Transcript: Episode 169: Breathtaking Beauty

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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 169. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/169. 

[00:00:14] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast right up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.

[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Peter Follows is the founder of Carpedia, a consultancy he started over 30 years ago to bridge the gap between strategy and implementation. His firm is known for helping businesses improve operational efficiency with a strong focus on allying processes, management systems, and people. While Carpedia started in industrial sectors, it began to serve service and hospitality companies after an initial engagement with the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company in the early 2000s. Peter has also authored a book featuring lessons and stories from his extensive career in consulting called Results, Not Reports. Today, we are going to talk about execution focused consulting, labor challenges in hospitality, and redefining operational efficiency for the modern hotel industry among others. But before we jump in, we need to answer the call button. 

Call button rings 

[00:01:49] Susan Barry: The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals who have burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at 850-404-9630. Today's question comes from Richard. And, Richard's question is interesting because it's not exactly hospitality specific, but I'm curious about what your answer is going to be. Here's what Richard has to say: What is the hiring process like for consulting firms? And I think he's referring to a client engaging a consulting firm versus like you hiring somebody to work at your company. So he says if the company could articulate their problem, they probably wouldn't need help solving it. So how does that work when they're going out to find help? Does that question make sense? Do you understand what he's asking here? 

[00:02:35] Peter Follows: I think so. Thanks for having me on by the way, too. 

[00:02:39] Susan Barry: My pleasure. 

[00:02:40] Peter Follows: Lot of the times I think companies have a pretty good idea of where they're trying to go. That's a sort of a consistent pattern we've seen over the years. And they try a lot of different things to get there whether it's internal or external. So I think when they get to the point of looking for external help, they've exhausted some of the avenues internally to get to wherever they're going to go. And then it's a question of what is available out there. 

[00:03:10] Susan Barry: Tell us about what led you to found Carpedia more than three decades ago. 

[00:03:17] Peter Follows: It was by accident in many ways. I went into consulting right out of school and I was — I did it to try to find a job. It wasn't meant to be a 30 year journey or thirty four year now. So when I got into consulting, I literally thought it was a fascinating place to work. That took a while for me to understand that there's an awful lot of knowledge and wisdom within companies, it's just that they don't tap into it all that well. They have a lot of the knowledge. They just, they need support and resources to get to that next level. And it's a messy coordination what we do, because you have different levels of management, you have different areas or functional departments that have to work together and sometimes it's very hard for an individual manager to coordinate those pieces of the puzzle. There's a lot of advantages of being an external influence, and particularly because companies pass money, it puts a heightened emphasis on actually getting things through and completed. So there are some advantages from our perspective.

[00:04:32] Susan Barry: Let's talk a little bit more about that implementation side because, I'm a consultant myself and I always feel a little bit hamstrung when I'm making recommendations that I won't be around to observe the implementation of, but I also feel If they can't implement program, then why did they pay for me to give them some suggestions? I don't know. It's a sort of a catch 22 in some ways, but I know that you really pivoted from focusing on pure strategy to incorporating implementation. So will you talk about that a little bit? Like how do you make sure that the strategic direction gets implemented? How do you not get too involved in the messy details, but at the same time track what's happening?

[00:05:27] Peter Follows: Okay. And it goes back a little bit to your previous question, too. So I worked for an implementation consulting company out of school for a number of years, and I left and worked for a company called Canadian Pacific. Which at the time was a big conglomerate. The history of it was a railroad in Canada, that when the country was formed in the 1800s, they put this railway together and then they diversified into a bunch of industries along the railroad, so including hotels. So they have some beautiful hotels along that railroad, which now have become Fairmont properties. But they also had trucking, they had shipping, they had airplanes, they had telecommunications — pretty much anything you could put along the sides of a railroad.

So when I worked with them I moved away more to the consulting where you were advising. So I had a number of years experience where you were, you're providing advice, but the heavy lifting was really left to the management. To some degree, it became an exercise in the PowerPoint slides and the sort of the brilliance of the advice, as opposed to the practical reality of somebody trying to implement that stuff. So when I left that, I left it because it was at a time when conglomerates were, they went out of favor. So they were starting to jettison their different business components. And I didn't want to just be a railroad consultant.

