On today’s episode, we sit down with Graham Donoghue, the CEO of Sykes Holiday Cottages. Graham had retired from a successful career creating and growing some of the most successful digital-led businesses across financial services and travel. A phone call while mowing his lawn pulled him out of retirement and back into the mix doing what he does best… scaling! We discuss how he was able to help scale Sykes from 185 to 1700 employees and 5,500 to 23,000+ properties in just 6 years. Oh yeah, a decent amount of acquisitions happened in that time span as well… 24 different businesses to be exact. It’s essential for a company to have a narrative, story, and belief that everyone can rally behind. We all know service is a component behind being successful in our industry. Still, Graham discusses how important it is to obsess over this aspect in order to separate your brand apart from everyone else. You don’t want to miss this episode!

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Service As A Differentiator With Graham Donoghue

Mateo, how are you?

John, as always, I’m fantastic. No real complaints. How are you?

I’m good. Season 3, episode 4. It’s been a whirlwind. It’s been nonstop. We have an amazing guest. I want to jump right in. We’re going across the pond with a huge player in the vacation rental holiday let cottage space. We are excited to bring in and announce Graham Donoghue of Sykes Holiday Cottages. Thanks for joining us, Graham. Welcome to the show.

Pleasure. I’m delighted to be here. I’m looking forward to it.

I was lucky enough to sit down by accident. I was at the VRMA Executive Summit in West Palm in Florida and was eating lunch or breakfast. I don’t know what you said. I always make a rule for myself when I sit down at any one of these conferences to go and sit with people I have never talked with. I also have an unwritten rule that if I have a team of people on my team, I’m there with Hopper and we’re all there that we don’t sit together. You go sit over there. Everyone go meet and mingle with other people. It’s a great way to know each other.

I had an opportunity to eavesdrop and listen to Graham talking to other people. I’ve got a few words in here and there, but I was excited to connect with Graham. Again, I’m excited to have you on your show. We want to hear your story. You’re doing a bunch of different things digitally with money, but how do you go ahead? You’re on Money SuperMarket and then TravelSupermarket. In 2016, you moved into this position as CEO of Sykes. How does that happen?

The story is Money Supermarket is a price comparison website. I’m trying to think of an equivalent you have in the US. Credit Karma is a good example. They’re one of the original price comparison websites that existed, and I joined there from a travel company called TUI, the world’s largest tourism organization. I went through seven years learning about this thing called the internet that shows you how old I am.

The internet hardly existed back in those days. It was always about contact centers and about selling holidays on the High Street. I then joined Money Supermarket because it was entrepreneurial and it was doing cool things. Over 7 years, we had 54 different channels, credit cards, loans, mortgages, and travel. I joined to run the travel business.

I realized within about three months that there was more money in financial services. The board, fortunately, said, “Why don’t you look after the financial services part of the business?” I looked after that and I also looked after utilities that were energy switching as well. There weren’t many pricing comparisons back then. Credit Karma was starting to aggregate. Money Supermarket was a tremendous ride, entrepreneurial, and suddenly, it was the biggest IPO in Europe.

It was around about $2 billion IPO, really successful, and suddenly, you’ve got these things called analysts and shareholders. They expect you every quarter to be able to tell you what’s going to happen. The environment changed and it became more challenging and more political as organizations get bigger. It became less fun. I retired at 42. I said, “I didn’t want to do a proper job ever again.” I had the notion of being this wandering nomad that went into organizations and helped them understand pearly words of my wisdom, how it could help them maybe be better for what it’s worth.

I took a time off for about a year. I spent time with my family, my wife, and my kids. I took my kids to school every day, and learned how to do gardening. I got bored quickly and that’s how I ended up in Sykes. This is the genuine truth. I was cutting my grass one day and I got a phone call from a head hunter whom I know very well, who said, “I know you’re not doing anything. I know this might be quite small compared to what you’ve done before, but it’s in travel. We know you love to travel. It’s in the Northwest of the UK.”

