Job #1 when you are running a B&B: You have to BE THERE!!!

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There is, of course, a lot more to a successful B&B than keeping the rooms clean, the bedsheets fresh, the food awesome and the staff smiling.

You can't have happy guests until you have guests, and no one will ever prosper by adopting Reuben's belief that "God is our booking agent."

I just went back and looked at the numbers for the Lord Mayor's Inn, and sure enough, just by being nice to people, Jen and I had monthly revenue up by more than 50% by the time we left. Then again, as I said before, revenue was barely $5,000 a month when we started, or about 10-15% of potential, so increasing the cash flow to an average of $8,000 a month was not as dramatic an improvement as we would have liked!

We learned that being accessible to phone callers is of paramount importance, even in this Internet age where more and more people are comfortable with making and paying for reservations online.

B&Bs attract the type of person who often likes to get the feel of an inn before they visit for the first time, and even the best website in the world is not, for them, an acceptable substitute for human contact.

In Long Beach, we made sure that one of us was close to the phone for most of the time we were on our feet, and we felt uncomfortable whenever we ventured away, knowing that these days people have short attention spans and want to make their reservations NOW NOW NOW (forget about calling back later or trying an alternate number).

In South Pasadena, Jen and I settled into a routine where we made sure someone was able to answer the phone from 8am to 8pm every day, and our best friend was call-forwarding, which meant that we were not totally tied to the office for 12 hours every day.

Once a week, we'd head out the door and down the hill to the metro for a trip into Pasadena for lunch out and an afternoon at the movies and sometimes even dinner away from the Inn. People get antsy if a cell phone buzzes in the middle of a good film, so once a week we hired a terrific young man to step into our shoes for 8 hours from noon on.

The system worked perfectly. Arturo could charm birds out of trees, on the phone or in person, and we would often hear guests swooning over him at Thursday breakfasts and demanding to know where "that lovely young man" had gone! Mostly, they were happy to make do with us when we explained that he was just our Man Wednesday, hired so that we could desert our little island for a few hours each week.

So accessibility, coupled with a friendly and patient phone manner, is top of the list of an innkeeper's priorities, once the place is shipshape and ready to receive guests. You have to sound as if you really want a caller's business, which does not mean being obsequious but does require a willingness to listen and offer special inducements if you sense that a discount is going to be the difference between deal and no deal!

Janet's policy was "No discounts" because she felt that her regular rates were exactly as they should be and no one should expect to pay one penny less. That inflexible attitude can make the difference between doing OK and doing well, and since within weeks we had monthly revenue up by around $5,000, it was clear that Janet's business plan needed revision.

Our belief was and remains that the more rooms we can fill, the better it is for everyone. People calling a B&B for information already know that there are cheaper options out there, so they are not looking for fire-sale prices. They also understand that as a general rule, you get what you pay for, so anyone willing to offer them a huge discount out of the blue might not be selling what they want to buy.

One mistake we made early on and learned from was that it's a bad plan to offer folks a multiple-room discount for weddings unless they are renting every room in the house. Weddings are fun and being around while friends and family are reuniting with one another is a great feeling...but wedding parties take over a B&B like nobody's business, impacting the experience for anyone who's renting a room but is not a part of the happy group.

The owners of the Bissell House, our more expensive competition in South Pasadena, imposed a 20% surcharge for wedding bookings and we thought they were nuts. After a couple of exhausting weekends, we realized that insanity is in business a relative term.

Usually, B&B guests are out, out and away by 10am and there's time to draw breath and get the place ready for the next wave. Wedding people stick around until the Big Event, consuming voluminous amounts of coffee, cake and cookies and getting underfoot. Fine, if they have the whole place to themselves. Otherwise...not so much!

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