Systemisation question from the community

‎This is a question from Alan Cinderey‎ to Serviced Accommodation Secrets which Alan has kindly said we can re-post here to share the learnings with you all:

Yesterday at 20:18 ·
“Hi all hope you are well

Just wondering what systems everyone has in place for different aspects of the SA business? What is really helping you have a hands off business, but still providing a 5 star service.

Hope you’e all had a great day”

So, in reply to this, I’m happy to share: (Long post warning!!)😀🎉🙏
I’m working on a program to systemise our SA business with the guys from Prestige Property, David Diack and Matt Ward, and they have been sharing what they do in their business with approx. 40 SA properties (imagine running those without a system!!!)

I found I’ve been constantly pulled back into the business, like having a job and would spend far too long involved in daily operations, scheduling takes an age and it became really hard to spend time getting new business, networking, new properties and living life!!

This program with the guys is great and has been a step by step process to create a guest dashboard and have full support in recruiting and onboarding our first VA to administer this guest dashboard and keep it up to date (as well as many other admin tasks). It’s still not complete, but getting there..

The dashboard is linked to our channel manager, Tokeet and it is created in Trello which then has automation within it, plus a series of boards for other aspects of the business, e.g. cleaning, property info, maintenance and so on.

There are various apps involved – Slack for communication, several options for ‘to do lists’ inc Wunderlist, Last Pass password manager, Zapier, Formsite and PARiM for our team.

The key thing is that the best plan is to record the processes you already have in place, usually following the guest experience, and the actions taken to ensure everything is in place for the guest to have an excellent experience at your SA unit!

Even if you’re doing these at the moment, still record each one as the idea is to get your the business into a state where someone else could run it for you because there are processes for each step and software/apps that enable visibility of the current status of, for example each booking, which property needs cleaning and when etc etc.

Now I’m not that great at systems, they really do not come naturally to me, so I didn’t want to start from scratch or re-invent the wheel. Best idea I think, is to learn from successful people who’ve done this and learn from them!

And as well as this, because we’re systemising our whole business, we are also working with Steve Day and Kevin Brittain in Systems for Outsourcing, because the SA business will slot into the structure we create here, and we’re using Asana business and G Suite for sharing information and having a central hub for our whole business.

For anyone who isn’t very tech savvy, I’d thoroughly recommend working with some experienced people to get this stuff set up!!

If you are tech savvy, but may get this stuff done on your own, or prefer different apps/software to do it, or maybe something like Guesty, the channel manager that has it’s own VAs and several apps which work with it.

The way it all works together is not something that comes naturally to me, but we now have a brilliant VA and she is doing a wonderful job and has taken a load off my back so I can be less of a control freak and better at working on the business instead of in it!! 😊

I hope this helps Alan :), appreciate the awesome question!! Thank you 🙂

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