That’s where I lived. “It’s a small business with huge potential. It’s backed by private equity.” I knew little about private equity. I didn’t know what it was. “Why don’t you go and have a meeting?” That’s what I did. I met the private equity people first and said, “Explain private equity. How does it work? Help me understand what your ambition is, and how we can grow faster.”

I met the team, fell in love with the category, fell in love with the team, joined, and said, “Whatever plan you’ve got, let’s double it. What do we need to do in the next four years? Let’s double everything. Double the headcount, double the property count, double the revenue, and double the EBITDA. What does double everything look like? More importantly, how do you build something that could go from double to 10X in a relatively short space of time because the headroom’s there.

That is what started in 2016. That was the journey where we said, “How are we going to do this? What’s the plan? What’s the master plan? What investment do we need? What capability between people? What culture do we need?” We started it. We can go back to give you the context, but now, we’re at 1,700 people from 185.

You more than double.

In Sterling, we were making about $7 billion profit back then. That’s increased by more than ten times that period and we’re profitable. From a supply point of view stock, we’ve gone from 5,500 properties to 23,000 properties on the portfolio, but also, we’ve acquired 24 businesses and integrated them. We now own a whole bunch of assets as well. We build and we rent out and we’re a supplier operator. We’re a marketing services company. We’re a company that does linen. We own a spa, and a restaurant and the rest goes on.

You’re wearing a ton of hats as far as Sykes Cottages wear tons of different opportunities. For those of us, and the majority of our audiences here Stateside, we’re working on that. I know no one’s going to compare apples to apples. For those that don’t know Sykes Holiday Cottages, what company here in the States would you say is a comparable comparison to how you’re running your business here at Stateside?

When I first went to the US to have a look about years ago, I didn’t find many organizations that I thought were similar. Some of that is a result of the way that consumers behave differently in the US. We’re 85% of our business direct. I can’t think of too many vacation rental companies in the US that have that level of direct. A few are starting to exist. We’re profitable and growing fast. We had managed to scale and be profitable. When I spoke to people, they were growing fast, but the profitability was going that way.

That is fine because you have to invest and speculate a good future that was unusual. Managed service, which is what we would call the cleaning, laundry, maintenance, and all this stuff, was a big part of the vacation rental experience that was managed by property managers, whereas it’s less in Europe and the UK. On my recent trip, when I was there before coming down to Beautiful Palm Beach, which is very nice, I spent a bit of time in New York. I met a few people I’d met before and I’m starting to see the emergence of more of a few organizations.

Post-COVID, where COVID regains the muscle power if you want to call it that, and property managers in particular think I’ve done well on the back of it. I admire what Steve Milo is doing and VTrips is a good example. I admire what Steve’s doing because he knows what he is, he knows what he’s not, he knows what the business is, and he has a formula and a pattern. He’s repeating it and seems to be doing pretty well. I also know the chaps that evolve. That’s the closest model.

That’s what I was assuming you were going to say based on the focus of maintenance and housekeeping. They’re separate like evolves a little bit different model here in the States compared to most. They’re more of a booking platform where the maintenance and the housekeeping could be an add-on. You don’t necessarily have to go all in with that. They’ve scaled pretty aggressively.

When you look at your inventory, is the majority of it fully managed? Whereas you’re doing everything from booking to housekeeping maintenance, are you more of a booking side and the homeowners are dealing with the maintenance and the housekeeping side of things?

In the UK and many parts of Europe, demand is not a problem. It’s slightly different in the US in terms of where you get the demand, but demand’s not an issue. We have 4 or 5 times more demand than we have supply the way to look at it. It’s not quite as straightforward as that, but I don’t lay in bed at night and I worry about how am I going to find more consumers.

Heads and beds are not an issue for you.

