Fact: Hospitality is a ‘people’ business. Alternative fact: It’s actually become a real estate business.

Stephen W. Ayers, CEO STAY Ahead Hospitality

The hard fact for me is that I got into the hospitality profession because it is a people business, and the main reason was the ‘staff’ people. In those days the hotels were little communities that cared almost as if the property was their own. They cared about each other like family and covered for each other.

For others the hospitality business as ‘a people business’ is an alternative fact. I would venture to say that the majority of owners are in the business for the real estate and recognize that the people are important only in keeping their investment safe and allow for a return while the value increases sufficiently to sell.

Hotels have been bought and sold and changed hands over many generations, but not as frequently as today. The major brands sold off most of the company owned properties back after the turn of the century when they realized that the profitability lay in managing and not owning.

Of course the unions are there to protect employees, and laws are in place that limits the possibilities of advantage being taken of staff. But payroll is ever on the increase and staff reductions are trending, with the burden of extra work falling on those who stay. In Canada, strict health and safety laws have gone a long way in curtailing work accidents and ‘keeping’ the operators honest.

There is, however, a seismic change appearing over the horizon, and it is coming faster than we think. The largest consumer group in the world today is the Millennial generation, and the same is true for the staff contingent in hotels.

Why a seismic change you ask?

The answer lies in the fact that the Millennials hold radically different values, needs and expectations than any of the generations before them. Owners and operators who do not recognize this and adapt to the new realities do so at their peril. Value of real estate increases with the success of the hotel, and those that adapt in some way or all the way will benefit.

Millennials actually care about a whole raft of things, from the environment, to community involvement, unique experiences and they live to spend. They are looking for true ‘hotelier’ value in their purchase of a stay. They want to see that the hotel cares for their values and is not just another generic hotel where if you close the blinds in your room you could be in a Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn, Hyatt, the list is never ending in its’ boredom.

They seek out places to stay that conserve energy, that are community involved, that off unique and different experiences, and that fulfill their needs. The hotels that care and engage their staff wholeheartedly and treat them fairly and with respect to their diversity will increase the value of the real estate for independent hotels, and ‘hotelier’ owners who are in the business foremost because they love it will reap the benefits of ‘true’ ownership.

Sure, the generic hotels will always be there for the developers of real estate, and will always be frequented by the travelling businessmen looking for a value place to stay, but when on vacations, families of Millennials will always be looking for that ‘pearl’ of a hotel to stay at and spend money in.

Which type of hotel would you rather work in?

Compare HR to a Pizza?

Is that CRAZY?

Stephen W. Ayers, CEO STAY Ahead Hospitality.

Whole Pizzas usually come in eight slices. A healthy and well run Human Resources department has many more ‘slices’ that make up the whole ‘pie’.

The big difference is that you can go into a pizza parlor and buy just one slice, and not the whole pie.

You cannot just buy a ‘slice’ of HR if you want to succeed and thrive in your restaurant or hotel establishment.

The sad fact is that many hotels and large restaurants only have a slice, maybe two, of the whole HR ‘Pizza’. Sure, they want the whole Pizza and to eat it too, but are not willing to invest in the ‘dough’! (Pardon the pun!)

So what do they do? They invest in enough dough to make a slice or two and pretend that it is a whole pizza. It is not.

If you want your HR to be a whole pizza, eat it and still leave it whole, you need to invest in your staff and create a great culture.

It truly amazes me to know that many of the smaller and midsized hotels do not have a person dedicated to taking care of the staff full time. I can hear many disagree with me in my mind. But taking care of your staff by scheduling them, giving them uniforms, going by the law in safety and health, and paying them is only a small slice of the pie. If that is the extent of your Pizzeria, it will not do well!

So what is the recipe for a great HR Pizza?

Firstly you, as the owner or operator have to make the conscious decision to invest. Having done that there are decisions about the culture you want to engender in the property, and a careful strategy and timeline for implementation. You cannot wave a magic wand and ‘presto!’ you have an ideal and well functioning HR department and a great culture in the building.

