Scaling Made Simple: Proven Strategies for Remote Vacation Rental Property Management with Lisa Roads

00:00:32 - Jenn Boyles

Hello and welcome to another episode of Direct Booking Success. I'm your host Jennn Boyles, and today I have the lovely Lisa Roads, the holiday property coach, with me. Hi Lisa, great to have you here.

00:00:46 - Lisa Roads

Hi Jenn, it's so lovely to join you.

00:00:49 - Jenn Boyles

So let's start with a little bit about who you are, where you are, what you do.

00:00:53 - Lisa Roads

Okay, so Lisa Roads, as you said, I have been in the short term rental business for probably an awful long time, over 20 something years. I started investing in properties when I was 22 on the advice of my father who was very entrepreneurial. I initially started buying tiny little miners' cottages up in the northeast of the UK with a very small budget and it was a traditional buy to let. And then that was kind of how I got my foot in the market. In the property market, my father said you'll never lose money on property, so you need to get on the property market. So I took his advice and I did. And then as I met my husband and we started to live and work abroad internationally in the Middle East, we wanted to continue with our property investments so we didn't lose our position in the property market. So I started looking for other property investments and on the back of some business networking, actually I met somebody who said, have you considered investing abroad in short term rentals? And at that time I hadn't. But I decided to buy several off-plan apartments in Cyprus because I did my homework and I thought there were some locations I thought were a bit high risk for me. But Cyprus, I knew quite a bit about. Cyprus in terms of its law was very much based on British law. And so I did an inspection trip to Cyprus and I bought three off-plan properties in Cyprus. And now the market was very new, it hadn't really established yet. So we were very early doors in a very emerging market and my properties came for completion. And at that point I assumed like a lot of other owners, that there would be all these services out there that were going to help me with my properties when I needed them and those services didn't exist. So I actually had another business at the time, I had a marketing company at the time with a South African business partner which was keeping me very busy. But the eternal entrepreneur in me saw an opportunity in a market in Cyprus to go, okay, so if these services don't exist, and I need them. There are lots of other people like me who are going to need these services too. So I just started with a very small part of the service, which was the interior design and furnishing of my own properties. And other people in the complex that also had bought saw what I was doing and said, can you help me with mine? And that's how it started. So I said yes, of, you know, the reality was that these things didn't really exist in Cyprus. There were no Ikea's or large department stores or anything. So I struggled to begin with, to do anything at large scale to even do my own. And I started bringing sorry to interrupt.

00:03:29 - Jenn Boyles

But where were you living at the time? Were you doing this in the UK?

00:03:33 - Lisa Roads

I lived in the UK and our properties were in Cyprus, so, yes, I was doing it. Traveling between.

00:03:42 - Jenn Boyles

Another layer of difficulty.

00:03:43 - Lisa Roads

Yeah, it does. Well, I think I certainly appreciated what other owners were going to have to struggle with. If I was struggling with it, I thought, well, you know, there's an opportunity here to create this initial service. And I pulled together a load of local contractors, your DIY people, your electricians, all those kinds of people to help me with mine. And eventually I thought, well, I could offer this service and I ran it concurrently with my marketing business. Actually, I've just kind of started with this. I don't think at that stage I really had an idea about where it was going. I just knew there was an opportunity to deliver a service to people. So that service was our investor complete service, which was, we'll take an empty property, we'll interior design it for the right market, we'll furnish it, project, manage that and you'll have ready, a completely furnished, ready to go product. But then the next thing came along and it was like, well, what do they do with it? Then? These people are working in the UK and they don't know the first thing about renting their properties out. And I was like, OK. So I actually tried a few local property management companies and to be honest, I wasn't very impressed. The standard of service was not what I wanted. So there I go again thinking, well, it's not what I want. Let's develop what we do want, so let's create a service that now is a management service. So that's what I did. And I initially started working with contractors to deliver this service on a very small scale. And then it grew really quickly because the market was growing and I just kind of snowballed this business, just snowballed really fast. So I realized that working with contractors was never going to be a long term solution. I had to start thinking about employing people, so I was quite happy to do that. I already employed people in the UK, so I was quite happy to do that. So I started looking for some people to work with. I mean we were literally into 60, 70 properties in about eight months. It was quite my goodness, really quick.

