Capitalizing on your niche can be the key to moving your business forward—just ask April Brown and Sarah Sklash, founders of The June Motel in Prince Edward County. What started as a side hustle between best friends has now turned into a Netflix sensation and multi-property endeavor. 

On this episode of the REAL TIME podcast, April and Sarah share how honing in on their unique offering is what really made The June Motel into what it is today. Plus, hear their take on why focusing on a niche audience can actually make things easier when it comes to marketing your business. 

Transcript

Shaun Majumder: You feel that leaning into that niche market has really paid off?

April Brown: We were sold out that first summer. We were featured in Vogue. It was a wild ride that first year.

Sarah Sklash: It's bad when you need a sign, which meant people were gutting fish in it.

Shaun: There's a real magic that comes with honing in on what makes you stand out. Not many people know that better than April Brown and Sarah Sklash, the two best friends behind the iconic June Motels, and Netflix's renovation show Motel Makeover. April and Sarah joined me today to talk about their journey to finding June, who may or may not be a real person, and how embracing uniqueness really helped them find their niche and help to create the successful business they have today. Wow. April, Sarah, this is so exciting. Thank you so much for joining me today. How are you doing?

April: Good.

Sarah: Yes.

Shaun: Love it.

Sarah: Happy to be here.

Shaun: I love it. Listen, this story is so inspirational, it's amazing. I want to start at the beginning. I can only assume that obviously you two went to some mountain town in Switzerland and trained to be world-class hoteliers before you started on this journey. Is that correct? Is that a fact-based assumption?

April: Honestly could not be further from the truth. 

Shaun: Let's start at the very beginning. How did The June Motel come to be?

April: Sarah and I, we've been friends for 20 years now, maybe a little bit more than 20 years. It was 2016 and we were both working separate 9:00 to 5:00 jobs in Toronto. I was working for a PRM marketing agency, Sarah was working for the Ontario government, and we both really dreamed of doing something different with our lives and our career. We were looking for something that would bring a bit more meaning and purpose to our lives at that point. We got together one day. It was the beginning of the year. We cracked open a bottle of wine. We're like, "This is the year we're going to make some changes." We probably brainstormed 50 different side hustles, honestly.

They weren't even like, "We're going to quit our job and become a motelier." At this point, we were like, "We're just looking for a weekend thing." There's this little area outside of Toronto that's called Prince Edward County. It's an up-and-coming, or at the moment, at the time in 2016, it was an up-and-coming region with wineries and breweries, cool restaurants. We had been going out there with our girlfriends, drinking wine, seeing it evolve, seeing the opportunity, and we were like, "Oh, wouldn't it be cool to do something out there?" Actually, one of the ideas that we had come up with in that brainstorm was this idea of hosting a weekend wine camp for adults.

Shaun: Camp. Oh, I like that idea. You guys would be the head counselors.

Sarah: Of course.

April: Of course. Drinking all the wine.

Shaun: Right.

April: We were just looking for a place to host it. Sarah knew that there was this motel that was for sale outside of Picton, and said, "Oh, maybe we would take over for the weekend, and make it cute, and host everybody there." We start thinking through this idea. It was honestly minutes into this brainstorm that we looked at each other and we were both like, "We should just buy that motel."

Shaun: Wow. When that light bulb goes off, I assume at that point, you're probably two or three bottles deep?

April: At least a bottle. Let's assume at least a bottle.

Shaun: Just to get to say, "We should buy that instead of just going and hosting a girl's weekend," that's a huge leap. That's epic, but why not? That sounds exactly in line with your personalities and what you were feeling at that time. That's a huge leap.

April: It was a massive leap. I want to say we had that conversation in January, and a couple of months later, we're literally putting an offer in on this motel. Couple of months after that, we are quitting our jobs, packing our bags, moving to this town of 4,000 people, and actually living at the motel.

Shaun: Wow. Do you remember what the name of the motel was before it became The June Motel?

April: Yes. It was called the Sportsmen Motel and it was a popular stay for fishermen and hunters. To paint the picture, it was musty blue carpets, those old floral quilts on the bed, and the only art in the room is this laminated sign that says no gutting fish in room.

Shaun: I think that's a quality rule. I think you should not gut fish.

Shaun: I live by that in my house.

April: Me too.

Sarah: It's bad when you need a sign, which meant people were gutting fish in it.

Shaun: Yes. Right. "Frank, I've told you, every season we've talked about this. You've ruined the table every year now, please. You know what, Helen? Let's get a sign. Let's paint a sign, put it in each room." Wow.

April: Exactly.

Shaun: How much of it did you just look at online and fall in love with at first? How much of it was going there to see it? At what point did you say, "This has got to be the property that we have to purchase?"

April: I think we went there with some conviction that this was going to be it. I think we joke when we look back on it now we saw past a lot of things. The floors were sloped, the place was extremely run down, but we had such a strong vision at that point that we showed up and we were like, "This could be amazing. This is it. We need to do this." I think it was that vision and that conviction that we had for the idea that I think just propelled us to see past the sloped floors and the imperfections of this place, and see past what it was and see what it could be.

Shaun: Take me through the idea because if you're sitting there, you obviously have gone through a big list of side hustles, and then you honed in on this idea. Was this an inspired idea from that conversation and you just worked it out as you were having these brainstorming sessions, or was it something that was always in your back pocket and you thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if we could find something to do?" What was the idea, per se, Sarah? What were you guys honing in on?

Sarah: I think we knew Prince Edward County was a place that we knew people were going to want to be. I had purchased a cottage out there, I think, two years before we started looking at this place. There was more and more talk of Prince Edward County, and yet there weren't that many places to stay. The Drake Devonshire was opening up around the same time, but they were only 10 rooms. The other options were dingy roadside motels or old-school B&Bs.

We saw that there was this motel and we thought, "It can be a blank slate. It can be whatever we really want it to be." Really put ourselves in our own shoes and the shoes of our friends and said, "If we were going out to wine country for the weekend, what is it that we would want to have?" Kept going back to that as we thought, "How do we take this dingy roadside motel and make it into a it destination for people to travel to?"

Shaun: Now all of a sudden, as you're going through this process, you have to think, what is that it in the it destination? It sounds like you were using your own wants and desires to be the guiding force, correct?

Sarah: Yes. We like to call ourselves moteliers. We weren't the first moteliers, but I think we were the first in Canada. We were looking people were doing this in Miami and Texas. We were finding some good inspiration out there. We knew others had been able to take these dingy roadside motels and turn them into something cool. I think the other thing was back to April and I having no experience in hospitality before this, it really gave us fresh eyes as we looked at the entire experience and so went step by step.

One example of that is hotel check-in processes. Everywhere you go, some are starting to get better, but overall, they suck. They're slow. They're boring. They're often impersonal and they take a weird amount of time. This is back in 2016 and we're like, "You know what would make this better?" The very first thing that we did was do is like, "Hey, are you checking in? Would you like a glass of welcome rosé?"

Right away, that makes the checking process significantly more fun and sticks out, and gives us a chance to really warmly welcome guests to The June. That was just one example, but we kept going piece after piece of this experience and what we could do to make it not just a place to stay, but be an experience and a home base for people when they're traveling in wine country.

Shaun: That is that feeling when you