What made you want to do the work you do? Please share the full story.
I grew up coming to the Lake District every summer with my family, staying in the same rented cottage near Coniston for almost a decade. That cottage had a broken boiler, mismatched furniture, and a smell of damp that never fully went away, but the setting was so good nobody complained. When I moved to Windermere permanently in my late twenties, I started noticing how many properties in the area had that same gap between location and quality. Owners were sitting on beautiful assets and either running them badly themselves or handing them to agencies that treated every listing the same way, with the same beige throws and the same stock photos.
I started Laik with my co-founder because we both had backgrounds that fit the problem. I’d worked in interior styling and knew what actually gets a property rebooked versus what just looks fine in a photo. We took on our first three properties as a test, redesigned them ourselves down to the crockery, and watched the occupancy numbers jump within two months. That was the moment I knew this wasn’t a hobby. Nine years later we manage 45 plus properties and the thing that still drives me is walking into a house that’s underperforming and knowing exactly which five changes will fix it.
How is AI changing your business? What changes are you making to adapt?
The clearest shift has been in how guests find us and how they book once they land on a listing. Search behavior has moved toward conversational queries, things like “dog friendly cottage near Ambleside with a hot tub for under 300 a night,” rather than typing a location into a booking site and scrolling. We’ve had to rewrite property descriptions to actually answer those specific questions instead of reading like generic marketing copy, because AI-powered search tools pull out the specific detail, not the adjective-heavy paragraph around it.
On the operations side, we’ve started using AI tools to handle the first pass of guest messages, things like check-in times, wifi passwords, parking instructions, so our team can spend their time on the messages that actually need a human, like a guest asking for restaurant recommendations or dealing with an issue on arrival. We also use it to draft the first version of new property listings based on a site visit checklist, then a person on our team rewrites it to sound like Laik rather than a template. The tool speeds up the unglamorous parts of the job so we can focus on the parts that made me want to do this in the first place.
If AI is impacting your business, please tell us 3 things you expect to change in the near future.
First, I expect dynamic pricing to get significantly more granular. Right now we adjust rates based on season, local events, and competitor snapshots, but AI models are starting to factor in things like weather forecasts and even social media sentiment about a region, and within two years I think manual pricing adjustments will feel as outdated as writing prices on a chalkboard. Second, I think guest screening and damage prevention will shift toward AI-assisted risk scoring before a booking is even confirmed, which matters a lot in a market like ours where hot tubs and countryside properties see more wear than a city flat.
Third, and this is the one I think about most, I expect property photography and virtual staging to become AI-assisted in a way that changes how owners prepare a property for listing. Instead of a full furniture refresh before every shoot, owners will be able to show us a near-finished room and use AI staging to test different looks before committing to the spend. For a company like ours that does renovation work as part of the offer, that’s going to change how we pitch design packages, because owners will want to see the result before they pay for it rather than trusting our word for it.
What are your greatest 3 skills and how have they helped you succeed?
The first is an eye for what makes a space feel considered rather than staged. I can walk into a property and know within minutes whether it will photograph well and whether it will actually feel good to stay in, which are not always the same thing. That skill built our reputation early on, because guests notice when a cottage has been thought through room by room rather than furnished off a catalogue. The second is negotiation with trades and suppliers, which sounds unglamorous but has saved us enormous amounts on renovations. I know what a hot tub install should cost in Cumbria versus what a contractor from outside the area will quote, and that knowledge alone has funded design upgrades on properties that would otherwise have stayed tired.
The third is reading occupancy data and knowing which lever to pull when a property underperforms. Some owners assume a slow month means dropping the price, but often it’s the listing photos, the check-in instructions, or a review mentioning something fixable like poor wifi. Being able to diagnose the actual cause rather than defaulting to price cuts is why our portfolio sits at 70 to 80 percent occupancy against a regional average closer to 53 percent.
Tell us about a time you were dead wrong about something.
In our second year, I was convinced that every property needed a hot tub to compete, because the ones we’d added were driving huge booking spikes. I pushed hard for an owner in Grasmere to install one in a small garden that honestly didn’t have the space for it properly, over the advice of our development lead who said the layout would make it feel cramped rather than luxurious. We went ahead, and the reviews confirmed exactly what he’d warned about, guests said the hot tub took over the garden and made the outdoor space feel unusable for anything else.
We ended up removing it eighteen months later and redesigning the garden with a smaller plunge pool that actually suited the plot size. It cost us the original install, the removal, and the redo, plus a stretch of mediocre reviews we had to work to bury under better ones. What it taught me is that a trend working across a portfolio doesn’t mean it’s right for every individual property, and I’ve since built a much stricter rule into our design process, that no upgrade gets greenlit without checking it fits the specific space rather than what worked somewhere else.