00:05:35 - Jenn Boyles

You had a property background but the hospitality side of things and bookings and short term rentals and all that, that was all new to you.

00:05:45 - Lisa Roads

Yeah, but I had a marketing background. Yes. So I had a marketing background so I could apply the basics of marketing to anything I was doing. So I understood about the ideal target market, communicating with those ideal clients, best means to find them, communicate to them and at that time bearing in mind this is pre Airbnb and that makes a lot of people laugh. They're like what? There was a life before Airbnb. There really, really was a life before Airbnb or any of the other you know, you're talking about sort of basic social media, building local relationships, collaborations, finding travel agencies and that kind of thing. But the rental marketing was the very last service that I layered on. I wanted to make sure we got the first parts of the service right, the management service, the looking after the properties, the acquiring the right properties, the contracting, the commercials, that kind of thing. And then really maintain a proactive. Preventive maintenance was really key to the service I wanted to offer so that these owners had the reassurance and the confidence that we were absolutely going to take care of a very high value asset when they were a long way away from where that asset was. So we did that and then I recognized that in order for this to be of any great value there needed to be the rental bit of the equation because otherwise the machine didn't really work for the owners or for us. Most of the owners really didn't have a clue or the inclination to take on the rental marketing themselves. So with my marketing background I said okay we'll layer on the rental marketing service. So we ended up doing an end to end fully managed property management rental marketing service and we scaled that business over 18 years. 275 properties, very selected properties. I mean this is the thing I always say to people. It was not the scatter gun. Let's just take anything on. Whoever comes to me will just have your property. It was never that. It was about really knowing that we understood who our ideal client was. We knew what caliber of property we needed. We needed owners that were going to work with us to really deliver the product. We needed to really buy into it. This has to be the right property, right place, it has to be furnished correctly, good inventory and all the support we needed to offer that they completely supported us to deliver. So yeah, I captured it about that because I thought I didn't want to get to the point where I just took anything on and I also with the island of Cyprus I started in the Paphos end of the island and I didn't expand until I had feet on the ground, skills on the ground, resourcing on the ground to manage the additional geography logistics that we were going to be taking on. So that's what I did.

00:08:24 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, it sounds like you became the real insider, the real local know, you had the network, you then had employees on the ground and were you still living in the UK and traveling back?

00:08:38 - Lisa Roads

And so I had my initial two properties, but I then also bought a base property for me there, which I never rented out. And it was my kind of bolt hole. When I needed to go to Cyprus to work for a couple of weeks or a few months or whatever I decided to do when we were really busy project managing lots of properties, being furnished. So I had a good base and that was in the Coral Bay area of Paphos, but in between I built a really good team and when I looked for my team, I looked for people either with hospitality or property management experience. Obviously being able to speak Greek was very helpful on the island, although they do speak very good English. And I looked at people with a really good attitude to hospitality, to really going above and beyond for guests because as we all know, Jenn, things don't work five days a week, things operate seven days a week. Twenty four, seven. And the other thing I wanted to make sure we could offer was 24/7 support if people needed it, and we did. And there were a number of occasions over the time I was there where that really was a very big USP because not many companies worked over the weekend and very few companies offered 24/7 support to guests.

00:09:51 - Jenn Boyles

Yes, because like you said, the guests are there 24/7, they have an issue in the middle of the night, they need somebody to contact.

00:09:59 - Lisa Roads

Yeah, and flights come in at funny times of the day and night, all days of the week and it's inevitable that they'll arrive at 01:00 A.m. And for some reason they can't get in or something's happened or they can't find their way. Nothing ever looks the same in the dark. So I was always the backup position because of the time difference, I was always there in the backup position if someone couldn't get hold of somebody. So yeah, you work seven days a week, 24/7 if you need to, because that's the investment you put in your business, isn't it, at the time.