The program must be well structured and committed to publicly with your whole staff contingent. The plan must be implemented according to the timeline decided upon, and staff trust will be built up over time. If you like, you can look at decisions and implementations as what is called ‘CBM’s’ in world diplomacy, or Confidence Building Measures. Every positive step you take will be noted and appreciated by your people.

While it is a ‘human’ plan, it is also a kind of science to implement it properly. The plan must be well regulated with timelines for events, survey of employee satisfaction to benchmark progress, policies for bonus systems, rewards for long time employees, career advancement, diversity recognition and even down to the staff dining room offerings. It must be adhered to strictly.

Decide and start implementing an encompassing HR plan and you will see the dough rising. You will begin to notice the stress fading among the staff and a new sense of pride in their work and the hotel. Confidence and respect for one another will increase. Your leadership in creating the new culture will not go unrewarded, and you will be amazed at the benefits coming your way.

Staff turnover will decrease substantially, with a statistical saving of $5000 on every new employee training and integration you do not have to undergo.

The guests will soon notice and will reward the hotel with repeat business, increasing the occupancy.

Productivity and efficiency will increase, saving thousands of dollars.

Social media will reflect the popularity of the hotel and you will be able to increase room rates.

When all this happens because you decided to invest in enough ‘dough’ to make a pizza, you will be able to sit back and enjoy ‘eating’ the pizza while it still remains whole. You are taking care of the needs and expectations of your most important asset, your staff.

But do not forget to keep the oven hot and the pizza warm and attended to. It takes time to make a great pizza but only a few moments to destroy it. The same can be said of a great staff culture. Once you have reached a good plateau you need to carry on maintaining and nurturing it, always adding great toppings to make it better!

Stephen Ayers is the co-creator of The Meaningful Seminars designed to assist hotels and restaurants achieve positive culture, meaningful branding and great guest engagement.

Can you afford not to be an innovative leader in all matters of human resources?

Stephen W. Ayers, CEO STAY Ahead Hospitality

The days when staff was just numbers on your payroll lists have long been gone. Finding good staff today is difficult, and once found, keeping them on board is an even more difficult task.

In more rural and outlying areas it is easier to attract and keep loyal employees, but in the cities the matter is a whole lot more complicated. I hear constantly from colleagues that not only can’t they find staff for vacant positions, but that no sooner are they on board and productive that they get ‘poached’ by competitors.

Yet when I ask some of them what their HR department is doing to actively combat the situation, their answer sometimes amazes me. Many just have a ‘designated’ person in charge of hiring, firing and everything in between. The HR duties are just an annoyance for the designated manager who has his or her own department to run.

Need another employee? Stick another wanted ad in the local paper. The candidate looks more or less OK? Hire him and carry on. Need a more senior manager? Call the headhunters. A brief interview, a call to check references and hire the guy. Heck, the ads can be placed in the local papers anytime, they are going nowhere, and neither are the headhunters. 

But the consequences are very real and…….very expensive.

Set aside for a moment the fact that every new employee costs around $5,000 until he or she becomes a fully effective and functioning member of staff. Sure, if ten employees leave and ten are hired every year, that impacts the bottom line by $50,000, and that is just the beginning.

To engage the guests of today and tomorrow in the right way that delivers on their needs and expectations, every hotel needs to first engage their staff and create a culture that takes care of their needs and expectations. Human resources are not just the rules and regulations, the health and safety, the grievance procedures, social benefits and payroll. Sure they are absolutely important, but they are the personnel management side of things, the ‘cold’, legal side. Human resources encompass not only the personnel management but also the ‘engagement’ of your staff, and this is the ‘caring’ part.

The rise of the Millennials to becoming the largest consumer group has altered the map with such a different set of values compared to generations before. They are the majority of your staff and also your guests. This needs a different approach, a more caring hotel culture to ensure increased staff loyalty, longer service and improved results.

Implementing and ensuring a great, caring and successful staff culture needs focused leadership and commitment. In hotels and restaurants of a decent size this means a dedicated HR professional who is passionate and heads up an HR office full time.

In my article The Three Golden Pillars I wrote about the critical importance of Staff as the most important pillar, and property owners and managers who do not recognize this are staring at a bleak future!

