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The Importance of a Feasibility Study · Outdoor Hospitality Podcast: Glamping, STR, Resorts, Unique Stays, RV Parks, RV Resorts & Campgrounds

• 0:08
  Luke Pica: Sometimes also we have to break the sort of the bad news that a plan isn't feasible. And it's not nice to have to do. I think this is this is true in any walk of life, if you want to make a leap into something new and with an element of risk just when it comes to the amount of investment that's required, being informed, cannot be underestimated. I mean, I would speak to an expert in any field if I was going to be moving into that field. And that's what we are.
• 0:41
  Nick Purslow: If you could give one tip to someone who was doing a feasibility study for a glamping site by him or herself, what would that be?
• 1:03
  Nick Purslow: Hello, and welcome to the Glampitect podcast. Today I'm joined by Luke Pica, who is the research and reporting lead at Glampitect. His role involves looking into new markets and products, but his main responsibility is overseeing our feasibility studies. This episode delves into what a feasibility study is, why it's important for any prospective glamping site owner, what's included in our offering, and what you need to remember, if you're doing one yourself. As ever, I hope you enjoy and find value in today's episode.
• 1:31
  Nick Purslow: Hi Luke, how you doing?
• 1:33
  Luke Pica: Really good, thanks.
• 1:33
  Luke Pica: Good.
• 1:36
  Nick Purslow: Thank you for coming on. So you're the research and reporting lead at Glampitect, which is I think you've been newly promoted. And we're going to get into that in a little bit. But to start with, I'm led to believe that a bit of an interesting career, I mentioned once that you worked in it, you ran a jazz club or something like that. So just just briefly, to start with you just give us a run through of your background and your career before Glampitect, please.
• 2:03
  Luke Pica: Sure thing, I started out with like a, quite a decent career in sort of promotions and hospitality management, managed some, some nightclubs, in my younger years and live music venues. And originally, it was more kind of club nights, DJs, bands, and big acts as well. And pretty much most of the acts that were back in the early noughties, sort of late 90s have kind of come through places that I managed. And then after that again and gradually sort of got a bit older started to move into a slightly more sedate places, managed a jazz bar for a number of years as well. And then after that, transitioned into a research job, doing some media monitoring, and then took over the running of the team there and had done about 10 years of, of sort of research and management at that company working with like government agencies and quangos in charities. And that kind of sparked my interest in this kind of work. So not not the most obvious career path and to doing what I do now, but certainly the, you know, my work in media monitoring and researching and there is, subject matter is different but it's broadly quite similar to what we're doing now.
• 3:40
  Luke Pica: And a world away from from getting to lesson to live gigs every, well, every night. I mean, six nights a week, potentially three shows a night.
• 3:49
  Luke Pica: So my ears ring less now.
• 3:54
  Nick Purslow: Well, sorry, to the listeners, but just indulge me slightly. What are some of the bands that you saw?
• 3:58
  Nick Purslow: that you're
• 3:59
  Luke Pica: coming from?
• 4:01
  Luke Pica: When we started, we've had the Strokes, we had Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, all those bands that were kind of coming up. And then make you know, bands that I love like LCD soundsystem, or TV On the Radio and bands like that, we managed to put on. I mean, DJs wise, I mean, take your pick of anybody that was kind of big in that era. I mean, like David Guetta played when nobody really knew who he was. I mean, we had just everybody I mean, like, I could go on for hours. But that's that's a different podcast, probably, you know.
• 4:36
  Nick Purslow: I think I'd have stuck around in that career!
• 4:41
  Luke Pica: You can only do it for so long before you go deaf.
• 4:45
  Nick Purslow: Okay, right, so, obviously, you're as I said earlier, you're now the research and reporting lead, you did have a slightly different job title when you first joined I think.
• 4:53
  Nick Purslow: What was that? And then how did this promotion come about?
• 4:55
  Luke Pica: Well, again, when I started with the company, I mean it was everything grew so fast.