00:10:31 - Jenn Boyles

And as you scaled this business, did this business start to take over from your marketing business? Did that business?

00:10:37 - Lisa Roads

Absolutely, I think it was probably about within about the first twelve months I recognized that this was growing legs much faster than I expected it to. And so I spoke to my business partner, UK, and I said, how do you feel about buying me out of the marketing agency so that I can concentrate wholeheartedly on this? I think it's because I come from an entrepreneurial family and my family was a very service oriented family. And my father had brought us up to be very service focused, that I had a real passion for this. Even though I didn't come from the hospitality sector, I definitely had a passion for looking after people. And so that's what I did. I sold my share in my after the agency and Michelle took that business on and I then was able to completely focus on growing the business and investing my time in the skills of my team, the processes, the systems, all those things that you needed when you're going to grow a business that's growing, like, so fast.

00:11:32 - Jenn Boyles

And such a testament to your father with him saying to you to invest in a property from the start, isn't it?

00:11:40 - Lisa Roads

Yeah, I mean, it was a struggle. I remember I was a fairly low paid civil servant in the UK. I was very young and I remember saying to my dad, but, dad, I haven't got any money left at the end of the month now. All my money's going on my mortgage and my bills. And he said, yeah, but you'll thank me later, you may not appreciate it now. And I actually made money on every single property I bought and sold in the UK, every single property. And that allowed me to release equity, to buy the next one and the next one, and that's really how I funded the deposits on the properties in Cyprus. So, yeah, all thanks to my dad. That was a good piece of advice, for sure.

00:12:17 - Jenn Boyles

Very good piece of advice. I wish someone had given me that piece of advice too. Yeah, because you were making money as you went along, weren't you, and building up that nest egg so that you could then when the opportunity came along, you were able to jump at it.

00:12:35 - Lisa Roads

Yeah, and that's the other thing is, one of the things that, you'll know, when you scale a business is it's very money, cash hungry. And when I started looking at just my salary bill, the months were enormous. And paying contractors, contractors need to be paid on time, and I think that's something that if you don't come at it with a plan financially, your business could drive you if you don't have a financial cash flow plan for funding it. And it's quite seasonal. So even if you did rely on contractors, there's going to be months in the year you're going to need high cash flow and other months of the year, the shoulder season, for example. You may not have quite the same levels of activity, but you've still got to fund these very high periods of cash.

00:13:21 - Jenn Boyles

You were definitely in a great position when this idea came about. You were in the right place also, mentally, because I was speaking with Yvonne Halling in last week's episode. And we were talking about the mindset of being a professional in this industry rather than a hobbyist. And I can see that you were already an entrepreneur, you already had your own business, so when this opportunity came.

00:13:48 - Lisa Roads

About, you probably didn't.

00:13:50 - Jenn Boyles

Have any of those sort of hang ups as you were creating this?

00:13:55 - Lisa Roads

No, I think because I'd already set up another limited company. Setting up the company was not in any way an intimidating prospect for me. I had a commercial contracts background before that, so I was always about doing things properly, systems and processes. I'm a pretty organized, detail driven type person, relationship building, something I think I do quite well at. So, like people say, I'm a natural connector. And when you are that person, you just go out and build those. You look for those people that you need to work with, you identify the people that are very similar in values to yourself and you go, we could work together. And don't be shy of asking that question, would you like to work together? The other thing was I never really worried about competition, which sounds really arrogant, but it wasn't that I just wasn't on the ground enough to worry about it. I just got on with what we were doing and realized the cake is big enough for everybody to have a piece of it. Just let them get on with what they're doing. We just do what we're doing. And there was never a clash at all with any competitors.

00:14:57 - Jenn Boyles

And also, I guess, with social media, we're now run by so much social media, overrun by it, really. We can see so much of what other people are doing and we start getting into our own head and impostor syndrome creeps in and all that. But I can see from a few years ago when you were doing that you didn't have those temptations on social media and you could just stay in your lane and do what you were doing.

