Speaker 1: (00:00)
Hello and welcome to season eight of How to Start Up a podcast for anyone starting a company hosted by me, Juliette Fallowfield, founder of pr, communications and podcast consultancy, Fallowfield and Mason, where we enable you to own your own PR and messaging. When starting business founders have the opportunity to start with a clean slate as well as start as they mean to go on. So in this season, we wanted to share as much as we can about how businesses can start with ethical practice at their core.
Speaker 1: (00:29)
When building a business from scratch, fans have an opportunity to consider the environmental impact of all of their activities, including work, travel. According to statistical research, 81% of global travelers believe sustainable travel is important. However, 43 respondents to a booking.com survey said they never or rarely managed to travel in a sustainable way. In this episode, I speak with Raffi, one of the co-founders, Selena, the travel company, combining beautifully designed accommodation with co-working, recreation, wellness, as well as local experiences. Having founded Selena in 2014, Raphael and Daniel aimed to make more sustainable travel, easier, particularly for founders and support the local communities living and working near their properties. In this episode, Raphael shares his advice as to why community was so important for his business at the get go and why that is the really, really big part of his sustainable travel business. Thank you so much for joining. How to start up today? It would be great if you could kick off with an introduction as to who you are and a bit about the business that you started.
Speaker 2: (01:32)
So thanks for for hosting us and it's my pleasure. Uh, so my name is Rafi Muser. I'm, uh, 44 years old. I'm Israeli, uh, live most of my life, uh, abroad, I think over 10 years in Latin America. Then little bit New York when we expand the business to North America. Then we decide to expand the business to, uh, in the Middle East and uk. And then we moved to London, and now I'm back in Israel.
Speaker 1: (01:59)
So what is Selena?
Speaker 2: (02:00)
So Selena, it's, it's a lifestyle hospitality brand that combined, uh, rooms and food, beverage, event wellness. There is coworking spaces, there is, uh, common areas where people socialize, meeting each other from a, from a nice library to, to a nice, uh, cinema to a, like a common kitchen like the old traditional hostels all the way up to very high end suites where people can, they're very comfortably. So Selena took the stars out of the hotels, uh, language. So there is no two star, three star, four star, five stars. Um, you have everything within one box. So if your budget is $20, you can stay in a dorm with friends. Um, if your budget is $50, you can stay in a private room and share bathroom with another private room. And if you are in a hundred dollars budget, you can stay in a normal standard kind of a three star product that you can have in the same place. A very high end product sometimes can get to a thousand dollars a
Speaker 1: (03:00)
Night. So when you started, I know that you had sustainable and ethical practices embedded in from the beginning of your business. How would you define sustainable travel and why is it important to you?
Speaker 2: (03:10)
So for me, the whole word of e s g, like the, the, not just the, the about the sustainable travel. For me, the whole word of E s G was very, very important from day one. So we tackle it mainly on the social side, but for me, where in a time where 30% loneliness, depression, et cetera, people are uh, need to socialize, they need to meet people, they feel quite lonely as again, as, as much as the online ward developed and people celebrating it, there's many, many disadvantage to the online world. It's create the fake feelings of of, I'm, I'm surrounded by many people, et cetera. When you go out to real world, you realize that you don't have those social skills as used to be in the past. Selena, it's all about that. Like our mission from day one, 2014 was to inspire meaningful connection between people.
Speaker 2: (03:56)
We're measuring that. So we're measuring what percentage of our guests make a friend. So every person leaves Selena get a posta survey, did you make a friend? And how you do that. So it start from how you design a space that make it feel more comfortable all the way to common dining, like bigger tables that force kind of people to share common area. You go, you watch a, you wanna watch a basketball game at 11 and you're gonna find another three people there. You're gonna, you're gonna introduce each other. We have a welcome drink. You, you walk into Selena, there is a free cocktail and afternoon. So all the people that check in the same day and we're introducing them to each other and we are facilitating this first interaction. So, and a lot of content and programming. So the social part for me is the most important part in the, in the word of E S G.
Speaker 1: (04:49)
Well, so important. A lot of people forget that. I mean when, especially when you go through B Corp, people think, are you tracking your carbon footprint? It is. That is a tiny, tiny part of being sustainable. And you've gotta look at governance, community, people, your team, your supply chain.