• 4:58
  Luke Pica: So officially when I came in, I was a feasibility expert. And then that changed to research and reporting expert, I believe, as we added more kind of responsibilities and started to look at products outside of the feasibility studies themselves.
• 5:15
  Luke Pica: And then we, it would have been about three months ago now, I was brought in to research and reporting lead. Now, I mean, it was great news and super happy to receive that. But as I came in from, you know, had a management background anyway. So I pretty much always tried to carry myself in that sort of lead role. If there wasn't one, when we first started, so, you know, it's great to get that recognition. But I kind of feel that, you know, it was a role I was maybe performing sort of.
• 5:52
  Nick Purslow: Yeah you were definitely leading that side.
• 5:54
  Nick Purslow: Yeah.
• 5:55
  Luke Pica: Sometimes I can't help myself.
• 5:57
  Nick Purslow: Yeah. So obviously, a big part of your role is the feasibility studies, which we're gonna devote a lot of this podcast to. But just just before we do that, what kind of things are you researching and reporting on in your in your new role?
• 6:11
  Luke Pica: Aside from the feasibilities, we're working on development of a couple of new products. We have started to put together the framework for our business plan service, which would be catered to customers who are looking to provide a business plan to planners, which is something that I think can be quite daunting for a lot of people, but at the same time, the business plan isn't necessarily the style of business plan that you would take to the bank, it's more of a framework and an explanatory business plan that does have facts and figures in it does provide a pretty broad overview of what our business and how a business would operate. But it's really tailored at the moment to them to satisfying planners, where necessary. And that's something that we're looking to help out on.
• 7:05
  Luke Pica: And we've also started looking at helping out with land buying because a lot of customers are coming to us asking, what sort of land should we be looking at, you know, where should we be looking, and using our expertise of the various kind of local plans and success rates and various different council regions to try and provide a product where we can vet a lot of land for clients. But these are all again, works in progress, and always ever evolving. So we're spending quite a lot of time working on stuff like that, also starting to look at some international stuff where possible, but the majority of our day is still taken up by the feasibility studies. I mean, they've been really successful, and there's a lot of demand for it. So I'd say four-fifths of the week week is still taken up on those.
• 7:56
  Nick Purslow: Okay, then. So what is the feasibility study for glamping?
• 8:00
  Luke Pica: So, the feasibility study is an analysis or a report that looks into the feasibility of an idea. And generally, the client will come to us with a kind of outline of what they would like their business to look like, and a piece of land where they'd like to site it.
• 8:19
  Luke Pica: And we look at try and look at every aspect of that idea. So it essentially, is a huge broad overview of every sort of aspect that goes into creating and setting up a business. We'll look at planning probabilities, we'll look at the success rate of other potential other applications within our council area that would fall under the same local planner or the same policies, and all the way up to looking at the figures, you know, we'll look at the costs of setting up a business and ultimately, how financially successful it could be.
• 9:08
  Luke Pica: That is, arguably the most important element when you're looking at the amount of investment is required versus the return investment that you would get. But we look at everything else in between.
• 9:18
  Nick Purslow: I think I think it's important to emphasise the first bit where you said about the likelihood of planning success, because when I first joined, and I heard the term feasibility study, I thought it just be like a page or two about, you know, here's what we think your cost might be, and your profits and blah, blah, blah. Well, because it was it was it wasn't a page or two, but it was it was a few pages, I think when when Calum started doing them, but you've since developed them over the last, is it a year or so now? Probably just under a year. And they really are the roughly 20 pages roughly, is it?
• 9:51
  Luke Pica: I think at the moment, the average page layout gets up to about 26 to 28.
• 9:56
  Nick Purslow: Sorry it's clearly more than what I thought it was, so how have you developed, without giving away the secret sauce, you know?
• 10:03
  Luke Pica: Yeah, in fairness to Calum, they were considerably longer than a few pages when I came in, butI mean, I think at the start, it was a, we're looking at about 10 pages, and there were, you know, the framework was there. And the idea was, was definitely there when we came in. And basically, we've expanded upon each section, sort of doubling the amount of content in each bit.