00:15:23 - Lisa Roads

And I have. I will be so good that they can't ignore you. And I said to my team, if you deliver everything and more, that you promise your clients they'd have no reason to go somewhere else. They'd only go somewhere else if you didn't deliver what you said you were going to deliver. So that was always my thing. Look after them now. It's not just about now. You want them to stay with you and you don't want them to just book once, you want them to book again and again and again. So the Aspiration was always, get the first booking, but make it so good, they're going to come back to you next time. And they do, and they did, and they still do great.

00:15:57 - Jenn Boyles

So let's talk a little bit about your booking. So you set up this, you did the end to end service, which it sounds really exciting that an investor could come to you and say, okay, here's my empty shell of an apartment. You do everything. Which I think is probably quite a good dream for people who are wanting to have a larger property management company, because I think a lot of times people come with saying, this is our property, you can't change anything, which is a completely different mindset and a whole other thing that you have to deal with. So you said that the rental part of it was the last part that you layered on. So can you talk a bit about how that came to be? Because we're talking pre airbnb, so let's dig into that a bit.

00:16:45 - Lisa Roads

Yeah. So I was very fortunate that I had some influence with the owners in terms of how we furnished and presented and styled their properties, because I had a really good understanding even in some areas that were not really well established. I'm talking about your outside of the centre of pathfoss, areas that weren't very well known. I could see where I thought those markets were going to appeal to a particular profile of customer. So with that in mind, I made sure that we created a product that was going to appeal to them and I made sure I had a really good photographer, so I kind of was able to control all of those elements to make sure that what we got at the end of it was going to appeal. And then I started using social media. You know, I had the basics, Facebook and all the rest of it, but actually, most of the business came through. You know, working with people who I knew of or friends and family who needed somewhere to stay or even local people on the ground who would have friends and family to come to stay regularly. So Cypress seems to be one of those places that once people fall in love with the place, they just keep going back. And I've had people who started on holiday and then got married there, and then they'd go back for their anniversary or their birthday. So once you've built that relationship with somebody, you've got a connection to all sorts of other people that will spread the word for you. They will be your ambassadors for your business. And that's what we tapped into, whether it was a local estate agent who could refer people to us or a local travel agent. We tapped into the Russian market, the Greek market, because in Cyprus it's quite funny. So people who live down the other end of the island will come up to Paphos for their main summer holiday and they want somewhere to stay, so it's only a couple of hours, but they actually, literally would rather go to the other end of the island for their main summer holiday than go abroad. So we've built relationships not just with travel agencies and through our own sort of social media presence, we've also built relationships with local people who might live at the other end of the island, who will typically go to Paphos end of the island for their summer holidays. There's like a three week window in August and the Greeks all shut down, everything shuts down. And they won't go abroad. They will come to the other end of the island. And what's really lovely is that we weren't just marketing to your international market, we were marketing to a local domestic holiday market, too. And they still come back to us, even now. Even in the last week, I've had people come back to me, and today I had a phone call from a chap in Israel who spoke to me in 2019, who bought a property in Paya, who needed extra accommodation for his family, who phoned me. They arrived tomorrow night and I gave them somewhere to stay. And that was from a conversation in 2019. I think if you make an impression on somebody and you're helpful, you will leave a lasting impression and they will come back to you. And it was that I've always banked on, really, always going the extra mile and always responding quickly and always saying, yes, I can help you, and finding a way of helping somebody.

00:19:46 - Jenn Boyles

And without sounding too woo. But that air, that sort of vibe that you give off of being helpful and considerate, rather than, this is how I want to make money. Let's get more heads on beds. I just want your money. So I think showing your hospitality focus, I think, yeah, it really shows.

00:20:11 - Lisa Roads

I would say heart led. I've always said this and I have this conversation even when I'd been mentoring people in businesses. I've always said, lead with service and your heart and the money will come. Don't focus on the money, focus on what you can do to help people and deliver that amazing service and experience, and you will get their loyalty and they will pay for that service. We were never interested as a management company. We were never the cheapest ever. But it didn't stop people working with us.

