What made you want to do the work you do? Please share the full story.
Marta and I grew up together at Queen Katherine sixth form in Kendal, and like most people from around here, we left for university and work and spent years dreaming about getting back to the Lake District. That pull never really faded. We tried to make it work in small ways first, renting out a luxury bell tent in a farmer’s field on weekends, just to see if there was an appetite for something better than the standard damp cottage experience. There was. Guests kept telling us they wanted the same warmth and character but with proper design behind it, the kind of place you’d actually choose to spend a week rather than just tolerate.
That bell tent became the test case for everything Laik is now. In 2019 we took the leap properly and named the company after the Northern dialect word for playing, taking time off, being on holiday, because that’s genuinely what we wanted to build back into people’s trips to this area. I handle business development, growth and most of the renovation and project work, while Marta shapes a lot of the guest experience side. It was never really a calculated career move. It was two people who loved this place and thought they could do right by both the visitors and the properties.
Tell us 3 surprisingly easy and 3 surprisingly difficult things about your business.
The easy surprises: guests responding to genuine dog-friendly properties was instant, once owners saw that Ted (our own dog) actually shaped how we vetted homes, bookings from dog owners picked up fast. Sourcing design inspiration was easier than expected too, the Lake District itself does half the work, you just have to not fight the landscape with bad decor. And getting 5-star reviews wasn’t the grind we braced for, once the basics were right (comfortable beds, proper heating, honest photos) guests noticed and said so.
The hard surprises: convincing the industry that single-night bookings were worth chasing took far longer than it should have, most agents still push minimum stays because it’s less admin, even though visitors increasingly want flexibility. Navigating the shifting rules around short-term letting in Cumbria has been a genuine headache, balancing being a real economic contributor to the area against concerns we’re eating into residential housing stock. And renovation timelines in rural Cumbria are brutal, tradespeople are stretched thin across the whole Lakes, so a “quick” hot tub install or decor refresh can slip by months.
What are the 3 things you like best about your work and why?
First is walking into a property mid-renovation and seeing the moment it stops looking like someone’s old holiday let and starts looking like somewhere I’d want to stay myself with Ted. That shift is the whole job in miniature. Second is reading guest feedback that mentions small things we agonised over, like a log burner actually being used properly or a hot tub being warm on arrival, because it proves the details we obsess over land with real people.
Third is the relationship side with owners, watching a property that was sitting half-booked suddenly get consistent five-star stays once we’ve reworked the styling and the booking approach. That turnaround, from an underperforming asset to something owners are proud of, is genuinely satisfying and it’s the clearest measure I have that the business model works.
What are your greatest 3 skills and how have they helped you succeed?
The first is an eye for what actually makes a space feel welcoming rather than just photogenic, which sounds similar but isn’t. It’s meant our renovation work holds up once guests are actually living in the space for a few days, not just for the listing photos. The second is stubbornness on things the industry treats as fixed, like minimum-night stays. Pushing for single-night bookings created more admin for us but it matched what guests actually wanted, and that willingness to make our own job harder to serve the guest better has built real loyalty.
The third is reading the wider industry landscape, understanding how things like holiday letting regulation or buy-to-let tax rates ripple down into what owners and guests experience day to day. That awareness has let us plan ahead rather than react, whether that’s how we talk to prospective owners about letting with us or how we position properties as the rules around short-term lets keep shifting in Cumbria.
Tell us about a time you were dead wrong about something.
Early on I assumed minimum-night stays were simply how the industry worked and that guests would accept it, the way everyone before us had. I built our first booking policies around a standard two or three night minimum because that’s what every other agency in the area did, and I figured fighting it would just cost us admin time for no real benefit. It took a run of guests asking, sometimes quite bluntly, why they couldn’t just book one night for an anniversary or a quick escape, before I actually questioned the assumption instead of just repeating it.
Once we tested single-night bookings properly, the demand was obvious and it had been there the whole time, I just hadn’t been listening for it. It meant more admin on our end, more turnovers, more coordination with cleaning and changeover, but it matched what visitors actually wanted rather than what was convenient for agents. I was wrong to treat an industry norm as a guest preference, and unpicking that assumption changed how we set policy on almost everything else since.
What is the biggest challenge you face each day and how do you handle it?