• 10:27
  Luke Pica: So we're now doing more, a greater deep dive into at least one planning, which is broadly similar to the proposal that a client will be putting to us.
• 10:39
  Luke Pica: We'll also look in length and into some others and then try and paint an overview of the total number of kind of approvals and refusals and stuff in an area. And also, then we've created a new section on kind of a deep dive in the local plans.
• 11:01
  Luke Pica: Now, this can be quite complex, often councils have multiple plans in operation at the same time, potentially new plans being drafted or sort of consideration stage, which may come into effect before a proposal would go in front of the planners. So we'll look all that. And that section has expanded considerably. And we've also added in, you know, sections on sort of the land designations and the circumstances around the land, you know, flood zones or looking at other sort of details associated with land, possibly, that could be rights of way issues, for instance, which we'd look at and explain how that would potentially affect our proposal from a planning perspective, and also an operational perspective.
• 11:56
  Luke Pica: You know, all these things.
• 11:56
  Luke Pica: Every site is different, every proposal, we try and look at every aspect of it. But I mean, we've, you know, it's had, it's had a bit of a read revamp, as well, we've got some new sort of graphical representations of probabilities and stuff like that, and it's ever growing, it's constantly evolving. And, you know, it's, and it will, part of it stems from the feedback that we receive from sales, our team, do our post-feasibility call with every client will discuss the outcomes of the report, and that will regularly get fed back to us and we use that to continually evolve and try and refine the reports to be exactly what the client requires. And that's ultimately what it's about is trying to provide as accurate picture as possible of, you know, the feasibility of an idea. But also to make sure that there's there's no stone left unturned as far as, as far as the clients are concerned, that there's, you know, we're not, we're not missing out on anything that any questions that they're going to have. And obviously, every case is different. And sometimes we'll have very specific questions that might not be covered in the feasibility study, but they'll always be covered in our sort of aftercare. You know, when they're when they speak to our team, about the results of the feasibility study, and we can continue to investigate if required.
• 13:26
  Nick Purslow: Yeah, you stole the words out of my mouth when you said it's an ever-evolving process. You know, I know you've been working on it, given them a bit of a makeover, I don't know how far along that is at the minute.
• 13:38
  Luke Pica: Yeah, that's getting a facelift. Certainly, that's in the design phases. But I can't give you a date on when we're, when we'll be actually implementing them. And it will be an iterative process, you know, as we roll that out, as well, because, you know, everything changes and the amount of space that'll be required, the size of sections and stuff like that needs to be quite flexible. So we really want to, we want to make it you can spice it up a little bit.
• 14:14
  Luke Pica: And it's work. But really, ultimately, it's the content that matters. And it's the content and the clients are interested in an opinion for so it's more important that we make sure that was ranked first, which is why it's been our primary focus. But no, because we're happy with the amount of content that we're able to put in and the feeling that we're over delivering in that regard that now we're able to shift our focus to the kind of secondary things of how it looks.
• 14:41
  Nick Purslow: And one thing I think is important about any kind of feasibility study, whether it's with us or with another company, because there are companies that do it. We don't want to publicise it too much, but there are, we think ours are the best obviously the best value for money, but there are others and also, you know, you might do it yourself. One thing that's important to establish after you're done, it is the next steps. And we sort of point people towards the next step, some people we think can go straight to full planning, some can go to pre planning.
• 15:07
  Nick Purslow: Again, I don't want to say too much, but we might look at how you might stand out from the competition and things like that. So how much of an important part of the process is that to you, in terms of giving clients an idea of the next steps that we think they should take?
• 15:28
  Luke Pica: Well, I think it's hugely important. I mean, it's ultimately, it's advice, and we like to lay out every option, as we see it, you know, whether or without Glampitect. Obviously, we'd love to have clients work with us and us be able to help them deliver, and bring their, you know, their vision into reality. But you know, that that's not always the case.
