom call that we've done. And we just wrapped film in the week before Verma, so middle of October, and now it's being edited and it's ready to go with the results and all the cool things that we have done, on the 26th of December, which we're going to have a big YouTube watch party on the Boosty channel, which is why I'm now spreading the word about it now to get everybody ready and aware of it, and so when it's upon the 26th of December, I'd love everybody to tune in with us.

Alex Husner: 15:53

Oh, that sounds great. We will be there. That's like after Christmas present Extraordinaire. It sounds like yeah.

Mark Simpson: 16:00

Well, this is why we did it, and we want to do it on that day, because it's when everybody's going to be chilling out post Christmas, and it'll be the UK. It'll be late at night, about eight o'clock, so everybody's going to be just chilling out. In America, on the Eastern time will be about three o'clock and then in Europe it'll be nine o'clock. So be a nice little time to go live. And even if you missed a live watch party, it'll be there, it'll be on the YouTube channel and you can watch your back for years to come.

Alex Husner: 16:21

Yeah, every day. I'm so sorry, I love it. So tell me about. I mean, what will we actually see in this? Because in my mind I'm thinking about how you would show the course of a campaign or somebody who they start their book direct strategy in January and that you know what that includes, from the strategy to laying out the different campaigns and the offers that you're going to have and what that looks like in social and creative, but I feel like a lot of that could be shown in actually showing the campaign and the elements. So what is the video component actually showing? Is it showing guests how they're engaging with it or talking to guests, or is it just coming from you interviewing the host about the process?

Mark Simpson: 17:02

It's really interesting doing this because what we realized is that no two businesses followed the same roadmap and we're really noticing this now with most of our clients that come on board as well. We set this roadmap out and I sort of explain it, like when you're sitting in your car and you know that you need to drive from A to B and you maybe plug it in on Google Maps and it says right, you can follow this route or there's several other routes you can go to get to your destination, and the destination is 65% direct bookings. That's the destination that we want for everybody. But people go on different routes and it really does depend on where they are in their business, where they are in their personal lives, where they are in their business lives, where they are in just the terms of their career trajectory. And for Justina in the UK for her, I feel like she had a solid book, direct game book, direct mindset. The way that she can take a booking from Airbnb and bring it to direct is unbelievable already. But for her trajectory and her year is being about letting go. So for her it was more the hiring. We spent a large time with Justina of introducing her to a recruitment company that helped hire a first virtual assistant, who has then helped alleviate her day-to-day role so she can focus on working on the business and not within the business. Another part for Justina as well was that it's very easy in this industry to jump from one tech solution to another, from one shiny software to another. For her it was right stop with the shiny object syndrome. Let's focus on what you have and let's work on how we can optimize what you've got so you're getting the most out of it. And that falls from her property management software tool to her pricing software tool, to CRM and all those things in between. So her big win and you'll see in the documentary is what she's been able to achieve by focusing on those two things. And obviously we did the book directness stuff as optimizing her listings and all of that cool stuff. And then for CUNY in America, I mean his was such a big learning curve. His was like a hockey stick sorry, because he knew nothing. He just knew from being in a group and being part of a community he was part of. Put his list on Airbnb. He's in a very popular destination which is Orlando. He was down in Davenport which is about 20 minutes from Disney and Universal. It was like put it on there and you'd be guaranteed to get bookings. For him it was okay. So how can I do this? And how can I get from property one that he bought his property? How can he get from property one to property number two, where it's going to be in Orlando? Is it going to be tamper? How does he do this? How can he best make sure that every single dollar that he gets from every single booking is the best possible? So for him it was relying heavily on price labs, dynamic pricing. How can we make sure that his Airbnb listing is as visible and as bookable as possible to his right demographic, his right avatar? So we implemented, as you'll see in the video, loads of the correct things into his business. So he was just on that roadmap a lot quicker, because otherwise, if you do this by yourself, it can take a long time to get to that destination. And that was the thing that really struck home for me was the two of them and the video and the documentary, which would be like a good hour. So we've crammed the whole year into an hour. It will just show the ways that we did this and, again, I was really lucky that I could call up the founder of Uplist and I could call Jamie at AirDNA, I could call Aniraga at price labs and I could say, hey, this is what we're doing, jemine jumping on a Zoom. Call Jemine doing X, Y and Z so we can focus and feature on this in the documentary, which was great. So we've been able to document all of those parts as well.