It’s a supply-constraint market. We will do whatever it takes to get the best properties and the best locations. If that means we have to do fully managed service, by that I mean, pretty much everything, give us the keys. We will do that. If it means the owner wants to do the cleaning and the laundry maintenance, and we are just going to provide guest management maintenance, cashflow, and booking services, we’ll do that. We have a menu. There’s a start and it can go up or go down.

Across the total portfolio, if I leave New Zealand for one second, that’s slightly different. 85% roughly of the portfolio, we are doing everything apart from the cleaning. 15% of the portfolio, we are doing the cleaning and full-minded service. There’s like a base commission level, which is an average of about 20%. We have a booking fee that we charge that tips it up to 26%. Depending on the level of services in order once, that will take the rate up as well.

It never quite gets as high as Vacasa at 47% or whatever it may be. It’s fully laden. It’s sitting at about 35%, slightly more than most. It’s about making sure we get the best supply. We’ll do whatever we need, which is why in hyper-local locations, we have launderettes, our linen, and our own cleaning companies as well.

Two things stick out of my mind that you said when you’re talking about your business. My first question is, I want to rewind and go back to my first day coming into this space. What was that, 2016? On your first day in, what stood out? What was the immediate thing that you saw in the state of the industry in which you found it, where you knew you could have an initial impact and change for success for the business?

It was clear to me. Here’s a great company, here’s a great market, and a real opportunity, but the company is lacking a narrative, a story, and a belief that it can become truly awesome and that was so clear. It was the business of marginal games that existed since 1991 and adjust a bit better. The culture that had been created in the business was one of the more departmentations between the different layers of the company, between reservations and, property recruitment operations, finance, and back office. It was all quite layered, but nowhere was there glue.

They held it together and said that this is what we’re going to become. We’re going to do it in the next years, and these are four things we need to do. This is how we’re going to measure success, and this is how we’re going to behave. It lacked a bit of a rallying cry or a galvanization to bring it together.

All the ingredients were there. If you tried to bake a cake, and the way it was when I came in, you would’ve made a poor cake. My job was to try and bring it all together. We did things in the right way, spoke to our investors, and said, “This is where we’re going. Are you with us? Can we have some money? Can we go faster?”

Isn’t that always a question?

“Can we hire some great people? This is how we want to talk, how we want to behave, and how we want to think.” That was the thing that stood out to me, day one, early on. Interestingly, I remember walking around the building on my very first day and people said to me, “I’m amazed that you’ve turned up and you’re not wearing a suit, considering where you’ve come from or what you’ve done.” I thought that was quite interesting, in terms of the perceptions of what people were thinking I was going to be as this new CEO from the corporate world.

There was a wave of that. In that transition, we saw a certain level of sophistication coming into the industry. I remember, at my first conference, I felt overdressed in a polo in khaki pants because we used to wear suits and that’s the thing that stood out. One of the things I hear in what you’re saying is, you’ve built all the ingredients to build your brand.

We have many businesses in our industry, but we have this mythology of the elusive STR brand. What’s going to be the brand? Who’s going to be the brand? Is it going to be the Vacasa? Is it going to be VTrips? Is it going to be X, Y, or Z company? I love to hear how you approached this, and then what was built out of it. From this side of the pond and looking over there, I’ve always heard about what you’re doing, it’s exciting and it’s great, but hearing it from you, it’s almost like you’ve built something that could encapsulate everything that was needed by a different level of demographics within our industry, different types of owners with different needs.

You’re able to give them something that could attach them to you. Once you got them, you want to keep them happy and it seems like a fascinating story. One of the things that stick out is the ownership component. You own pieces. You own buildings. You do buildings that you own. How did you get your investors to buy into that and what was the thought process because that could be an extremely risky undertaking? It’s a lot of risk to that being successful, and it’s not cheap to do that.

You don’t do it from day one. You have to earn the right over time to be able to have the grown-up conversations about moving from asset-light to more asset-heavy, and what does that mean? I’ll come back to that a bit. We had 185 people back in 2016. What was important for us is to say, “Do we all believe we can be the best at what we’re trying to do here? If we believe that, then how are we going to measure it by when? What do we need to do by when?”

