Hello, hello, welcome along to another podcast. So today we are talking about how nothing drives bookens like impact pet easy for me to say nothing drives bookens like impeccable design and we've got very special guest who's going to be talking why that's important and how you can be mostly booked and I love that that.

There's both the name of this person's business, but also we love saying that. Yeah, we're mostly booked. It's just a great saying for us STR owners. So if this is your first one here, you're listening to the bootly podcast, the podcast that helps gives hosts the tools, the tactics, the trainings are most importantly, the confidence so you can go out there and get more direct bookens my name is Liam carolan and this is the mini series on the bootly podcast, which looks at businesses, people who you as a short term rental operator should know about within the industry. So today I'm doing

to win by Stephen Eagles. And as I say, his company is called mostly booked. You can go and check them out mostly booked.co and I'm just excited. I've been following Stephen for a couple of weeks since, you know, since we arranged this and he's very, he can polarize a room with some of the opinions, which is fantastic. So I'm excited about this. So Stephen, welcome along and thank you for joining us today.

And thank you so much for inviting me. That is true. My content can be a little bit polarizing at times, but I do feel like it's it's on points and some things need to be said, you know, there's a lot of I think what I find is there's a lot of hosts out there who are in different places. There's like the host in these Facebook groups who's just got the one list and it's their baby and they will do it in a certain way. And that's very different to how like a medium to large sized operator would operate.

So therefore, when I come in with some cold truths, you know, they're always there to shoot me down. So that's not right. You know, but a lot of my advice is for this. I would say people with several listens and above, you know, and to be fair, you have to be cruel to be kind. Sometimes there's a lot of overly optimistic people who go into into business isn't there. And they just some of the truths actually can save them from making something the fatal mistakes that we see happen. So let's start off by throwing the mic open by saying, can you introduce

yourself and your business mostly booked? Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Stephen from mostly booked. And I help hosts essentially cook through the noise, beat market saturation, that big key word that everybody is sort of afraid of. I'm a season property manager. And we're now an agency that saves hosts to help them stand out from the crowd and achieve a calendar that for most of the time is mostly booked that sort of that's the end of the game.

I like it. How did the name come about? I was trying to hit the nail on the head with what is the desired outcome that my my avatar would like, you know, something similar to how maybe a host can think about their guest avatar. I think about my customer avatar. What's important to me, you know, because I've been a host myself for many years.

So to grow and in scale and other people's portfolios, I've obviously understood that that is the that's the most important thing. It's the thing that we always want. But also it's not too, you know, you'll see a lot of maybe coaches and consultants out there promise and I can I can achieve you 100,000 pounds and three days, you know, so I thought mostly booked is a little bit on the state that it's the result that we all really would want if we could be mostly booked most of the time, then that would make us all very happy and sure.

100% and there's a saying which I always talk about, which is your vibe attracts you try, but the end of the day, some people will go for that, hey, big promise, you know, big result and that.

And others will prefer just the sheer honesty and like say, just be a mostly booked would be great. Most of the time, wouldn't it? Absolutely.

I just want to revisit the problem that the company solves and how it does that. So talk us through who it is, you help mostly you mentioned your avatar and how it is, you best help them.

So I would say sadly a lot of it, it comes down to almost the accountability, you know, I can I put a lot of time into my content and trying to put the best content out there and coming up with like the latest cut an edge tactics and tools and strategies, which are all greater sort of individual strategies.

But I think I found that most host just simply they don't have the time for whatever reason to implement a lot of these strategies and they don't have the time to focus on the growth related tasks because the busy checking guests in and maybe even maybe you could consider scale and a growth specific task, which touches on another problem of host sort of scale and on a bad model to outrun poor performance.

So I guess in a nutshell, what you could say that I mostly do is the tasks that I feel that the host should be doing, but they're not necessarily getting the time to do.

So just quickly I originally started with the along the coach and sort of model, which is me preaching to the world, which I'm very good at doing of here's what I think you should do and here's how you should optimize your list and your pricing strategy, etc.

Which is all well and good and people love to consume that information, but I found that it wasn't necessarily moving, moving any of my clients further down the line, you know, they were paying me because they wanted that problem solved, but then when I'm trying to keep them accountable to hey of you actually gone and done that work, you know, there's there's always a million different things going on in their lives that stop them from moving forward.

And so now I've sort of switched to more of an agency model, which is what I thought, you know, I guess hosts, if they could pay to get the result done versus me telling them what to do, you know, that would be a win-win for us all because I love to take satisfaction and work with hosts, listens, seeing them get better increased performance, you know, it's great for them and great for me.

So in a nutshell, and essentially it's like outsourcing your growth specific tasks to an agency from someone that's been there and done it and knows the industry inside out.

It's like a safe pair of expert hands is essentially what I'm offering hosts, you know, nice and it definitely resonates with me and I'm sure hosts listen to this disco, you know, so many times I know exactly what it is I should be doing.

But a week goes down the line or two weeks and you know, you sit there with a coach and mentor and they're like, did you do it and you're like, no, I don't get my homework or whatever whatever the reason is, but yeah, what do you find, first of all, we should mention because there's people listening from obviously us UK.

I'd love people listening to this if you're watching on the Facebook live just to put in the comments what you're finding your biggest reason is for not getting to the time for doing the things that you think you should be doing.

That would be awesome to find out on there actually on the call.

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