So I left and set up Carpedia, and Carpedia originally was designed as both strategy and execution. When we went to the marketplace, it went back to a little bit of what I said before. A lot of times the executives had a good idea of where they were going to go. They just, they couldn't get there. And they try a number of things. And to some degree, we were a sort of an option of last resort, bringing these guys. And we became a bit of a SWAT team to help the executives achieve that next level of performance. And there is a fundamental difference in the way you think as a consultant, whether you are doing it to provide advice or whether you're doing it to implement. And I think the biggest single difference is the implementation requires involvement of the people in the organization. The strategic advice doesn't so much. 

[00:07:56] Susan Barry: But don’t you think you're sometimes giving advice that the people in the organization don't want to hear? If they were willing to do the thing that you're telling them to do, it would have already been done, no? Or is it more a matter of just not being able to see the forest for the trees kind of? 

[00:08:12] Peter Follows: I don't know. Cause there's lots of jokes about the consultants telling your, taking your watch, telling your time, all that kind of stuff. But what I've actually found over the years is that there are a lot of good ideas within companies. And some of them they've tried, they try a lot of things. It's hard to actually implement because implementation requires that coordination of multiple functions often to really make a meaningful difference. So a lot of times we will get good ideas within the organization. What we're able to do — I could argue that there's almost too many good ideas and a lot of companies and we're able to sift through those ideas and narrow them down into the practical ones that you can actually do something about. And then, like I said before, we have that advantage where we can work across functions to coordinate the resources to actually put them in place. 

[00:09:03] Susan Barry: So Canadian Pacific was probably your first brush with hospitality with their iconic and amazing hotels, but your company, Carpedia, first got involved in the hospitality industry with Ritz Carlton. Can you tell us how that happened? 

[00:09:22] Peter Follows: Yes, that was a bit of a mistake, too. So we were doing cold calling because early in the company's history, we didn't have a big enough network to sell our services. We were literally on the phones every day trying to get somebody's attention. And one of our salespeople Horst Schulze. To this day, I'm not quite sure how, but she did. And he passed her off to a gentleman who at the time was the Head of Quality, who unfortunately has passed away, but he took the call, but he took it and called in our sales rep mostly out of anger. The Ritz had just won, they'd won the Malcolm Baldrige for the second time, so they were all riding fairly high and he brought her in mostly to dress her down.  

[00:10:12] Susan Barry: How dare you call? 

[00:10:13] Peter Follows: Yeah. What audacity, so I happened to be in my office at the time and I got a phone call from, my sales rep who was almost in tears. And I had to take this call and explain what, who we were, and what we were doing. Now, fortunately I had a lot of experience in quality. And Pat was, Pat Meen was the gentleman, he was a bit of an academic and he was very interested in the sort of the science of business. And my experience in quality was that there was often a disconnect between what the quality people thought and said and wrote about in their, their procedure manuals and what the operating people thought and did in the real world. So we had this discussion and it centered on the fact that we had done a lot of work with a large aerospace company who were doing a rolling out lean manufacturing, which at the time was called the Toyota production system. It morphed into lean over the years. And Pat was fascinated on whether that could be applied to the hospitality world. So we were invited in almost precisely because we weren't hotel consulting. I remember I, I honestly, I thought you had a, their executive boardroom, you had some very high level hoteliers who really did not want to be given advice on how to run a hotel from —

[00:11:44] Susan Barry: An aerospace guy? Yeah, I'm sure!

[00:11:48] Peter Follows: Yeah. I think that intrigued them a little bit because you weren't trying to tell them how to run a hotel. You were trying to bring some knowledge from another industry. And lean manufacturing had It was just in its infancy of starting to gravitate or move towards the service sector. And Pat was fascinated by the concepts and how it could be applied and that led to, many years of work with the organization.

[00:12:11] Susan Barry: So what happened to your salesperson? Did she quit? Did she get an apology or did she just brush it off and take the commission? 

[00:12:19] Peter Follows: And she brushed it off, took the commission.

[00:12:21] Susan Barry: Excellent. I'm glad to hear it. How about navigating what are often competing priorities between hotel owners and hotel brands? Have you encountered that type of conflict in your work? And if so, what did you do? 