• 15:56
  Luke Pica: Sometimes people just want advice from us, because we're experts, and we've done this.
• 15:58
  Luke Pica: And, you know, they might have, you know, any any number, any number of reasons why they would want to do work without Glampitect. But we present our advice as concisely as possible.
• 16:10
  Luke Pica: The next step section will be will really just be a kind of honest, look at this probability. And whether we think going straight to full planning is the best course of action. Sometimes you additional advice, and many councils do offer that pre planning advice service, and we can help me packages to, to get the best advice back to the council and also help councils understand completely what a proposal looks like.
• 16:50
  Luke Pica: Some councils don't offer the service anymore. And so we will try and provide that. The feasibility to an extent, is a substitute for that in some cases. But sometimes also, we have to break the sort of the bad news that our plan isn't feasible. And it's not nice to have to do, but we look at it in a way that, like, it's, if you're willing to invest a large sum of money in a prospective business, it's better to, you know, have paid 497 pounds, and get that information early so you're fully informed, rather than going straight to full planning and spending 10 times that amount, potentially. And having, you know, hitting a snag, which was unforeseen, which could have been avoided if you got advice from an expert.
• 17:42
  Nick Purslow: Yeah, I think it's almost like an insurance policy in that regard. I worked on an info pack for the pre planning services that we're offering and it's a lot more, it's a lot easier to take financially and emotionally, if you do invest a bit of a smaller amount just to be told no, rather than investing everything. And then, as you say, hitting a snag, and it doesn't work. So hopefully you get told, you know, we think it's got a good chance of success, and you should go ahead, but it is a bit of an insurance policy as well, if it if it goes the other way.
• 18:15
  Luke Pica: It has to be said that it is rare having to break such bad news. But it has happened. And again, I think there there's obvious value in and doing it in this manner. But you know, more often than not, there's there's a route to success for every, for almost every application that we've got, every proposal that I've had to consider. You know, but there is a level of flexibility in every planning application that is kind of required. So while a particularly rigid idea might not be successful in every aspect of it, with some minor changes or some sanding of the edges, we can normally point them in the right direction to putting a proposal together that is more favourable to planners or favourable to the local plan, or, you know, consultees, and other agencies that might have stakes in a planning application.
• 19:15
  Nick Purslow: Absolutely, flexibility is a big thing that Ali mentioned in an earlier episode we did, where we talked about the worst mistakes people make as prospective glamping site owners, and one of them was being too rigid in their thinking, and it's all well and good having this dream glamping site in your head going into the process but it's likely that you might just have to adjust slightly and you've got to be prepared for that going into the process. And obviously feasibility studies can point you to towards that, or if the council have a problem when you go into pre planning or full planning, but you do have to be to be flexible. Absolutely.
• 19:53
  Nick Purslow: And you mentioned earlier about how it's 497 pounds, and I don't want to make this too much of a sales pitch. And if you aren't interested in a sales pitch, then please stick around because we've got a question at the very end for people who are interested in doing this kind of thing themselves. But we do charge what we think is a really low fee for a feasibility study, considering the work involved, and the product that we produce.
• 20:20
  Nick Purslow: Why do we charge such a low fee?
• 20:20
  Nick Purslow: And why do you think it's such a good value for money?
• 20:24
  Luke Pica: Well, for starters, I think it's priced essentially, as a loss leader. I mean, this is our advice service that we provide almost the cost.
• 20:31
  Luke Pica: Obviously, we want to, you know, start with these first steps with prospective clients and carry that through all the way.
• 20:42
  Luke Pica: Be it through pre planning advice, planning advice, package through full planning application, possibly through concept design. And we can support new prospective glamping business in a number of ways. I mean, I'm sure your listeners all heard this before. But I mean, we will do what the channel managers will do. We're gonna work on marketing, there's, there's a number of ways that Glampitect can help.
• 21:07
  Luke Pica: But really, the feasibility study, in my view is really the first evidence of the professionalism of Glampitect.