Speaker 2: (05:02)
But if you speak to a person that feels lonely but feels that it doesn't have enough friends and he's traveling by himself because nobody want to come with him to this, to this journey, I think it's a much bigger problem than anything else we're talking about. Because again, even the US they declare loneliness as a real epidemic. Like it's, they said it's worth than smoking. And it's true statistically it's true. So at the end of the day, again, we are obviously we're much more than that. We're doing a lot of other things. But at the end of the day we always believe that even commercially, if you're a place that people trust you, that they can travel by themselves, they're gonna meet new people, they're gonna continue to travel with them. I think at the end of it, it takes longer, but at the end of it, they're gonna choose to come back to travel within your journey, within your platform because they feel comfortable.
Speaker 2: (05:55)
So this is the part of the s you the e s G, right. But when you think about governance, again, we're, since our board towards C level to our entire company, I think we're always been in a, on a 50 50 male female, like that was uh, very, very important. Many companies, uh, uh, have this on the employees level. And then you go to the C level and you go to the board and you find high percentage towards males. And this is not the case in Selena. Uh, it was never been the case. Um, and this is very, very important diversity, like anything to do with diversity and across the entire company, every person need to feel very comfortable to work in our platform. Whoever you are, uh, whatever education you have, it's all key.
Speaker 1: (06:42)
Presumably obviously you've been doing this since 2014 and some companies back then were liberal and letting people work from anywhere and working from home. And freelancers typically you could set where they work. But now since the pandemic, the world has changed and a lot of people are able to work remotely or they have months of the year that they can live in another country. Have you seen a huge uptake in Selena's offering since the pandemic? Yeah,
Speaker 2: (07:09)
We built product for that. So we have Selena passport, we have the CLI and we have the CLI flex. It's kind of packages that exactly catered for this community. And that's one end. And on our employees, we, we we're filling it obviously. Cause there is several things that happen. One thing that happened is that interest rate went up, capital become more expensive. So companies saving money, they're turning every stone to save cost because just the world change from low interest, very gross mode into a very profitability mode. So company also saving money by, by uh, reducing cost, right? That's one. And at the same time, many, many people want to work remotely so it can save potentially office costs, et cetera. So I think it's, it's a combination of many things, the habits of how people want to work and at the same time the economy shift will lead to, will lead to a big, big, big thing situation where people more and more are gonna become digital nomads and remote workers that will travel the world while they're working. Well
Speaker 1: (08:13)
I'm thrilled. I started my business right at the beginning of the pandemic thanks to redundancy and suddenly thought I can work anywhere in the world. And it was so exciting cause I love meeting new people and places like Selena are perfect. There's a few other people popping up doing it. But you can walk in and it's completely comfortable to go up to someone and go, hi, I don't know anyone here, who are you? And they're like, sure, come and join us. It's liberating. But I'm also conscious that my carbon footprint has probably gone up quite a lot more as well. Cause I'm flying more. So do you have advice for your community as to how they can reduce their impact on the planet?
Speaker 2: (08:45)
First of all, you want to build a company from day one thinking about it because the, the, from a financial roi, it's a long-term roi. It's never a short term roi. So if you're not putting it as a value and as something very important from day one will be very difficult to shift mm-hmm. later. So when people come opening new companies, they want from the very beginning to ask themself or across the E s G word what it's important, what's realistically they can do. Because business first need to survive, be profitable to be able to continue. But at the same time, we all believe that in the long term, if you really focus on E S G across all the parameter of E S G, you will end up doing better also financially because your customers will appreciate it and will support and will consume from brands that care about their environment. It's a fact, people, once they're gonna know about it, they will, but they're not gonna believe you just by saying it. They wanna feel it, it need to be real authentic and, and they need to understand that your company really care about it. Right. And that's something that, that it's in the values of the organization.
Speaker 1: (10:00)
So it really works on all levels. Like it's the right thing to do and it's what we should do, but actually your business is gonna benefit in the long run as well. So that's an absolutely no excuse to bet it in from the beginning. And is there anything that you learned from the start that you would change and go back? Yeah,
Speaker 2: (10:15)
I think that I, I think that on the, on the social side we were, they very focused like the company is doing the maxi, which can do on the social side, I think governance as well. I think on the environmental part, we always took existing hotels and convert them to Selena. We didn't build new hotels so it didn't really allow me to, uh, to build a new box in a perfect way. From a sustainability point of view, I did my best.
Speaker 1: (10:46)
But you were kinda upcycling in a way.
Speaker 2: (10:49)
, yeah. Yeah. So what we did is I think 60 or 70% of our furnitures in our, what's called FF and e uh, is upcycled. So we're taking local artists from the town where we're building a Selena, they're walking into the asset and they're converting it. The conversion happens for a lot of upcycling and recycling huge. So probably, probably we're a hospitality company that doing upcycling more than anybody else. So that's something we're very proud of. But to have a real impact, if you build a property from day one, thinking about all the parameters you can do even more.