Stephen Ayers is the co-creator of The Meaningful Seminars focused on the new meaning of staff culture, hotel branding and meaningful purchases by guests.

What is it about ‘Penny wise and Pound foolish’ that is so attractive to independent hospitality property owners and operators?

Stephen W. Ayers, CEO STAY Ahead Hospitality

‘Penny wise, pound foolish’ has long been of deep interest to me, and something I have tried to avoid throughout my career, ever since working as a cook in Lausanne during my ‘stage’ from the hotel school there. I was lucky, I learned early.

I was working at a small restaurant in Pully in the suburbs. The Executive Chef, in those days known simply as ‘Chef’, was a German with the ‘Maitrise Federale’, the highest certification in Switzerland at the time. I learned so much from him about cooking and how to do it right, but I learned one huge lesson from the owners about how to do things wrong. It was a glaring example of ‘penny wise, pound foolish’, or should I say ‘Centime wise, Franc foolish’?

The restaurant was relatively successful and the food was really good (how could I say otherwise as one of the cooks!). Dinnertime was usually packed and lunchtimes sufficient to carry their weight.

The standout thing about lunch was that every day during the week, and elderly couple came in to have lunch, as they had done for a couple of years before I joined the ‘brigade’. EVERY DAY! Think about that for a minute. They spent many, many hundreds of francs if not thousands during what must have been at least two hundred days worth of lunches at our restaurant. Now that is the definition of returning guests!

One day the husband caught a mistake on the bill, something he had not been satisfied with and requested that five Francs be taken off the total.

“You ordered it and you will pay for it’ was the owners’ answer. The gentleman did not argue too much, kept calm and paid the bill in its entirety.

They then walked out and were never seen again at the restaurant.

Talk about penny wise pound foolish!

Thinking about today, and not only because I offer professional help to hotels, the saying is so much more pertinent than ever before.

Many independent owners and operators of restaurants and hotels are caught between a rock and a hard place. The huge, powerful brands are buying up hotels like never before. The OTA’s are taking more and more rooms at discounted prices and large commissions. Expenses are going up and encroaching on profit lines. Competition is growing with every hotel built, every restaurant opened.

It seems that it is no longer just good enough to keep your place clean and well maintained. It is no longer enough to offer good facilities and reasonable food. Offering more and more ‘value’ for money is not the answer any more. Sitting back and being satisfied by surrendering more rooms to the OTA’s is not the answer either, though it may give that sense of ‘security’ for a short while until the damage is understood.

Today the largest consumer group is the Millennial generation, and their needs and expectations are radically different than those of the generations that came before. They live to spend. They want to see and feel more ‘values’ in their purchase. They want a different experience at the restaurants and hotels they go to. Sure, they want what was on offer to their parents, but they want so much more than that.

So, if restaurants and hotels want to carry on thriving in the future, they need to invest in learning how to adapt to the new reality. Investing can mean investing money in projects to differentiate the property, it can mean a makeover in identity to be able to lower the OTA chunk of business, and it must mean a different staff culture than in days past. The latter two do not entail huge funds, but rather a change of ‘attitude and beliefs’.

I firmly believe that if hotels do not change and adapt to the new needs and expectations of not only the ‘new’ guests but also their own staff, they will be endangering their future as a viable business.

There is great, professional help out there for independents; it is just the will to connect and invest that is lacking. Some of the adapting costs little or nothing, and some can be done with careful, clever planning. If help is offered for free it is suspicious. If help is charged for it is an expense to be saved. Why is that?

There is no shame in sourcing professional, expert help and investing in your staff! It could make the difference.

So I ask: Is it wise to be ‘A few thousand dollars wise, your future foolish’?

Stephen W. Ayers is the founder of STAY Ahead Hospitality, and one of the creators of ‘The meaningful seminar series’.  

Are good service and brand standards enough for today and tomorrow’s hotel and restaurant guests?

Stephen W. Ayers, CEO STAY Ahead Hospitality

It is of course critical to the success of the hotel or restaurant to provide a smooth flow of good service from arrival to check out. Also critical is a sense of good maintenance, cleanliness and interior, facilities and value.