• 21:15
  Luke Pica: And it's, you know, that's again where I like to talk about over delivering. It's a very robust report that will look at every aspect of a prospective proposal or plan.
• 21:35
  Luke Pica: And the value for money can't really be understated. I think that the amount of investment that is required to create a new business is so considerable for so many people, and I think this is true in any walk of life, if you want to make a leap into something new, and with an element of risk, just when it comes to the amount of investment that's required, being informed cannot be underestimated. I mean, I would speak to an expert in any field if I was going to be moving into that field. And that's what we are. And I think a lot of people will do a lot of research and are capable of doing a lot of research into the feasibility of an idea. And many of our clients might have a really strong understanding of elements of what goes into feasibility. So you might have put in numerous planning applications before as a farmer who's maybe developed a lot of their land, or you may also have a business background and have a really strong understanding and grasp of returns on investment, etc. But the feasibility study covers all of that. And it really is a kind of one stop shop that goes from planning probability, it looks at return on investment, it looks at wind conditions, it looks at construction challenges, it looks at really everything that we can think of, every issue that we've encountered in the time that we've been doing this, and that we've learned through our experiences of running our own glamping sites, that we really think it covers all the bases.
• 23:13
  Luke Pica: And there isn't really anyone else where you can get that advice as a as a one stop shop.
• 23:21
  Luke Pica: So really what you're getting for 497 is, I mean, obviously, I have a very high opinion of it, because we've invested so much in it, and we put so much of our time into this. But I don't think it can be understated, how much again for your money.
• 23:34
  Nick Purslow: Yeah, and for those who do you want to do it themselves. And that, you know, they're confident in their ability to do it themselves. We want this to be a resource to help people as well, rather than just a sales pitch for Glampitect. So if you could give one tip to someone who was doing a feasibility study for a glamping site by him or herself,
• 23:54
  Luke Pica: Well, it's, it's a tricky question, because there what would that be?
• 23:59
  Luke Pica: are there's a lot to go into.
• 23:59
  Luke Pica: And there's a lot to think about in that question. But I mean, aside from the flexibility thing, which I think we've already covered, because I mean, being flexible in your approach to these things is invaluable. I mean, flexibility is required, really every every stage and being flexible will give you a infinitely higher chance of getting across that finish line.
• 24:24
  Luke Pica: But putting that to one side, and something that I think people often underestimate is contingency costs. We regularly see kind of figures that appear quite rigid and they very rarely factor in contingency costs. So we would always recommend, you know, having a 10% contingency on any figures that you're looking at because there are almost always unforeseen costs to development. With the best will in the world, you know, we can estimate every element of it but so many of these things are kind of, there could be a domino effect where one unforeseen element of development might cause you to have to change things that again. This goes back to flexibility. But in saying that as well, development on this scale, all can always have unforeseen costs. So always factor in at least a 10%, I would say conservatively, to allow yourself that room, and if you don't use it, fantastic, that's extra money that you can use in marketing or furthering your business down the line, maybe looking at phase two, but always be prepared.
• 25:35
  Nick Purslow: And we'll put the contact details of Glampitect so you can speak to one of our sales guys if you are interested in getting a feasibility study.
• 25:41
  Nick Purslow: But if anyone wants to contact you directly, what's your email address, please?
• 25:47
  Luke Pica: It's luke@glampitect.co.uk. And yeah, absolutely be more than happy to be to be contacted. And yeah, and we try and help with any questions that you would have, even if it's not specific to the the commissioning of the feasibility study. Sometimes people like to know just what information is required before they jump in. And we are obviously really, really happy to be able to have a chat whenever possible.
• 26:23
  Nick Purslow: Perfect. Well, thank you for coming on, it's really appreciated.
• 26:27
  Luke Pica: Now worries at all.
• 26:27
  Luke Pica: Thanks a lot.
• 26:32
  Nick Purslow: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Glampitect podcast. I hope you enjoyed and that you found value in today's episode. If you did, feel free to leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts because it really helps us move up the podcast rankings. Thank you.