Locked-down leadership - what matters most?

It has been almost exactly one year since I took up my first Board and C-Suite position with TravelNest. As a woman working in a male dominated industry this was an 18 year dream finally realised, so I leapt at the chance. But had I known back in February 2020 that I was about to embark on a significant career step weeks before one of the most horrific 12 months in our collective history, I may have thought some more about it. I was taking on a COO role in a tech startup in a sector that has become the most severely affected industrial casualty of Covid: Travel.

I guess that is the really tricky thing about resilience - you usually don’t get to test how much of it you have, before you realise how much of it you really need. 

I guess that is the really tricky thing about resilience - you usually don’t get to test how much of it you have, before you realise how much of it you really need.

Given how hard many women (and indeed men) have worked to smash through glass ceilings and pave the way for such opportunities for women like me, I feel it’s important to share my experience of my first year in a Board level role. There are still too few of us that even get to the point of opportunity, albeit the statistics are moving in the right direction. I believe the needle will shift faster if those of us that do find ourselves in positions of power and influence commit to making the path easier to follow for those who come after us - to normalise and share our experiences. My first year operating at this level happened to coincide with some extraordinary macro events for us all, and I found myself thrown straight in at the deep end, with no management or leadership books to offer a playbook for what would follow. 

About a week after my appointment at TravelNest was confirmed by the board, we saw the horrific realities of Covid landing in quick succession. The first cases occurred outside China. Then Italy was overwhelmed. Then Spain. As the first cases of community transmission were confirmed in the UK, my ‘early risk warning system’ was on high alert.

I had learned about this concept of an early risk warning system about a year before, when I attended an International Women’s Day event headlined by First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon. Here, one of the speakers, Dr Lynn Calderhead, said:

“Women are often characterised as being more risk averse than men, but I don’t think that is true - I actually believe women have more advanced early risk warning systems”.

I don’t like to draw too many comparisons or differences between the sexes, but I do think this one has some truth to it. As a start up, TravelNest is very lucky - we have a beautiful office in the heart of Edinburgh. However, as a small company of around 40 people, it is effectively one large room with an air-con system that is hyper efficient at germ distribution and much less effective at regulating temperature. The minute anyone got sick, it spread throughout that office in days.

The under-reported case numbers in the UK at the start of March 2020 only took some basic extrapolation to suggest there was every chance someone in the team had already been exposed to Covid by early March. It became clear that the country was heading for impending catastrophe if we didn’t enter lockdown quickly. I therefore didn’t hang about getting us all working from home, even though some were still wondering what the fuss was about. If someone had the virus, then the whole team was at risk - for me it was a race against time. We did a working from home test day first and then went for it for real from March 16th, a week before it was imposed by the UK Government. 

I have never been so grateful that I listened to my instincts and acted early. That little nagging voice saying “don’t leave it too late, this is not looking good” served me well, as it turned out we did have someone in our company carrying the virus - a TravelNest ground zero - and we only just started working from home in time to prevent them spreading it. 

That unwitting virus carrier was me.

I ended up coming down with symptoms on our first official TravelNest working from home day on Monday 16th March. I had a fairly brutal but thankfully non-hospitalising two-week period of being ill with the disease. I wasn’t tested at the time, because the UK government simply didn’t have the capacity to test anyone other than those in hospital. I remember being on hold to NHS 24 for 4 hours, anxious and worried as it was Day 10 and my symptoms hadn’t improved. It was like no flu I had ever had before. When I finally spoke to someone they said “Yep, sounds like you have it, but I’m afraid there is nothing we can do unless you need support breathing. You sound like you are breathing OK?”. I continued to lay low at home and slowly got better. I also began the parenting and working juggle a week earlier than everyone else as my husband and I and our then 3 year old daughter all had to isolate as soon as I developed symptoms. 

I have never been in a business and macro situation where you witness so immediately the impact of external events playing out in customer behaviour and numbers in real time. We describe ourselves as a travel-tech company - our aim is to make life easier for vacation rental owners (we call them hosts) by unlocking the potential of their vacation rental properties. We advertise properties on the world’s most popular booking sites - think Airbnb, Booking, Expedia, TripAdvisor and many more. It’s all done through our platform, which combines AI, industry expertise and data insights to help hosts maximise their chances of getting booked. 