00:20:41 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, that's great. Now, Lisa's coming to speak at the third Direct Booking Success Summit, which is coming out next month, October 3 to fifth, 2023. So if you're listening in the future, you've missed it, but tell us a little bit about what you're going to be speaking on during the summit.

00:21:02 - Lisa Roads

So I'm going to be talking about how I scaled my own property management business from Naught to 175 properties, but I did it in another country, from the UK. So I was never based in Cyprus when I scaled that business. I operated that business for 18 years remotely from the UK, operating a team based on the island. So that's what I'm going to be talking about, how I did it, all the strategies I used, all the things that helped me to make that possible, yeah.

00:21:33 - Jenn Boyles

And I guess spoiler alert, part of it is going to be about those connections that you've made.

00:21:38 - Lisa Roads

Yeah, for sure. And those connections go an awful long way. You cannot run a business of that size even in the same piece of land that you stood on without a lot of really good people. But trying to do that from another country, if things go a bit pear shaped, which they inevitably do from time to time, if you have any major emergencies, which we had several of them, we had earthquakes, we had major disasters that hit us while we were running that business. You can't do that without a really good team of people around you. And that's a really big part of your strategy. Yeah.

00:22:10 - Jenn Boyles

Whenever I hear somebody wanting to run a business that isn't in where they know the first thing, I said, okay, well, who's in the know? Who's your got my I'm in Canada now. I've still got my business. Yeah, I'm trying to run it from here, but I've got people on the ground that I can depend on. If there's an issue or whatever it is, they're going to take care of it for me because I physically can't be there.

00:22:40 - Lisa Roads

The more properties you have, the more concentration of guests you've got staying, statistically, you're going to get more problems.

00:22:50 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, definitely. And what did you scale to?

00:22:54 - Lisa Roads

200 and 275.

00:22:58 - Jenn Boyles

So, yeah, I can just see there was quite a few problems that would.

00:23:02 - Lisa Roads

Have 175 not 275, but even so, 175 properties over an island, logistically and all requiring different levels of support. You're talking about sort of very high end, large villas that could have been used for weddings and retreats to very expensive villas in golf resorts, like five star golf resorts, where people have very high expectations of their stay.

00:23:33 - Jenn Boyles

And did you change your strategy or how did things impact you when Airbnb did come on the market?

00:23:41 - Lisa Roads

Well, like everybody and I know you've spoken about this, they can be part of your strategy, but you don't necessarily rely totally on them. So it was always about, well, we'll use them, but we'll convert people to directly book with us next time for the first time if people don't know you, or they might use that as their vehicle. But I pretty much say 98% of people would book directly with us if they booked again. And airbnb, I think they have their place. But I think the people that worked with us wanted that personal service. They didn't want to deal with people that they didn't know. They wanted to deal with you directly because what we were able to do is find out exactly why they were coming, what was important to them, what else they needed help with. And we had relationships with everything from baby equipment hire, wedding planners, photographers, disabled equipment hire, all the food items they might need if they're arriving late. Weddings, birthday cakes, anything they needed. Car hire, airport transfers. We offered the whole thing. We managed everything for them, so it was easier if they came to us and we just dealt with it all.

00:24:51 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, no middle person there getting in the way.

00:24:56 - Lisa Roads

Good stuff.

00:24:58 - Jenn Boyles

So bring us up to speed about what you're doing now. You sold this business, didn't you?

00:25:03 - Lisa Roads

I did. When did you? I did. Okay, so Brexit was a great big help for that decision. I can imagine. I think there are two things. I actually started the business before Cyprus joined the EU, so we were using the Cyprus pound before they joined the EU. So I had worked in Cyprus before they joined the EU, but Brexit just added a whole nother layer of complexity in terms of double accounting, tax systems, all that rest of it. And after 18 years of operating a business seven days a week, I was honestly quite tired. And it kind of limited some of the other things I could do. I could spontaneously just disappear and travel somewhere really easily. And if I did travel, I had to accommodate time zones, that kind of stuff. So I felt like the writing was there to say, it's maybe time to give it a new home to a new owner and allow me to do some other things. So I started looking for a new owner probably about two years before I decided to sell. And I wasn't willing to just give it to anybody, I had to give it to somebody who was going to honor our relationships with our clients because I felt so responsible for them. I felt like I'd had the loyalty of all these clients for so many years. It was really, really important to me that I didn't just parcel them off. I say, sorry, I'm done with you now. I've had my 18 years, I don't really care what happens to you.