It’s simple. One is about a purpose. What’s the purpose? Why are we getting out of our bed in the morning and do we all believe it? Secondly, how are we going to measure it? What do we need to do by when? We anchored our sales on supply because that was a real fuel. We said we need 20,000 properties by 2020. That was the number because the original plan said 10,000 properties. We said double it.

For me, it wasn’t about we’ve got to hit 20,000 properties, do or die. It was the aspirational moonshot of saying, we believe we can get to 20,000 properties. I always believe in setting what we call BHAG, Big Hairy, Audacious Goals. You look at it and you go, “There’s no way we’re going to get there. That looks quite challenging.” We sat down to say, “How do we do it? What do we need?”

First of all, we need to have a trusted brand, and the only way we’re going to get a trusted brand is by earning trust. How do we do that? We need to deliver the best experience for our customers. What does that mean? We need to be the owner’s choice. If an owner chooses us, we need to know why they’re choosing us over something else. What’s important to the owner? Is it revenue? Is it warm bodies and beds? Is it service? The final one we said is, “We have to build this in the capability of being a platform using data that allows us to scale.”

Everything we did had to fit into those four pillars. If it didn’t, we shouldn’t be doing it. There’s a sea of behaviors, which are values that are driving the way and each one of these pillars has to have a set of objectives and measurable. What are you going to do by when? What does it look like? What are the key measures? Naturally, what then happens is capability. What do you need? We need to hire people who can run a business twice the size, and we need to hire them now.

We can’t afford them now. We need to hire them now. They’re for the future. We need to get 20,000 properties. We’re never going to do it organically. What do we do? Let’s split it in two. Let’s see, how many can we get through M&A? Who can we buy? How many can we get organically? If you want to buy some businesses, you need to go borrow some money. How much money are we going to go and borrow to buy some businesses?

Who are we going to buy? Where are we going to buy it? Is it going to add value? What are the measures of success of value? How to make sure we don’t collect businesses? How do we integrate them quickly and how do we show investors that there’s a model and a formula that makes them more confident. That allowed us over time to just grow and grow the profit curve and get more comfortable.

Eventually, you come up with a conversation that says, “I’d like to own some assets.” it. You have a business in the US called Getaway Vacations, which they call outposts in forests. We own very similar. We own 700 cabins, anything from 1-bedroom up to 4 to 5-bedroom tree houses in cabins, all purpose-built. We build across the UK. We own and operate the whole thing. The reason we’re able to do that is it fitted directly into our mission. It fitted into our purpose. Our investors could see how it would add value.

You have a proven track record of success leading up to your ask. It’s not like you’re just shooting from the hip saying, “This is what we’re going to do,” without a proven track record.

For any investor, you earn trust for executing. It’s the failure of most organizations that I come across or speak to that are struggling. They don’t know the purpose and how to execute. It is drawing that line or that narrative and understanding between, “This is where I want to go.” We believe it and we’re going to keep communicating and everybody believes it. When I look over my shoulder, I’ve got 1,700 people with me that know exactly where I’m going and this is how we’re going to execute it.

These are the key things that are required. That’s the framework we use and it’s been relatively successful. We could have gone faster. We could have gone and bought loads of things. We could have come across to the US and bought up a whole bunch of things. We turned down lots of opportunities. Unless they fitted into a model, I could see how we create value, or we believe that we could make value from it, then we always said no to it. We had to be quite disciplined in a formula in our thinking.

Graham, I got a question for you. You scaled exponentially since 2016 through now. We’ve seen comparable companies here in the States that have done similar things. Overall, there is a mixed bag of reactions from property managers to homeowners to hosts. Two companies of your size and girth that are doing the things that you are doing. Some of that is like, “This is amazing. This is wonderful. You have your proprietary tech. You’re a tech-first company.”