The first example of this macro swing in behaviour came swiftly, and soon after the Government accepted the reality of Covid and enforced lockdown. The impact played out immediately in our bookings and our marketing efforts. We had achieved our best ever months of performance of customer growth and bookings in January and February 2020. Both dropped to zero almost overnight. Bookings ground to a halt, and any attempt to promote something with the slightest link to travel got (quite rightly), shamed and shut down. Everyone was nervous, tense and scared. Then followed a very dark three month period of almost zero bookings. The only thing we were breaking records for was the number of booking cancellations the team were processing.

In my career, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have worked across many different industries, with a myriad of challenges and problems to solve. I am grateful for all of those, as they have given me the collective skills and experience I’d need for what lay ahead. If I could choose a job title for my role, I think I might change it to Chief Problem Solver and Cheerleader. My days, weeks, months consisted of long lists of problems. Some have been partially solved by others, many of them are completely new and call for a novel approach, but almost all are complex and difficult. If it is an easy, clear cut problem, it usually doesn’t pass my desk, someone will already have solved it. It’s the complex and tricky issues that land with me. But that’s what I love most about my role. I particularly love a problem that exists at the juncture where people, processes, commercial trade offs, business performance and technology meet. The real head-scratcher problems. What then followed was a seemingly never-ending series of head scratching problems that came in quick succession, for which we needed solutions in record time.

First and foremost, we had to act fast to conserve costs. We requested a voluntary 20% salary reduction from our staff. All of the team opted in within 24 hours, and the executive team chose to take a higher voluntary reduction. This called for robust communication as it was not a great message to share. It was tackled expertly by our CEO Doug, with the core message being that to preserve jobs, we all had to sacrifice a little. The TravelNest team were awesome. Not a single person made a fuss or had a problem with this. Of course, no one was delighted either, but everyone wanted to do their bit to ensure TravelNest survived and we protected the wider team. We put in place an exceptional share options scheme, to compensate our team for the reduction in salary - another change that was fairly intense to explain and administer. 

We furloughed as many people as we were able to, on a rotational basis to make it fairer to everyone, as well as offering more extensive furlough to parents on the team who were finding it tough to balance work with homeschooling. Again this was not a nice decision to communicate, but one that would ultimately preserve jobs. 

We went on a cost saving mission, working through every contract to identify savings. I had to have some rather punchy meetings with major suppliers to convince them to share the pain of Covid, even though there were contracts in place. Many of our suppliers have really come through, and taken some of the financial hit alongside us, in the interest of mutual survival over the long term. There are one or two that I am still trying to persuade however …

We invested in robust communication for each of these changes, with either Doug or myself fronting each announcement personally. We ensured that every communication was well documented with FAQs, a place to go for questions and briefings for our managers to support their teams through it. Most importantly, we had a very strong and clear narrative for why. We became well practiced at putting in place significant people changes that previously would have taken months to prepare and execute. We were averaging one a week for the first couple of months of lockdown. 

One thing we did early on that paid dividends was to introduce daily check ins with the whole company, taking place at the start and end of the working day, with hosting duties shared around the team. Everyone was set a silly challenge for the day, for example: What is the ugliest ornament in your house or - one of my favourites - we’ve been through your Facebook profile and found some interesting photos, let’s hide the faces and try to guess who is who! We managed a unique daily challenge hosted by every member of the company for around six months! This kept our spirits up and connected us through those long months. They were so popular we have reinstated them as we tackle this second lockdown.

We had to support our Customer Operations team in painstakingly working through every booking to understand if it could go ahead, and also unravel the myriad of channel Force Majeure and cancellation policies that were changing, often daily. Many of our customers (vacation rental owners) were in dire straits. Many of our owners rely on their properties as their sole source of income. At the same time, many travellers were in a heightened state of stress, wanting reassurance that they’d get the money back for bookings they’d made. 

We took a call to honour and pay out booking cancellation refunds without demanding immediate repayment from our owners. We shouldered this debt ourselves, to give our customers time to recover from Covid, instead setting off the debt against future bookings. This approach has significantly paid off in the long run. Whilst it carried a not inconsiderable financial risk, TravelNest is a customer focussed business and we had to take care of our customers, and their guests. In the same way that we asked our suppliers to shoulder some of the burden, we too had to do the same for our hosts. Having seen the very public pummelling that some of our competitors got from their less supportive strategies, this is a decision I’m very proud of and one I believe has enabled us to build trust with our owners that cannot be replicated. We are a company that really means it when we say we have their back. It is great to report that bookings have recently seen a huge bounce-back as traveller confidence returns. 