[00:12:40] Peter Follows: Yeah. Funny enough that it's initially we didn't think the hotel industry was particularly good for consulting precisely because of that sort of. But I'm not sure there's so much competing priorities. I think they have similar priorities. They have different incentives and different perspectives on those priorities. So both of them are trying to, prove guest satisfaction, grow revenue, reduce costs — they’re aligned in the priorities, maybe not in the timing of the priorities — that's tricky. Sometimes the owners want to see results faster than the brands either want to deliver or can deliver.

But it's a tricky one to navigate from a third party like us, because the brands don't want the owners telling them what to do. And the owners want some control in terms of their, the returns that they're getting from their properties. And I think that it is, it's trying to figure out how best to satisfy both requirements and both incentives. The way the brands are “incented” doesn't always align to a consulting company coming in and helping them to reduce cost. Because who pays the bill for the consulting company is actually a good question.

[00:14:01] Susan Barry: So that was going to be my follow up question. Are you more likely to be hired by a brand, an ownership group, or an operator, a third party management company? 

[00:14:12] Peter Follows: It's usually owner operators. Our initial sort of ventures into it, I mentioned, the Ritz Carlton, the first project we did, it was a very successful project, but it ran into problems when the GM of the property wanted to expand the scope of the project. And this issue of who's going to pay the bill came up because a large percentage of the potential improvement was going to go to the owners, but they didn't want to involve the owners in the decision changed. We were invited back and by the Ritz a few years later at that time, they had been taken over by Marriott had gone through a bit of a transition. And they took a different approach, which was more of a, almost to spread the cost over a number of properties and do a rollout type of program. So it was a little bit of a different focus and that was more function-specific. So food and beverage, you'd look at different aspects of the operations. But I didn't think it was as effective simply because you didn't have this inter-functional interdepartmental coordination is actually a very big thing for a lot of properties. And that tended to be a little bit siloed, so you didn't necessarily have all the attention of the management. So and then we worked, we did a lot of work with Hilton when this was before the LBO with Blackstone, but that was primarily owned property. So Hilton owned and ran their property. So the decision to, and the improvement was all, it made logical sense because the, not only the cost of the benefit was captured the same.

[00:15:54] Susan Barry: Going to the same person? Yeah. 

[00:15:57] Peter Follows: And, but from that day forward, it, there's been more of a shift for sure to the owner side of the business. So management companies and brands, to some degree they're more competitors to us.  

[00:16:10] Susan Barry: Oh that’s interesting.

[00:16:12] Peter Follows: Because they are— Right? There really are consultants that are working for these owners. 

[00:16:17] Susan Barry: Yeah. 

[00:16:18] Peter Follows: And there is a bit of a conflict. So in those cases, it depends sometimes on The scale and scope of the owner and how much influence they have.

[00:16:28] Susan Barry: Every time an ownership group has hired me to consult on their hotel properties, I have not been a popular character for the management companies or brands. So it's a good point that it's a competitive relationship. I didn't think about it that way. What about unexpected outcomes? Can you share something, one of the most unexpected outcomes of a project, maybe one that demonstrates why your focus on implementation is so valuable?

[00:17:00] Peter Follows: I'll use one for the hotel world. It is, I think one of the things that you find out is that the, it's much easier to plan improvement than it is to actually create improvement or to capture and particularly sustain improvement. And sometimes it's not always what the logic dictates. And there was one example, which happens to be hotel-specific. And we have lots of these, by the way, in lots of different industries, but this particular one was, it was a relatively simple, logical fix to a problem, which was the resourcing in a stewarding department was heavy in the morning. And it, logical and just in the sense of the pattern of work and the flow of work and when people were eating breakfast and when things needed to be cleaned and so on.

So the simple solution was simply to stagger shifts. So from a consulting point of view, it made sense — staggered shifts. And on paper it seemed to make a lot of sense in terms of why that could better match the demand of their work versus the resources they had. The problem when we tried to implement it was that the workforce came from a local community, which had limited transportation options. So they all came in at the same time in the morning, and so it wasn't a question of the staggering of the shift. It was the staggering of their transportation to and from the property. 

[00:18:38] Susan Barry: I thought you were going to say somebody had to drop their kids off at school so they couldn't make their staggered start time. But same thing. It's all those practical concerns outside of work that are influencing the ability for that to work. So how did it play out? 

