Now boasting more than 22,500 holiday homes for rent across the UK and the Republic of Ireland, Sykes Holiday Cottages started life as a single property in Yorkshire, owned by a certain Mrs Sykes, who in the 1970s spotted an opportunity to earn a small income from her second home. She was soon approached by a friend, who asked her to manage the renting out of her cottage too, and then by a second friend, and then more. In 1991, Barbara Sykes and her son Clive founded Sykes Holiday Cottages, swiftly growing the business to manage more than 1,000 holiday homes. In the late 1990s, Clive and his family moved to Chester, and established offices in the city. In 2016, with 5,000 properties, Clive was ready to press the accelerator and grow the business, which, with the appointment of current CEO Graham Donohue, and an infusion of funds from private equity resulted in Sykes Cottages growing dramatically.
'My objective then was to work out how to take it from 5,000 properties and scale up the business. At that time, we had 180 people working in our Chester offices on Lower Bridge Street, which was far too small for our ambitions, which was, essentially, to double the size of the business.’
Graham and the team achieved this growth plan largely through acquisition, purchasing smaller, similar holiday rental businesses around the UK, and moved the whole team to 1 City Place, the very first tenants in the new building close to Chester train station.
‘We were all wandering around when we first moved in here, wondering how we’d ever fill it,’ he says. ‘We have four floors now; by 2019 we had 20,000 properties and 700 employees. We then took further investment and bought a business called Forest Holidays, which offers off-grid holidays in cabins set in Forestry Commission-owned woodlands, such as Delamere. We have built 700 forest cabins, where people can go on holiday and just disconnect. We call it the “forest feeling.” It’s just you, the cabin, a hot tub and trees, stars, owls and otherwise silence.’
As part of the growth, Sykes expanded overseas into New Zealand, where the business is the market leader in holiday cottage rentals – which they call baches, or cribs.
‘We now have more than 30,000 properties in the UK and New Zealand customers can choose for their holidays, and more than 1,900 people working for us, plus thousands of contractors who service and maintain the properties.
‘We take three million people on holiday a year in the UK. Every time I drive along the M6 I wonder how many of my fellow travellers are heading for a Sykes holiday cottage. And of those three million, about 30 per cent are accompanied by a dog.’
Sykes Holiday Cottages has evolved into a vast enterprise, and itself sits under an umbrella company, Forge Holiday Group.
‘Within Forge we have the agency business, which is Sykes, alongside the many different regional brands we acquired, which maintain their local branding and business names, such as Menai Holidays; the New Zealand brand, Bachcare; the forest cabins, Forest Holidays; and UK Caravans for Hire, where people who own static caravans can use the decades of Sykes’ experience to rent them out. There are over 7,000 caravans for hire through this agency, and of course the many thousands of people who rent them out.’
The numbers sound immense, but it’s important to remember that most of these properties are owned by someone just like you or me, who uses it themselves for a few weeks a year, then earns some additional income from it the rest of the time. This is something Graham and his team are all hyper-aware of, demonstrated in part by their decision to pursue B-Corp certification.
‘B Corp is a movement in business all about balancing profit with purpose with people,’ Graham says. ‘There are only 1,700 businesses in the UK that have achieved this to date, and we achieved our own accreditation in 2023.’
B Corp is a certification provided by the non-profit organisation, B Lab. It began in 2006 as a means to help businesses boost their positive influence and impact within their own industry and beyond. B Corp-certified companies aim to use the power of business to solve social and environmental problems, creating an inclusive, fair, and sustainable economy – a force for good, if you will.
‘It’s not just a tick box exercise,’ Graham adds. ‘It took us 18 months of being evaluated on our governance, on our environmental impact, on what we do for the community, our social impact and how we look after our people. This allows us to use B Corp as a bit of a compass, every time we’re doing something we make sure what we decide to do aligns properly to our purpose, and also it means we have to be really transparent and consider the legacy we leave, and that allows us to lean into working with local charities and local communities and making sure all our employees can give back too. We allow them paid time to volunteer and match any funds they raise individually or as teams for the charities we support. Last year, in terms of time given, our people donated more than 4,000 hours, doing everything from packing food bank hampers to walking dogs in rescues to supporting website design and SEO for small, local charities.’
In 2023, after a year of fundraising initiatives, including a Santa Dash, a 98ft abseil down the side of their headquarters, and several marathons, the Sykes colleagues raised more than £26,000 for good causes, including Hospice of the Good Shepherd, Mind, The Wave Project, and more, which the business matched to total £56,000.
One of the causes Sykes supports is Buckley’s Bees, in Nantwich, a tiny organisation on a mission to save the native British honeybee.
‘We sponsor eight hives, and we take the honey to sell and put the money into our fund. I now have my own hives creating honey raising money that goes back to supporting Buckley’s Bees. It’s a virtuous circle – and you learn a heck of a lot about bees.’
It doesn’t stop there, however.
‘We also leverage our position to try to help disadvantaged families go on holiday,’ Graham says. ‘We have a lot of owners who are very happy to give a week or more of their property’s availability to support this cause. We work with a Chester-based charity, set up by a previous owner of ours who has a son with learning difficulties, and they were finding it difficult to find appropriate accommodation. They approached us and said they’d like to start a charity to address this and would like our help in doing it. We’ve only been going for about 12 months, and we took a hundred families away last year.
‘We can show our property owners case studies on families that have gone on holiday they quite frankly simply wouldn’t have been able to afford, but we can make that dream happen – it's amazing to see the joy we can bring and it’s wonderful to see how open and how willing property owners are.
‘The process is quite complex – you've got to make sure the matching between the family and the property owner is done well, but it’s our ambition to scale that to over a thousand families per year as quickly as we possibly can.
‘The greatest challenge is the unpicking of the term ‘accessible’ and what it really means, and auditing the available properties to ensure they are accessible to families who have children with sometimes quite complex special needs.
‘Every time a family goes away, all we ask is a postcard to tell us how it all went. When you read these, you know you’re making a difference.’
sykescottages.co.uk