00:26:22 - Jenn Boyles

And I guess clients too are on both sides. It's the homeowners, the investors, but also the guests, isn't it?

00:26:28 - Lisa Roads

Yeah. And that transition, that's probably one of the hardest things to do. It was the hardest email I ever had to write, to say, things are changing, because I felt really ODS with the whole thing. Really. I knew it was the right thing to do, but I felt very ODS with doing it. But I finally made the decision to transition to actually being a member of my management team who did have a lot of experience in the business. She did come from a property management business in the UK before she arrived in Cyprus. And she was at the right time, her son was growing up. She had the time to take it on more fully. And as part of the agreement, I kind of gave her 18 months of support to make sure that she wasn't alone dealing with this really big business. And the. Nice thing was the owners knew her, the property owners knew her, so they didn't feel completely like I'm dealing with somebody I don't know either. And yes, there's been a few kind of moments where they come to me instead of her and I kind of just kind of point them back and say, sue will deal with it, Sue will deal with it, and just reassuring them that everything was fine. I think that was the best thing we could have done was just to reassure owners that everything was just going to carry on as it did and they were going to be looked after. And I was still here in the background if there was anything that Sue needed. But actually she was more than capable of running the business and that was 2021. So we're now nearly two years on and everything is good.

00:27:55 - Jenn Boyles

Oh, great. Yeah. I couldn't have thought of a better situation there.

00:28:00 - Lisa Roads

No. It wasn't initially like they're staring at me, but it became apparent that that was the right thing. There were a couple of options on the table. I looked at them and I just didn't feel quite 100% about them. And I knew that Sue was a really good person. I knew she had a massive heart for hospitality and looking after people. So while she didn't have everything, I always wonder whether they recruit for attitude and train for skill, really. And she definitely had the right attitude for looking after people and she's continued to do that. So I'm really pleased. Yeah. So that transition happened and then I took a little bit of time out because I needed to take some time.

00:28:40 - Jenn Boyles

Out, of course, and well, you could have retired at this point.

00:28:43 - Lisa Roads

I could have done, I could have done. A lot of people thought I was going to do that, but anybody who knows my family and knows my entrepreneurial genes just knows that's just not going to happen. My husband tried to retire once and he gave up, went back to consulting. So I thought, well, if he's going to work, what am I going to do? So I decided then, and people like, know, the obvious thing to do, Lisa, is to utilize your years of experience and help other people. So again, it came back to helping other people. And it was not about money, it was not about being the best, the biggest name person in this industry. It was just about saying, if you need some help, I can help you, and I'd really like to help you. The holiday property coach and the property management coach were sort of born in 2022 and I'm now working in two ways with people. I work one to one with some businesses. So I'm talking about your property management companies who want to scale, who just need a bit of support and mentoring on a regular basis to help them through that process. And I do work with some one to one smaller businesses who are either very new to this and just don't know what they're doing. And then I work with people who maybe started during the pandemic when it was relatively easy, and now they're realizing it's perhaps not quite so easy now that the world has reopened and the market is pretty competitive and they need a bit of help to kind of elevate their marketing and their visibility, to kind of do a bit better than they are.

00:30:11 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah. Oh, that's great. Well, I'm glad that you didn't retire because I think you said this a few minutes ago, that when you were talking about competitors on Cyprus that there was enough business there to go around for everyone.

00:30:28 - Lisa Roads

Yep.