Alex Husner: 20:44

It's interesting too, because Orlando is probably one of the most difficult markets to operate in and it's very unique compared to a traditional vacation rental destination, and had the opportunity to learn what that really meant when we were there ahead of the RMA last month and just meeting with some operators down there and it's down there, it's really. It's definitely not just about verbal Airbnb, expedia booking. You've got to have relationships with the tour and travel providers, with a lot of the overseas groups, so it's a complex thing, I think, probably for your partner. He's smaller and he might not necessarily be at that point yet, but he will get there and that's when you really have to start being strategic in some of those partnerships as well. But did that come up in the episode at all, or is that not really on his horizon yet?

Mark Simpson: 21:28

The Hymn for this year. It was really figuring out okay. So who is his property Ideally for? So he was really at the start, for his major win this year for me, is that he knows exactly who he needs to be marketing to which part of his property, what's the niche that he's gone down. That is what he needs to be talking about and starting to build his database. So he's now got an email list, which is great because and he's got a referral network because the people that are coming to stay with him are predominantly families. They live either in Florida or they're just on the border in states, south Carolina, etc. And, because of the clientele, they're all young families. They're all on social media. He's building a lovely email list and he's starting to get referrals now. So when people leave, they're going home to tell him they're friends and when they're booking their Disney, universal or get away to Orlando, they're saying, hey, go and stay with escape bookings, which is great for him. Obviously, in his growth and his trajectory, however, he does grow he will need to then be able to build those relations. I mean he may decide that the Orlando market he just wants to have that one property. He is based out of Tampa and he is looking to maybe expand his second, third and fourth property, maybe in Tampa. So that may be looking more at the more MTR strategy which could be focusing on the hospitals etc. And I think that's for him now. I think this first year is really key to go okay. Do I want to do this, first and foremost? Do I want to have all those questions? Do I want to be dealing with guests? And he does, and he's established himself from that and now the next stage for him is really going okay. So what does one to two look like? What does two to three look like? What tools do I need to do there? What connections, what relationships do I need to build? What model am I going to do? Because he may not want to buy every single one of them, he may want to do a more, maybe a management model or rent the rent, or other creative finance and options that he can do. So that's really what CUNY wanted to get out of it.

Alex Husner: 23:18

Okay. So it's actually more of an immersive journey that you're capturing in this than I had originally thought. I thought it was more just focused on just the direct booking strategy, but you're really looking at their entire business with them, how they're looking at every aspect of it, which is really cool. I mean, it reminds me a little bit of some of the things that Matt Lando has done in his documentaries, so this is going to be interesting to see from your perspective of comparing the two side by side. I think that's really cool. Now, are they going to be part of I'm sure they're going to be part of the watch party? Will they get to share any thoughts from the process or anything like that?

Mark Simpson: 23:54

We did interview them for the final part of the episodes, for the final part of the series. We basically put a camera in front of them and we asked them lots of questions. So they will be featured and they will be focused on the documentary and I would love for them to be part of it and then we'll do a follow-up podcast, a follow-up live video with them to be able to keep in touch with them. Because this is the thing that I've said to them is that just because the documentary is over now, I don't want to disappear from their world and their lives. I do want to keep in touch and figure out and see where they are in December 2024. 25 and beyond because it'll be cool to see where they're at. And yeah, and I've just said to them on the documentary, I'll say now it's like I've been a massive privilege to be part of their journey with them, because they have letters in. They've been very open and transparent and you know, and it's been really cool to get to know them personally over this past year and you know, if this documentary is like even a tenth as good as what Matt puts out, I'll be, I'll be, I'll be very, very proud, because it's the first time we've done this and we've worked with an amazing company in the UK that's helping us put it all together, which is I am Productions, and so, yeah, we're excited to see what sort of comes out of it and what the what the feedback is.

Alex Husner: 25:00

Awesome. Well, maybe we could even have them come on the podcast after it comes out too, and we can do a little side interview to hear more about the process. But definitely, definitely excited to see it and excited to see the reactions from. Obviously, you've got a huge fan base that your tribe that follows you and relies on you for this very important information. So, marking my calendar for December 26,. Everybody else, make sure you do the same, and we will make sure to include links, and we'll promote that ahead of the event as well. So in the meantime though, mark, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what's a good way to reach out?

Mark Simpson: 25:35

So the website is fantastic boostleycouk b-o-o-s-t-l-ycouk. I'm sorry it is one of these crazy UK domains, but that's the best place. And then, outside of that, linkedin is obviously a fantastic place. Just type in Mark Simpson. There's a couple of offers on LinkedIn, but there's just me. Just type in Mark Simpson, boostley in my face, or come up and, yeah, please get in contact, follow. That'll be the best place to go to get a notification about when the video is going to be up and that we'll organize a nice big watch party. But yeah, I have a website. All LinkedIn, please. Perfect.

Alex Husner: 26:05

Sounds great. Well, if anybody wants to get in touch with Annie or I, you can go to alexandannipodcastcom. And thank you for tuning in. We will see you next time.