Speaker 1: (11:25)
And how have you defined your sustainability plan? How did you tackle that going right? We're a new business, we obviously need to make some money to be in business. Putting that investment of time into that area, what would you advise someone to start doing if they want to bet in sustainability from the beginning? Is it sit down with a sustainability expert or just be really honest about what you want to achieve? Are there any practical steps you'd give someone?
Speaker 2: (11:50)
Yeah, yeah. First of all, there are great advisors out there that can organize for you from the very beginning, the metricses that you wanna measure. You need to be very realistic. You don't want to come and say, I'm gonna measure 20 things from day one. You're gonna say in year one I will look at those five metricses. In year two, I'm gonna add another two metricses. In year three I'm gonna add more. You wanna build to build a good plan from the very beginning, realistic plan combined with a very good way to measure it on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis and communicate to your team, team the achievements and at the same time to communicate to your investor base. So I think the thing is build your plan. A realistic plan, long term, five years plan, build the KPI around it, measure it on a quarterly basis and communicate the results. Either it's good or bad. Transparency is key to your employees and to your shareholders. And even if you have any newsletter to your customer base, you should share with them what you're doing. Doing that, what I just said will get a lot of appreciation from all the communities.
Speaker 1: (13:06)
That level of accountability as well. If you commit to sharing your updates, you actually then have to update them with something and it, it keeps you going. It keeps you on deadline because these things, there's no legal agreement to have to do this. I think it's, it's making sure it actually happens. It's important. We have this thing where the previous guest from the previous episode had a question for you. And obviously we have a question, well I'll ask you what you'd like to ask the next guest, but our previous guest asked is, where do you turn when you have a really tricky predicament or decision to make? Who do you look to for advice?
Speaker 2: (13:39)
So first of all, I think, uh, I have several shareholders, which is, by the way, it's usually not the biggest shareholders. Like, like if you think about it, small shareholders that join you from the very beginning and they're very, very connected to the story and the mission and they're here for the long run and they're supporter of the founders group. Those are the ones that will give you the best advice because they're clean. There is no conflict of interest. You always want to get advice from people that doesn't have this conflict. Now sometimes big shareholders, they do want the best for the company, but sometimes what best for them is not the best for you or for the specific moment because they want to exit in a year from now and your exit plan is five years from now. So always then ask yourself, who is the most not conflicted person around me that have more experience than me? And you go and you get this advice and this is what I'm doing, then you know that it's just, you just can take this advice that you can follow. Uh, this is for me, I think what's the most important thing.
Speaker 1: (14:45)
That's amazing. It's, yeah, unbiased is fantastic. And is there a question you'd like to ask the next guest? Something you've come across in your founder journey that you're like, I wonder what they think about that?
Speaker 2: (14:56)
I think how they, what, what they think about today when we aware of the fastest, you know, the fastest in interest increase in the history, what we experienced in the last six months, just move from zero interest to very high interest. So what I think it's about what people should do at an early stage to be prepared for those moments where the economy is shifting, I think. And that's, it's relevant for the, for the world of E S G, it's relevant for the financial preparation, but yeah, it's around the economy shift from the growth mode to a profitability mode. How you prepare yourself for that. That's
Speaker 1: (15:40)
A big question. I am very much looking forward to asking the next person what their thoughts are on that. And are there any last golden nugget pieces of advice you'd like to offer a new founder?
Speaker 2: (15:49)
Um, love, just love, love, love what you do. Like it's, it's very, very, you know, you have great moment, you have difficult moment. When you're doing well, people are gonna follow you. When you're not gonna do well, people are gonna blame you. At the end of the day, you need to be a hundred percent engaged to the brand and the promise, if not, people will feel and will not follow. You have to be all in.
Speaker 1: (16:18)
I love that. It's so true. And this is why I love this podcast cuz it reene energizes me. So thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it today.
Speaker 2: (16:27)
You're welcome. You're welcome. Thank you so much for, for having us.
Speaker 1: (16:30)
If you'd like to contact Raphael, you can find his details in the show notes along with a recap of the advice that he's so kindly shared. Thank you for listening to how to start up. I hope these conversations offer you some confidence, encouragement, and reassurance that you are on the right track. If you can enjoy this podcast, I'd be so appreciative if you were to rate, review and subscribe as it will really help other people starting a company discover it.