I recently had the honour of doing a podcast interview with Zendesk COO Peter Lorant, and it was a very proud moment, when Peter, coming from one of the global leaders in Customer Service asked me how we had achieved such strong Trustpilot Reviews. We are rated 4.6/5 (Excellent) by our customers. The actions we took to shoulder debt certainly were a big factor in this. I must also credit our excellent Customer Service team who have had to think on their feet and interpret the often vague guidance from our country’s leadership! We also had a Corona Swat team in place from Day 1 of the pandemic. This group focuses on any change, however big or small regarding Covid restrictions and immediately interprets these for our hosts so that they are well armed with all the relevant information. We created a dedicated set of Covid FAQs for our owners to answer their key concerns, and also published an eBook to help them navigate the challenges of Covid.

Meanwhile, I got a strong reminder about the impact of Covid. Four weeks after recovering from my initial Covid symptoms, they returned. I was experiencing what is now known as ‘long Covid.’ At the time, this wasn’t well reported, as our knowledge of the disease was still in its infancy. I thought I was going a bit mad, or maybe wasn’t coping with the stress. Oddly enough it was Dominic Cummings’ Barnard Castle scandal that gave me reassurance, as I too was struggling with my eyesight. I couldn’t focus, and had a weird flickering in both eyes, together with extreme fatigue. His widely reported flagrant breach of lockdown restrictions did make me think that maybe my eyesight problems and everything else I was feeling were actually Covid symptoms. I must add though, that at no time did I feel compelled to drive to a local beauty spot with my family to gauge the severity of my symptoms! As a leader, or someone who is in a position of power, what you do matters. How you conduct yourself matters. Another lesson that has been played out spectacularly on the world stage for us in the last year.

As a leader, or someone who is in a position of power, what you do matters. How you conduct yourself matters. Another lesson that has been played out spectacularly on the world stage for us in the last year.

During this initial lockdown, as a company we were still very focussed on building for the future, no matter how far off any kind of return to normality might be. Doug and I worked closely together to completely overhaul our product development processes - a step which has significantly improved our product release capacity. 

We took the team through a cultural transformation, relaunching our values and consciously ‘managing in’ the culture and behaviours we believed would set us up to win, (when there was a market to win once again). Launching new values to the business was nerve-wracking and exhilarating at the same time. Realigning the culture to one that would enable our success had been a goal of mine since I started at TravelNest. It is a piece of work I am really proud of, and we are seeing huge payback from it. I find culture, mindset and human behaviour fascinating. I love driving this kind of change, and seeing it manifest in numbers, actions and performance. Having fulfilling, rewarding work to do can be anchoring and sustaining, when other parts of life are tough - another lesson I learned during this period.

Having fulfilling, rewarding work to do can be anchoring and sustaining, when other parts of life are tough - another lesson I learned during this period. 

There is really no elegant way to say this next bit so I will just say it. As I was about to address the company on the roll out of our new values, I began to miscarry an early pregnancy. I know that sharing this is something of a taboo. Miscarriage is a topic that makes people feel intensely uncomfortable, myself included. People just don’t know what to say. Having confided in my female friends, I cannot ignore just how common this is and how challenging it is to speak about, particularly in the workplace. For me it was gutting, heart wrenching, lonely, and a horribly elongated thing to endure as the physical side of it goes on for days. Very often it happens at work but women are terrified to tell anyone they are working with for fear of being labelled as someone not to invest in, because they’re trying for a baby. For me, a very quick explanation to colleagues helped me get the support I needed to endure and regroup - and they were wonderful about it.This might be a difficult topic, but these taboos do need to be broken if we are to continue to make the path easier to follow for those after us.

By this point - towards the end of summer it was looking as though things were starting to come under control with the virus. As extreme as we felt the impact of lockdown, we felt the extreme in the opposite direction when things opened up. I will never forget when Boris Johnson announced the opening of UK tourism and Nicola Sturgeon did the same for Scotland the next day. Absolute euphoria! We had a booking surge unlike anything we had ever seen, overnight, as the whole of the UK attempted to condense their holidays into an 8 week period between July and August. We were beating the market by over 100% in bookings growth and seeing a 3X YoY uplift. It was incredible. Our problem now was keeping on top of demand. We had to rapidly hire in temps, get everyone back from furlough and refocus on serving this demand. We were even featured by BBC news!