What is the biggest challenge you face each day and how do you handle it?
The daily challenge is balancing owner expectations with what guests actually want, because those two things are often not aligned. An owner might want their property positioned as a premium five bedroom house for large groups, but the booking data tells us short weekend breaks for couples fill faster and command a better rate per square foot. Having that conversation without it feeling like I’m undermining their vision for their own property takes a specific kind of tact, and it’s a conversation I have in some form nearly every day across a portfolio our size.
I handle it by leading with the numbers rather than my opinion. I’ll pull up occupancy comparisons from similar properties in the portfolio and let the data make the case, because owners trust figures more than they trust my personal taste. It also keeps the relationship collaborative rather than adversarial, since I’m not telling them their instinct was wrong, I’m showing them what guests in that specific location and price bracket are actually booking.
What do you value most and why?
I value follow through more than almost anything else, in both people and businesses. The Lake District tourism industry is full of good ideas that never get finished properly, a renovation that stalls halfway, a marketing plan that fizzles after the first month, an owner relationship that starts strong and goes quiet the moment things get busy. I learned early that the companies who actually last here aren’t the ones with the flashiest launch, they’re the ones who show up consistently for every guest and every owner, season after season.
That’s partly why our 95 percent five star rating matters so much to me, because it’s not built on a handful of standout stays, it’s built on thousands of guests getting the same reliable experience whether they booked in January or August. Follow-through is unglamorous and it doesn’t photograph well for Instagram, but it’s the actual foundation everything else at Laik sits on.
What achievement are you the proudest of and why?
Getting our occupancy rate to 70 to 80 percent against a Lake District average of 53 percent is the number I’m proudest of, because it represents years of small, unglamorous decisions rather than one big win. It’s the result of rewriting hundreds of listings, chasing down maintenance issues before they became bad reviews, and pushing owners toward upgrades they were initially reluctant to spend on. No single property or single year got us there, it was compounding discipline across 45 plus properties.
What makes it matter more to me is what it means for the owners themselves. Many of them rely on their holiday let income to cover a mortgage or supplement a pension, so that gap between our occupancy and the regional average isn’t just a statistic, it’s real income difference for real families who trusted us with what is often their most valuable asset.
What is your favorite book and why?
My favorite book is A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. I read it during my first year running Laik, when I was constantly second guessing whether a woman without a traditional hospitality or business background had any right to be building a property company from scratch. Woolf’s argument about needing physical and financial independence to create anything meaningful stuck with me in a very literal way, because at the time I was renovating properties out of a rented flat with barely enough capital to cover the next project.
It reframed how I thought about the early struggle of the business, not as proof I was in over my head, but as the exact condition every person building something from nothing has to work through. I still think about that book whenever I’m negotiating for the resources, whether that’s funding or simply time, to do the work properly rather than cutting corners because the room of my own hasn’t been secured yet.
If you could go back 2 years and give yourself advice, what would it be?
I would tell myself to hire a dedicated maintenance coordinator far earlier than I did. For the first several years I was fielding urgent issues myself, a broken boiler in Keswick at 11pm or a leak in a Bowness apartment the morning a new guest was due to check in, and I treated that as just part of being hands on. What it actually did was pull my attention away from the growth work only I could do, like owner relationships and design strategy, and put it into firefighting that someone else could have handled just as well.
Two years ago I was still convinced that being reachable for every emergency was what good leadership looked like. I’d tell myself that building the systems and the team to absorb that pressure earlier isn’t a step back from being hands on, it’s what actually lets the business scale past what one person can carry alone.
Who has been your biggest mentor in life (personal or professional) and how have they helped you?
My co-founder has been my biggest professional mentor, even though we started Laik together as equals. He came from a finance background and taught me to read a business the way he does, through cash flow and margin rather than just instinct about what looks good. In our early years I would get excited about a design idea and want to greenlight it immediately, and he’d be the one asking whether the return justified the spend before we committed an owner’s money to it.
That balance between his numbers-first thinking and my design-first instinct is genuinely why Laik works the way it does. He’s taught me that a beautiful property that doesn’t turn a profit for the owner isn’t actually a success, no matter how good it looks in photos, and that lesson has shaped nearly every decision we’ve made since.
Just for fun, what is your favorite food?
Sticky toffee pudding, unapologetically, and specifically the version from the Sharrow Bay Hotel near Ullswater, which is actually credited as one of the places the dessert originated. I’ve eaten it more times than I’d like to admit while scouting properties around the lake, and it’s become something of a ritual for me whenever I’m having a stressful week with a difficult renovation or a tricky owner conversation. There’s something very fitting about loving a dessert that’s essentially a Lake District institution, given how much of my life is now built around this region.