00:30:29 - Jenn Boyles

And in our hospitality industry and in this sector, it is wonderful to have people that are like minded, that we can support each other, and also we're not out there trying to tell people how to get rich quick.

00:30:43 - Lisa Roads

No, that's something I really, really feel very strongly about. I get really frustrated when you see that you don't need any money, you don't need any experience, you just go and get a property and you stick it on airbnb and everything's fabulous. And I'm like, really? No, it's not like that. And I think it's a shame, really, because those of us who've been in this business for a while just know the ups and downs and the realities of what it really takes. And I keep saying, actually getting a booking is the easy part. Looking after your guests, delivering the experience and keeping them happy is the hardest part of hospitality. And I think that's a bit. A lot of these get rich schemes kind of quickly gloss over.

00:31:22 - Jenn Boyles

Yes, definitely. But it's exciting. So shiny and exciting, so I can.

00:31:28 - Lisa Roads

See why people get taken in by.

00:31:30 - Jenn Boyles

It, but no, it is work.

00:31:34 - Lisa Roads

But I think I'd like to think that I attract those people with very similar hospitality values and that's typically who I work with, people who genuinely are passionate about looking after their guests and they want to deliver that experience. They just don't have the experience to know what that looks like and how they actually do it. If you're looking for a kind of I'm an investor and I'm only interested in the return. I don't really care how I get it. They're not my ideal client, but. They're a good place. Am I trying to say they can still invest in property and have somebody. Else for yes, absolutely. Absolutely. But if you wanted to do it yourself, then there's some legwork that needs to be done to make it all happen. It doesn't just happen by buying it, getting someone to throw a load of furniture at it to get an airbnb.

00:32:23 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah, that's exactly it. And I think it's the education of people that realize what goes on behind the scenes and it's not as easy as it seems to be. No, not at all. And I can't imagine 175 properties doing that at that scale. I think that is really commendable. It really is. For the work that you've put into it and now being able to help others, I think it's wonderful.

00:32:52 - Lisa Roads

It's really wonderful. I get a lot of pleasure out of working with people. There's nothing nicer than working with somebody and just seeing them make progress, or the light bulb moments when you can see their skills developing and their portfolio growing and when they have great reviews and there's just something about that that gives me a really good feeling when I see other people doing really well.

00:33:14 - Jenn Boyles

Yeah. No, I'm the same. I absolutely love it. Absolutely. Now, I cannot let you go without asking you, what does Direct Booking Success mean to you?

00:33:26 - Lisa Roads

I feel it's about creating or building a good brand, a brand that attracts your ideal client like a magnet, that when they see it, they feel trust, they can see professionalism, and that it's easy for them to book with you directly. That's what I think it means to me.

00:33:47 - Jenn Boyles

Brilliant. Thank you, Lisa, so much for coming on today. I can't wait to have you as part of the Summit, third to 5 October. Head to Direct Booking Success, the longest name ever for a website, but head there to get your free ticket. It's a free online summit. It's the third one in three years, so it's going to be great. Now, I'm going to put your links in the show notes, but where can people connect with you?

00:34:20 - Lisa Roads

So I'm on most of the social media platforms. Facebook, the holiday property coach. Instagram, the holiday property expert. I've got my own website, theholidaypropertycoach.com I have a Facebook page. I'm very happy to connect with people. I love connecting with people. So Lisa Roads. I'm on LinkedIn under Lisa Roads or the holiday property coach. And if anyone wants to connect with me, I'd be very happy to connect with them.

00:34:42 - Jenn Boyles

Brilliant. And you've got a little offer too.

00:34:44 - Lisa Roads

Do you, for I do. I have a signature program called the Five P's of a successful short term rental. It's the foundation that I believe people need to get right, to get everything else right. And it's a six week program and I'm offering your listeners a 10% discount on that program.

00:35:01 - Jenn Boyles

Brilliant. So we'll put that in the show notes as well. Thank you again, Lisa, and we'll see you at the Summit.

00:35:10 - Lisa Roads

I'm looking forward to it very much. And thank you very much, Jenn. It's been a great pleasure.