When business travel took a dive in 2020, David Whelan, CEO and founder of corporate accommodation provider Urban Rest Apartments, revamped his tech processes to ride the wave back up.

Like many great business ideas, Urban Rest was born out of frustration.

Working in finance at the time, David was frustrated by the lack of options for corporate travellers looking for places to stay for more than a few nights. He wanted to create a marketplace between property owners and corporate travellers who cared about design, wellbeing and sustainability.

The properties would have all the trimmings: high-quality linen, laundry services, complimentary fast wireless internet access, entertainment streaming services and access to room service, spa treatments and a 24/7 concierge. Like a high-end hotel, but with more services and flexibility.

In 2017, Urban Rest was born.

The business took off quickly – until 2020 hit. Suddenly, business travel was off the cards.

“We had to significantly reduce our workforce and let go of quite a number of staff,” David tells Kochie’s Business Builders.  “We used that period to actually rebuild our tech stack because we had to focus on building a leaner and more sustainable business model.”

Here are some of David’s biggest learnings from putting tech first while priming Urban Rest for growth:

1. Your tech framework needs to be a flexible fit

“The industry we work in doesn’t have any specific software that caters to our niche,” David explains. “We sit somewhere between traditional serviced apartments and the hotel industry. And there was nothing really that serviced our actual direct needs, which meant that we had to build out a lot of custom software.”

In his words, “things were starting to fall apart while we were growing quickly”. Without the capacity to rely on in-house system engineers or a large IT team, David says it was crucial to unite everything into one service provider.

“Finding software that could integrate in as smooth a way as possible so people didn’t have to jump back and forth between programs; that was one of the key things that we looked for,” he says.

Once they had a clearer infrastructure in place, more unified systems could be rolled out across Windows 11 modern devices powered by the Intel vPro platform. With devices and programs streamlined, the business is much more flexible as it scales back up to meet the demands of business travel.

“We recognise the type of business that we’re in is quite operationally intensive. We’ve got a lot of people on the ground – there’s a lot of moving parts,” David says. “So in order for us to compete with the big established players, we really needed to have it in order to keep the pricing down in the model we wanted to build. Efficiency was a really key driver.”

One of Urban Rest Apartments’ luxe inner-city properties. Image: Urban Rest.

2. Refine your collaboration and productivity tools for a remote workforce

“Having offices in multiple locations around Australia added to the complexity of running a small business with minimal staff,” David says.

With staff on the ground managing hundreds of properties from a number of locations across Australia, the need to collaborate efficiently has never been more important.

While David prefers to keep his Microsoft Teams meetings “short and snappy” to avoid meeting fatigue, he also appreciates the ability to share documents during meetings so the team can jump on problems together, quick smart.

“The collaboration tools within Windows 11 have really allowed our staff to communicate in real time, troubleshoot and problem solve without necessarily needing to go back and forth between the office or the location,” he says.

Personally, David keeps his own schedule on track using another productivity tool in the Windows 11 suite: “The Snap Layout allows me to pin my calendar to the side of my screen at all times, meaning that I can see in real time exactly what I need to do, no matter what else I’m working on at the time.”

Watch Kochie’s Business Builders: David Whelan’s productivity tips

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3. Never compromise on the customer experience

“Customer satisfaction for us is all about the end user of the product – the actual guest who’s staying,” David says. “The kind of clients we have, if you mess up once you don’t get too many opportunities to retain their business. A lot of them have moved away from similar types of products because the quality control and assurance wasn’t there for them.

“It’s been a really important part for us to ensure we can keep the quality and standards there while offering something that’s a bit more homely and design driven, at multiple different locations.”

This means not just making the online booking process easy for customers, but also providing quick customer service if any issues arise.

“We’re trying to manage this with a remote, decentralised workforce so when you start getting into those issues, someone might be up in Brisbane or Perth taking a phone call from someone who’s arrived in Melbourne or Canberra,” David says. “You need really good collaboration tools so they can get on, find the problem and figure out how to solve it.”

David says that reaction speed is a major challenge, but one the Urban Rest team have prioritised to set themselves apart.

“We put in place NPS (Net Promoter Score, measuring customer experience) scoring systems, and we’ve seen ourselves sitting in the top decile of hospitality brands globally,” he says. “And that’s all just driven by our customer service and responsiveness. That’s the biggest differentiator to what we provide with a lot of competitors.”

Now, as Urban Rest hires more staff and grows its property portfolio, David feels confident in the decisions he’s made to scale the business. Technology has played a key role – and certainly Windows 11 updates in areas like collaboration and security for a remote workforce have proven crucial.

But it also comes down to a willingness to evolve.

“If I think back to where we were a few years ago, we were focused on developing a service and product, as opposed to really thinking about the technology that was behind it and driving it,” he says. “The difference now is… we’re really thinking about the future planning.”

For more, visit urbanrest.com.au.

Discover the latest collaboration, productivity and security benefits of Windows 11 modern devices powered by the Intel vPro platform right here.

This article is brought to you by Kochie’s Business Builders in partnership with Microsoft.

Feature image: David Whelan from Urban Rest Apartments. Credit: Pinstripe Media