StartWell's CEO sits down with Toby Savill, who is leading Canadian expansion for Airsorted - the world's largest single manager of AirBnB properties who recently raised £5M to fuel global expansion. Toby explains why Toronto's diversity has attracted the company to Canada and how StartWell is already contributing to his success.

[expand title="Podcast Transcript"]

Qasim Virjee 0:01

Do This is the inaugural podcast episode from start well, broadcasting, you know, over the internet on iTunes and other syndicated partners from Toronto. For those of you tuning in that don't know about us start well is essentially a co working space but we add value and play this kind of role of an incubator. We've got a mixture of artistic organizations as well as high tech startups that all share the same roof at our campus on King Street, we've got another location that's a bit smaller up at St. Clair, which is a residential neighborhood in downtown Toronto. So for this inaugural episode of the stairwell podcast, I wanted to sit down with someone who I think represents a lot of or at least is living through the experience of a lot of our entrepreneurs, comes from outside of the city working on very interesting kind of product launch and new brand introduction into the Canadian market coming from, you know, established markets. And so my guest on this first podcast is Toby Savile, who I'll introduce shortly I'll let him introduce himself.

Qasim Virjee 1:20

And, and yeah, why don't you just jump into it, Toby, tell us a little bit about yourself where you came from. And we'll we'll dig into your story.

Toby Savill 1:27

I can do yes, my name is Toby, I come from London. As you can probably notice, my accent is slightly fighting a lot. I'm over in Toronto, I've only been here a month, maybe a little bit more now than a month. So only been a month. It's been crazy. It's rush by. I am part of an Airbnb management company called Air sorted, which is based in the UK. But we're in 15 cities globally. And essentially, we eradicate any of the hassle for anyone who owns a home. And we'd like to advertise via multiple platforms, holiday laps, but predominantly Airbnb, were a very tech focused bunch of guys and girls. And we really do focus on revenue management, as well as the service providing just to ensure we eradicate hassle, as well as generating as much possible income as we can for our hosts. So it's been a great start to the trip and Toronto, the hosts that we've already brought on are fantastic. The traction has been excellent. And I will elaborate in a second on how fantastic start will have been for the beginning of our journey.

Qasim Virjee 2:23

Thank you. Thank you. Yes, please do. Please elaborate. Well, actually, let's jump into that later. I'd love to dig in a little bit into some of the things you said. Firstly, you're the world's largest is IT management company for Airbnbs?

Toby Savill 2:36

We are Yes. So we've been running for three years. And as I said, London was HQ and we manage just under 1000 properties there. And we're up to 2000 in the excess of 2000. Globally, we received a wave of investment fairly recently, which has given us some some wriggle room to get around the world hence my being here

Qasim Virjee 2:56

is this. And can you talk about what that round entailed or

Toby Savill 3:00

Yeah, so it's VC investment. And we recently received five, 5 million pounds, so you can do the maths with dollars. And the focus is global domination, it always has been. We always keep a focused and detailed service in all of our various locations. We try and hire talent locally to keep the the local knowledge as well as bringing someone like myself who has the business knowledge, we team up and we try and replicate our model as much as we