Overall, if I were to look at property managers here in the US that aren’t safe, Vacasa or Evolve, I don’t love what these large corporate or companies are doing, do you feel that you are scaling as quickly and fast as grand as you did in the US? What has that done to your brand? Is it a positive thing overall or do you think that you’ve had to battle that in recent years to keep that positive brand image of Sykes?

It’s interesting. We could have a 2 or 3-hour long show on brand. What is a brand? What does it mean? We made a conscious decision that when we did a lot of M&A, we were also acquiring not great properties. We were acquiring great people and brands that had a legacy. Owners had chosen to list their property with them for a reason. Some of it was about the brand, legacies, localization, and so forth.

What we do, which is different from many organizations is we don’t have one brand. You’ll hear me talk about Sykes Holiday Cottages. At the moment, I’m going through a whole rebranding, what does it mean? It doesn’t make any sense anymore. Sykes Holiday Cottages, because we’ve got 26 brands in the company. Sykes is a bit of a powerhouse. It’s got all this demand and all this volume. We have real local niche specialist brands.

We have caravan operating brands. We have Forest Holidays as a brand. We have premium specialists. We maintain and look after all those brands because they have an understanding, they have a purpose, and owners and customers want to use them. Now it caddies and overhead. We are happy to carry that overhead as opposed to saying, “Kill them, consolidate it, and it’s all under one ownership.” It adds value and we can see that it adds value.

We’re a collection of brands that have come together and will come together because we believe that collectively, we’re more powerful than one overall individual powerful brand. We’re a brand that’s salient as in Sykes Holidays. We’re a brand that’s considered. I wouldn’t say we’re a brand that has massive differentiation at a brand level from many others, but what we do have is supply that we control this exclusive that you can’t get anywhere else.

That is powerful because it helps us build the brand. We spend a lot of time on service and use that as a differentiator. We obsess about net promoter score. We obsess about trying to improve the overall experience for our guests and our owners. That engenders loyalty and trust, and we have a high reboot rate. That is all part of your brand. We do it through the hard lifting as opposed to spending £20 million advertising or buying a football team.

For those that are reading, please correct me if I’m wrong, but you’re going to go survey your customers, your clients, or the users and ask them if they would go ahead and rebook or reuse Sykes.

It’s a simple question. We asked four questions, but there’s one power question. “Would you recommend Sykes to your family and friends?” You have to pick a number between 0 to 10. The 9 and the 10 are what’s called promoters and the 0 to 6 are the detractors or it might be 5. The bit in the middle over the end, the 6s, 7s, and 8s are passives. They’re a bit, “It was all right.” You minus the promoters from the distractors to give you a score.

A good net promoter score is somewhere between 45 and 50. Per one, or more average, I should say, is 35. An exceptional one is anything 70 or above. The bigger you are, the more scale you have, the more reviews you go, and the harder it is to maintain those higher numbers. There are studies galore on this. The higher the NPS, generally, the better the company is, with better retention, better loyalty, better profitability, better-run companies, and all that stuff. What we’ve always looked for is, “What’s that key metric?” That one metric that’s not profit. If we can drive it higher, the business performs better and that’s why we use NPS. We’ve spent a lot of time, money and energy obsessing over everything.

How do you change that guest from a detractor to even passive? You want to get them.

That’s about intervention. That’s about closing the loop. It’s about making sure it’s fixed, making sure you learn from it. There are 62 people on this team now, and all they do is obsess over trying to make this better and getting all the feedback because of the volume. We’re taking 3 million people on holiday a year. You’re getting a lot of feedback. About 40% is giving you feedback, and you’re getting instant responses that happen at the moment of truth. The moment you’ve gone on holiday, you’ve come back, and you checked out the day after, how do we do? That’s the loop that we close.

