If you're a GM, don't be offended. This applies to you too :) Today, in less than 10 minutes, we're going to cover: 1. Mindshift from Covid to Post Covid. 2. A challenge to evaluate the executive team at your hotel.
The famous philosophy, hire the right person and get out of their way. Although accurate in some respects, we sometimes need to ask ourselves, do we want to bank our 15, 25, 35+ million dollar asset on one person's knowledge? Hospitality is a grind for owners and employees alike, in recent years, this is an understatement. If you treat your asset like a passive investment, you're probably doing it wrong. For many of us, these past couple of years have pushed us to the brink. This makes us wonder: Is the hospitality business right for me? Do I need to diversify? Can I afford to diversify? Do I have the energy to sustain this anymore? Within the industry, this has forced us to double down on our efforts. Getting even more involved from the top down ensures our properties run sustainably. This goes from owners, to off-site management positions to leadership at the property. Everyone took a step down as a matter of survival. Oversight positions took a cut and we relied on our individual hotel veterans to weather the storm, but what's next? Owners and management teams must to ask themselves if they still have the knowledge capital in their organizations to run their hotels in normal market conditions. Have we lost people to other industries? Are people coming back? Are we going to pay to bring back top talent? Is our oversight spread too thin? Do we even have oversight? Wait, am I the one overseeing?
So what am I getting at? Our on site executive positions are not set it and forget it jobs. It gets lonely at the top and these individuals need coaching and guidance. If we do not have people engaging our on site executives who absolutely know what they are doing, we will sacrifice profitability. These last few years hotels have run on survival instincts, but this is going to change. The time is coming again for teams to have structure, support and the knowledge they need to grow their asset, not ensure it doesn't go bankrupt. It's a different mentality and there needs to be a shift. I believe it is time to start cautiously investing in our operations again instead of counting our savings. As operators we can be guilty of penny pinching, but we have to start looking for ways to improve our hotels during the turnaround and it starts with reinvesting in our top talent. It might increase a line item on our income statements, but it's going to increase the top one by a lot more. Just remember, many of our property managers have gone years without a pay raise, some may have actually taken a decrease. They did this to work more hours than they ever have before, leading to less time to invest in themselves. We may have sacrificed for our business over the past few years, but they sacrificed for YOUR businesses. It's lonely at the top, we cannot let our on property executive positions fend for themselves, they may not be there for much longer.