So many managers across the globe strive to deliver those qualities regardless of the restaurant or hotel standard, whether two to five star establishments. I have had many perfect experiences in almost all the categories. I have had great food in small independent hotels and terrible food at five star places.

I am convinced that there are countless restaurants and hotels of all sizes and categories that deliver a good experience to their patrons, and make sure to tick all the boxes in the first paragraph.

BUT, and a big BUT, is that enough to carry them into the future with thriving success and a great bottom line?

My answer is an emphatic NO!

Think about this for a moment. How many generic hotels are there out there that are generally of the same size, standard, and facilities where virtually the only identifying feature is the sign at the top? Turn on the lights and close the curtains and you could be in any of the brand hotels. Even worse, many of the independent hotels try and copy the generics and some succeed, but for how long?

These attributes were sufficient for the fading generations who generally looked no further than for good value,  a clean warm bed in a well maintained hotel where the service was good and the food of a sufficient standard.

Not so the Millennials who are already the largest consumer segment. They do of course look for all the prior aspects mentioned to be perfect, but they expect a lot more when searching for a place to stay. Of course they look for good value, but they also look for ‘boxes’ that they can tick off that answer the values and needs that they hold dear and expect from the hotels and restaurants they patronize.

They are the first ‘caring’ generation. It’s a fact. They care about the environment, involvement in community, supporting good causes and unique, different experiences. They earn money to spend it, and live to experience the world.

So, whether you are a brand hotel or, more importantly, an independent establishment, it is time for a reset. It is time to differentiate your property from the crowd, time to deliver what the guests of today and tomorrow are looking for.

For more information on how to ‘reset’ your establishment and read about the benefits of ‘The Meaningful Seminars’ please go to:

http://www.stayaheadhospitality.com/the-meaningful-seminars

Please contact us at STAY for further information about the seminars; we will be delighted to hear from you!

Staff, ALWAYS a worthwhile investment!

Staff, ALWAYS a worthwhile investment!

Stephen W. Ayers, CEO, STAY Ahead Hospitality

I was first promoted to general manager at the age of thirty three and was privileged to work in an expanding new brand that in which I had helped open the first hotel as EAM and Food and beverage Manager. It boasted four hundred and twenty rooms and countless restaurants and bars. Opening the hotel was exhaustive but hugely rewarding in lessons learned on the job.

Fortunately our managing director believed in investing in our knowledge base and scheduled many very informative and interesting seminars and lectures for the leaders in each of the hotels. Sometimes we even had to ask him to cut down on the number of seminars so we had time to run our hotels!!  Investing in the ‘line’ staff was also a priority and I believe that it was a huge part in both establishing the brand and also in the success and expansion of the chain up until today.

As the industry has evolved since those days, and the importance of cost savings has increased, the tendency to lower the training budget has also increased. But the question persists: Does investing in staff mean money lost or is there a palpable payback?

I believe that the days of working as few staff as possible as hard as possible are over. The rise of the millennial generation as the largest consumer group heralds a new era in the whole subject of guest engagement, staff culture and hotel identity and values.

The past generations have had similar needs and expectations from hotels and restaurants that they visited and stayed at, but the new generation is very different in their outlook and actions.

Just a clean, well maintained and friendly atmosphere no longer ‘cuts the cake’, and neither does an HR policy that does not recognize the needs of our diverse staff in the modern industry.

The values, needs and expectations of the ‘new guests’ necessitates changes in hotel culture and direction if continued success if desired. New strategies are required for a successful guest engagement that includes subjects that may be new to some hotels. Successful and renewed staff engagement is a prerequisite to successful guest engagement, and we all know that well worn saying that ‘happy staff makes for happy guests’. This is much more important and critical today than ever before to the well being of the property and in the end, its profits.

The search for increasing profits lies through a careful strategies in staff engagement, guest engagement, property differentiation from the generic competition and in the hotel values and culture.

Adapting to the new realities can bring huge benefits in increased revenues, cost savings and an efficient operation, while ignoring them can lead to disaster.

Please visit The Meaningful Seminars for more information on staff seminars.