It’s from a brand standpoint too. Something you said about your brand stands out to me and the idea of what brands are. We hear, “Who’s going to be the STR brand? What is that going to look like?” It’s homogenous when people think about it in their brains, but something that you hit on that I’m sure is the key to your success is the diversity of what your brand makes up and what it encompasses. If there is diversity within your brand, that covers a wide gambit of everything, the people you are serving and the customers you’re serving need.

My metric is always more than anything else. Where are the customers going? What success are you showing? Are people staying with you? Are your homeowners happy and staying with you within that space? Are the numbers supporting that? Are your guests happy? Are those the metrics that people are looking at?

Profitability is key. It’s very different in terms of the way I hear that you and other brands in the US do things in the race to profitability. One of the things that are noble for you is you did it at scale and time. To be able to do it through M&A, merge, and bring cultures along into the brand to make them fit and work is no easy task. We see people fail at this all the time. They buy businesses. They think they’re buying the incumbencies and it doesn’t work with the cultures.

There’s no magic pill here. There’s no matrix moment. You have to do many things very well and most paths come back to the people you have, your employees, and how you make them feel. That’s important to us as an organization and hiring talent and not being afraid to almost overhire. We believe and I believe in this much that if you think of a flow of employee experience and if you get that right, what it leads to in terms of the customer experience and the business experience if you go straight in, you’re trying to go right to the end of it, but it doesn’t work.

You have to lay all those foundations. You have to do all that work, and you have to make sure you’ve got the right people, smart people who know what’s expected of them, who are understanding their purpose and the why. They come to work every day and are properly paid and remunerated. We share out love. Share out the equity. We all make money. We distribute about 10% of our profit to our employees each year for various incentive schemes.

We spend a lot of time on culture because if we can foster all that, it leads to better outcomes when you’re interacting with guests or with owners, better thinking, a better mindset, and better capability. You’ve got to do so many things well. I call it the flywheel. My CFOs got a great expression. He always talks about it as a marathon and we always talk about which water stop are we on in the marathon because there are many different water stops that you have to go on.

Is that Michael Graham?

Yes. It’s a good analogy because we’re always running the marathon and we’ve not completed one. We’ve done a half marathon in a few years. We got another few years ahead of us, and we have some big targets and ambitions, and we keep resetting it. We operate in an amazing category that is delivering amazing experiences. We’re creating brilliant memories. We’re taking people on holiday. We’re helping communities. We’re helping owners have additional income. Many things are joyful about the short-term learning industry.

You’ve got people throwing stones at us around regulation and various things. Ultimately, this category is phenomenal, fragmented, and huge. There’s room for everybody. I don’t believe in and it’s interesting who’s going to be the brand or the STR brand? I don’t think anybody is. There’s going to be consolidation and opportunities, but there’s a bounty for everybody.

Smaller operators are coming up in this space that are looking at established brands as a guiding light. I don’t necessarily look at who’s going to be the brand. There’s a handful of brands that are guiding lights, and then there’s a bunch of brands that are trying to replicate the successes of these other brands, which in most instances, is a form of flattery. Sykes has done some amazing things. We want to do things like Sykes.

I read an article that Vanessa interviewed you about a couple of years ago where you’re tracking over 20 million properties outside of your own to get data. You alluded to it earlier in our conversation when you first came in saying, “We need data to go ahead and back everything we’re doing.” Tracking of all these properties that you’ve been doing globally helped you scale, but where is this taking you? Are you still tracking these millions of properties?

We are. People keep saying to me, “When are you going to America or Europe?” My job as a CEO is to always be able to tell a story about value creation and how we’re going to be successful for everyone that must support their investors. You need cash, capital, and the ability to keep growing. We’ve taken a path that we’re a private equity bank company and we have a whole bunch of investors who believe in us and give us that financial support.

I have to be able to understand where the market is, where I’m going, and the story I want to tell in a few years. Tracking all the properties globally, understanding where the opportunities are, how the markets are moving, how regulation is playing in, and the difference between urban and rural, managed service and property managers, and who the 13,000 plus property managers that may exist globally are. What are they doing? Who are the runners and writers? That’s all part of what I need to know to be able to tell a story.