Things went so well that I was able to close two additional funding injections, from Silicon Valley Bank (we completed their first ever CBILS loan) and Scottish Enterprise, bringing ￡1.8M in additional funds. Both these institutions have been staunch supporters, they saw we had a significant opportunity with the staycation surge that led to an unprecedented number of bookings. We had done such a good job of cost saving during the lockdown that we had left it with the same amount of cash in the bank as we had planned for the time of year. I can’t thank these two organisations enough for going above and beyond to help companies like us.

Forecasting and planning - another part of my role - has been a constant challenge, we now do it in a near real time fashion as things change so rapidly. I have “Covid factors” built into every plan where I take out my crystal ball and try to predict the next plot twist. Again I am grateful for my early risk management system, as I made sure our plan was depressed for the first three months of 2021 (we complete our annual planning cycle 2-3 months before the end of year). This felt conservative when we built the plan, but now, with a new variant having turned everything on its head again, we’re grateful we haven’t financially bet on a “normal” start to the year.

We rode out the last few months of 2020, all the while improving our product, our processes and our conviction that we were onto something - our hosts needed our help like never before to maximise their booking potential. We have properties in their thousands across all corners of the UK. Navigating four ever-changing tiered restrictions across different regions was like solving a rubix cube every day, not to mention the other 56 markets we had properties in. Our Optimisation Team is constantly busy, supporting owners to maximise their bookings as travellers' confidence improves. 

And then the terrible news struck. There was a new, more transmissible virus and we were headed for another extreme lockdown. Schools and nurseries were shutting (I was devastated, for me, and my daughter, in equal measure) and we braced ourselves for another bruising period. However yet again, we are seeing more extreme changes in behaviour. People can finally start to see the end of this period in our history, are gathering confidence in the vaccine programme, and we’ve seen another surge in demand for staycation breaks across our property portfolio. The pandemic is driving a different kind of traveller behaviour with new trends emerging. People are still keen to get away, but are doing so closer to home. We have also seen a strong bias for properties in rural rather than urban locations as people want to get away from it all in a remote, more isolated location. Typically, vacation rental properties can provide this type of experience, and compete for bookings more strongly than hotels. 

We have seen unprecedented shifts in market share, in a sector that was already the fastest growing travel vertical and traveller preferences that we have been very fortunate to be well-positioned for. In 2020 domestic travel share increased by 45% in the UK (50% of our portfolio is in the UK - we are a global company in 60 markets. The weather isn’t great in the UK so more of us usually holiday abroad, when we can, than people come in) and rural holidaying has increased by 24% share, and vacation rental share has increased by 100% - our portfolio biases in the right direction to take advantage of all of all three of these trends. Again, when we speak of extremes it is so unusual to see anything like this level of extreme change in market share in a 12 month period. 

As the year progresses we gather momentum - our team are performing stronger than they ever have, we are seeing our highest performance numbers-wise that we have ever experienced, we have just completed our highest ever month of customer growth, are expanding internationally and we have maintained our Trustpilot rating of 4.6/5 through one of the most challenging periods I think we will ever encounter as a business. 

This past year has reinforced and redefined what it is to be a true leader. For me it has reinforced - now more than ever, that honesty matters. Transparency matters. What I do, and how I behave matters a lot. Humanity matters. Tough decisions taken early matter.

So one year on, have I made some mistakes? Undoubtedly. Have I been challenged in ways I never thought possible? Most certainly. The last 12 months have been extraordinary and I would never choose to repeat them, but I have learned and relearned an extraordinary amount. This past year has reinforced and redefined what it is to be a true leader. For me it has reinforced - now more than ever, that honesty matters. Transparency matters. What I do, and how I behave matters a lot. Humanity matters. Tough decisions taken early matter. Shaking off every set back rapidly and readying for the next challenge matters. What I have redefined for myself - my capability to do all of this is deeper than I ever imagined.  

It took a World War to demonstrate that women can perform in any kind of occupation. It has taken a global pandemic, to show our true capacity to lead.