The daily challenge is balancing two very different audiences at once, guests who want a seamless, thoughtful stay and owners who want their property performing well without becoming a second job for them. Those needs pull in different directions more often than people expect. A change that makes a property more appealing to guests, like a hot tub or a full decor refresh, means real cost and disruption for the owner, and I’m the one who has to make the case for it convincingly.
I handle it by staying close to the actual data rather than gut feeling, occupancy rates, review comments, repeat bookings, and using that to show owners exactly where investment pays off rather than asking them to take it on faith. It also means being honest with guests when something isn’t right for a property rather than oversell it just to fill a calendar slot. Keeping both sides operating on the same honest information is really the only way I’ve found to hold that balance day to day.
What do you value most and why?
Honesty in the small details, more than any grand principle. In this business it’s easy to let a listing photo or a description round up slightly, make a room look bigger, a view look closer, and I’ve seen competitors do it constantly. I care about a guest arriving and finding the property matches exactly what they expected, because that’s the difference between a one-off booking and someone who tells three friends and comes back themselves.
That value comes directly from Marta and me testing places ourselves with Ted before we’ll represent them. We don’t ask whether a property technically allows dogs, we ask whether we’d actually want to stay there with our own. That standard, would I personally choose this, is the filter I apply to almost every decision in the business now, from renovations to marketing copy.
What achievement are you the proudest of and why?
Going from a single bell tent in a farmer’s field to a business managing a proper portfolio of properties across Windermere, Bowness, Ambleside, Keswick, Grasmere and Cartmel, with over 4,000 guests through the doors and a 95% five-star rating, still feels significant every time I actually stop and think about it rather than just moving to the next task. It wasn’t a business plan that got us there, it was two people testing an idea in the smallest way possible and letting guest response guide every step after.
What I’m proudest of specifically is that the growth didn’t come at the cost of the standard we started with. It would have been easy to scale by loosening our criteria on what properties we’d take on or cutting corners on the design side, but we’ve kept the same instinct from that first bell tent, would we stay here ourselves. Holding that line while growing the business is the part I didn’t know how hard it would be, and it’s the part I’m most glad we managed.
What is your favorite movie and why?
It’s a bit on the nose given the business, but I’ll always come back to Local Hero. It’s a slow, quiet film about an American oil executive sent to buy up a Scottish coastal village who ends up completely won over by the place and the people, and it never resolves into some neat sentimental ending, it just sits with that pull between ambition and belonging. I saw it years before Laik existed and it stuck with me in a way I didn’t fully understand at the time.
Looking back, it’s basically the film version of what happened to Marta and me, we left the Lake District for work and study and kept getting drawn back, and eventually stopped fighting it. There’s a scene where the executive just stands on the beach doing nothing, no dialogue, no plot moving forward, and that image of someone finally slowing down enough to notice where they are has genuinely shaped how I think about what we’re trying to give guests.
What advice would you give to your younger self and why?
I’d tell myself to stop assuming the way an industry does things is the way it has to be done. When we started, I copied a lot of standard practice, minimum-night stays, generic listing language, the usual approach to property styling, because it felt safer than working it out from scratch. It took actual guest pushback before I questioned any of it, and by then we’d lost time doing things a way that never actually suited what people wanted.
The reason that advice matters is that some of our best decisions, like fighting for single-night bookings or testing every property with Ted before listing it, came from ignoring convention rather than following it. I’d want younger me to trust that instinct earlier and skip the years spent assuming the established way was the correct way just because it was established.
Who has been your biggest mentor in life (personal or professional) and how have they helped you?
Honestly, it’s Marta. We met at sixth form in Kendal long before either of us had any notion of running a business together, and she’s the one who’s shaped how I think about the guest experience side of this more than anyone else. My instincts run toward the practical, renovation, growth, the business development side of things, and she’s consistently the one pulling the conversation back to how a guest actually feels walking into a space.
She’s also the person who pushed us to actually test the bell tent idea rather than just talk about it, which is the reason Laik exists at all rather than remaining a nice daydream about moving back to the Lakes one day. Working that closely with someone who challenges your assumptions daily, rather than just agreeing with you, has probably shaped the business more than any single decision either of us made individually.
Just for fun, what is your favorite ice cream flavor?
Sticky toffee pudding, without much competition. There’s a place near Bowness that does it properly, actual chunks of toffee and sponge running through it rather than just a caramel swirl for show, and it’s become something of a ritual after a day spent walking a property or dealing with a renovation headache. It also feels fitting given where we live, it’s about as Lake District a flavor as you can get.