I may choose to say, “There’s an opportunity here for some big, hairy, scary private equity company that may want to use us as the premier consolidator globally.” That could happen. I need to know what that looks like. Equally, at the moment, we have said, “We talk in the language of TAM,” which for your audience is Total Addressable Market. I need to understand what is my addressable market.

That is why the best way to think of our business is we have an agency business in Sykes and 22 other brands. We have a premium operator business where we run and operate in our holiday business. We have camping in caravan. We have 6,500 camping caravan pitches across the UK. We have a small, but potentially future huge international business. That’s how we think and what is that?

At the highest level, there are 20 million-plus properties and lots of RVs and caravans. Your time when you’re talking about getaway vacations or forest holidays is different. That’s about the land you can build in a different type of TAM. You’re manufacturing. Whereas in your agency business, it’s much more around stock and properties. Don’t get me started on camping in caravans and RVs because that market is enormous.

It’s insane. It’s exploding.

The reason all works is at its core all of those divisions and all those businesses. What we want to do is to take people on holiday and make sure they have a good time. Create memories and do it sustainable way. It doesn’t matter what it is and that’s what our purpose is. It translates across all of them.

With all this, what’s next for Sykes? You’re at the half marathon mark, and we know in a few years, you’ll still be at that half marathon mark.

This is going to sound horrible, but I’ll say it in financial terms. We’re trying to create $3 billion of enterprise value for our shareholders by 2026. That’s the value. The reason I say that and talk in that language is if I know that I can work my way back in terms of what are the building blocks to get there, what I know is that we need more supply.

Across all these categories, not just agency, but operator, caravans, and possibly international, I know that we need to go from taking 3 million people to about 5 million people on holiday. Roughly what the number is. We all need significant investment to do that. We need more capability. We’ll need another 1,000-plus people to do that. Where will we do that? The geography we’re in, that I don’t know. That we will have to work through and try and understand. I work back from this enterprise value as crazy as a sense.

I say, “What’s the revenue I need? What’s the potential EBITDA that’s going to degenerate? What are the business units that we have? What are those business units need to do?” Deconstruct the model in that particular way and that allows me to then go out and say, “Here’s the story. Here’s the plan. In all those 20-odd million properties we’re tracking, here’s the opportunity and it could be, “We have to make a foothold in the US because the market’s big, fragmented, and nice. How could we enter the US? Let’s go and buy X company.”

That gives us a beachhead. It gives us 1,000 to 2,000 properties, which is what you look at and it’s a good and well-run company. We can help them with capability technology and we’ll give them the ambition to getting to 5,000 or 6,000 properties in the next couple of years, and we’ll provide all support. That could be one room, or it could be, “We have a brilliant business in New Zealand. Let’s move from Auckland to Australia. Let’s grow that way.” There are all these different opportunities that we can look at, or it could be buying lots of RVs. It’s all opportunity. As long as we know how to create value, we can execute well. That’s the key thing for me. We’ll keep doing it.

What excites you about what you have coming down the pipeline? Please don’t come up with something bad like the alphabet or something crazy. You’re going to come up with a cool name. I’m looking forward to the rebranding of what you’re going to going to come out with. My question to you is what excites you? What are you looking forward to? It could be anything, it doesn’t have to be directly related to your plan and path to profitability. When you’re looking at the future of what you’ve inherited and come into, what excites you every week?

I get a kick out of building things and seeing how they grow and flourish. When you set a goal and set a challenge and you’re sitting there thinking, “I have no idea how we’re going to get there. This seems quite audacious at this point.” When you get there, you’re like, “Brilliant,” but then you say, “Let’s reset that again.” That excites me in terms of growth opportunities. The other thing I’ve become very attuned to is the responsibility we have as a big business to consider how we’re balancing both profits and also the impact that we can have on the planet as well.

We spent a lot of time and energy in our organization thinking about how we hire and attract talent because we’re more than a big profitable machine. We also care about the footprint. We care about the impact we have on the planet and we’re big enough now we can do something meaningful. I had a call with the team who are leading this in the UK and we’ve taken a whole bunch of families away who need a respite, who need care and are owners of gifted weeks that can happen.

Never mind the joy on the families, but the joy on the employees because they’re participating in that and they can see it happening will stick with me. We want to do more of it. Businesses can balance profit and purpose. You don’t have to be a business that said, “You need to give away all your profit. You need to do it well. You can get it right.” That excites me.

That leads to the final point, which is, I love seeing people grow as well. I love seeing people grow in the organization. I love seeing your talent moving through the organization. When you’re bigger, you can do clever things, take opportunities, move people in different countries, take people from graduates, straight university, and suddenly, you can put them in charge of, within five years, relatively large divisions. I get a real kick out of that.

You mentioned a philanthropy approach to doing these things. You also mentioned being environmentally-focused as well. Being as large and as big a carbon footprint, are there specific things that you’re trying to do to work on your sustainability with the environment as well?

As you would expect with us, there’s a clear plan and clear measures and we hold everybody accountable for it. We built into people’s objectives, and we have a clear understanding of what we’re trying to do. We use the B corp framework. I don’t know if you’re familiar with B corp. You should look up B corp, which came out of the US. Patagonia is a good example of an amazing brand that’s a B corp. That gives you a framework you can that’s aligned to the STG, goals coming out of a year around how we should be thinking about balancing across multiple areas.

It includes governance of your business. It includes how you think about your employees, what you give back to communities, your social impact, and your environmental impact. Each one of these things has measures, goals, and actions. You can go on to B corp and there’s a free assessment you can fill out. You answer a whole bunch of questions, and it gives you a score. It tells you how you’re doing and it tells you what great looks like and it tells you what world-class looks like and you can set a journey.

We use that as a way of saying, “What are the things we want to do?” We commit to having the 3,400 volunteering days a year. We allow all of our employees to go out and give back to communities or share their skills. We’ve made a real commitment in terms of not offsetting carbon, but reducing it. The first thing is to measure it, understand the core business impact, understand the wider footprint, and say, “What can you do to influence or reduce it?” We make a commitment around how we think about supporting biodiversity projects, commitment to trees, and tree planting in terms of volume. The list goes on.

It’s built into people’s objectives. We track it, reward it, and have dedicated people who we hire, who do nothing but this. We call them to impact managers and they have ambassadors. We work with local communities. We sponsor everything from local football teams to national parks across the UK to support natural habitat planting. Every day, there’s somebody somewhere doing something. There were people I saw on the internet who were painting garden sheds at the neuromuscular society.

We’re helping a society, through our charitable work. People love doing. When we’re hiring people and talking to people, it’s a key way that we get people engaged in the organization. It helps if you’ve got nice coffee. It helps if you have a gym in your office and all that. That’s cool stuff. Think about Gen Z. We hire many of these Generation Z people in digital marketing, product, usability, and data science. They’re coming to work with a slightly different purpose. They’re not quite spoon-fed as Millennials and not quite streetwise as Gen X. They want to side hustle and leave a legacy and have more of a purpose. It’s great for recruiting people.

Graham, this has been great. We appreciate you joining us. Thank you so much. I’ve learned a ton. I know our audience has learned a ton and we’d love to have you on in the future to see what’s changed and see where you are in the marathon at that time.

We’ll meet you at the next water stop and have a conversation.

Awesome. I love it. Thank you very much.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you.

Important Links

• Sykes Holiday Cottages – Website
• Money SuperMarket
• TravelSupermarket
• https://Go.BeyondPricing.com/no-bs
• https://Casago.com/nobs/
• Megaphone.Fm/Adchoices