[00:18:54] Peter Follows: It reduced the ability of that organization to stagger start times because there was a practical limit. They did need to bring them on site. And it seemed unfair to have them sit around without getting paid. So it modified and we looked for other parts of that operation that could provide. It was a similar thing, by the way, in Philadelphia we did a project that a beautiful property that was it used to be a bank and, but the problem was all the housekeepers, accumulated at the the lifts in the morning at the same time. So you had this sort of lost time and again, staggering would have been a more effective tool. But in that case, it was a resource constraint in terms of just, they had converted this beautiful property into a hotel and it wasn't designed to be a hotel. So… 

[00:19:52] Susan Barry: So they didn't have enough elevators?

[00:19:55] Peter Follows: Simply not enough elevators.

[00:19:56] Susan Barry: Wow. That is so interesting. That's the type of thing that when those pieces are ignored, that's where people are like, “Consultants charge me to take my watch and tell my time” because it's missing the whole on the ground intelligence that you need to know if something's gonna work or not. So it's very interesting to hear how sort of the implementation part made it such that you were able to get a real answer that was practical and useful for those projects instead of pie in the sky or whatever.

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[00:21:38] Susan Barry: Peter, we like to make sure that our listeners come away from every single episode of Top Floor with some really specific and tangible tips or ideas to try at home in their businesses, et cetera. How do you think smaller hotels or independent operators can adopt operational best practices from larger brands? How can they and should they? 

[00:22:04] Peter Follows: I think the advantage of the larger brands is their scale. They have resources and they have scale that's tough to match when you're a smaller operation or an independent operation. However, saying that, the fundamentals I think are similar, what they do really is they try to figure out what is most important to their customer set and they're ruthless on the things that are less important and very focused on the things that are important to them. So I think that's true with small operations are small hotels or independent operators, that the understanding why people actually choose them as a location to go to and being really good, to manage that differentiation I think is vital. There's also group purchasing organizations to try to get some leverage.

But I think it goes back to focusing on those things that customers think are really important. And, the simplest thing I would suggest is if the managers can take some time and spend time in the shoes of their employees, it's very enlightening what they experience through the course of a day. And that's what we do when we work with these big brands. A lot of the times the performance measures are a little misleading because the standards that are put in place to determine what resources you need or what labor you need are artificially inflated because they're based on past performance or they have some of these operating problems built into them, so it doesn't always guide you to where the problems are.

So what we do with them is we actually spend time literally walking around with a housekeeper or spend time at the front desk and simply observe where there are breakdowns in the process. And it could be lack of information, it could be waiting, it could be the transfer of equipment, it could be lack of equipment, it could be lack of — whatever it is. Inappropriate matching of the customer service needs with the personnel that you have available. So observing that in real time is very powerful. And that's something that the smaller companies can do, independent operators can do. The trouble is it's hard to get managers to do it because they're very busy and it's hard to get them to take the time to live a day in the life of their employees, but that I would suggest is a very good place to start. 

[00:24:43] Susan Barry: Excellent tip. I think something that— I do have to be empathetic to the plight of managers, particularly in smaller organizations because they are asked to do now probably what two or three people 15 years ago were doing. So there's definitely some push and pull, but I agree with you. You have to, you can learn so much by walking around, right? 

[00:25:07] Peter Follows: I think to some degree, by the way, that was that was exacerbated by the pandemic, right? You had a collapse of the management ranks and you had a lack of people and I think they got inundated with activities and work. And I'm not sure that's, it may never go away. There's, there was some leverage advantages that were captured at that time that, may not help. 

[00:25:30] Susan Barry: It's true! It's just like the .com bubble burst or whatever, and the sort of 2001 September 11th travel recession — all that whole period of time all of a sudden administrative assistants, coordinators, like the people who were lower barrier to entry lower Hourly wage were completely wiped out of every hospitality institution. And so now there are people who make $250 an hour making photocopies or doing like some stuff that could absolutely be taken care of by a lower wage earner. But those positions have never come back except for they're starting to sneak back in and being called analysts. What do you think? 

[00:26:20] Peter Follows: I think that's true. I think that's true across quite a few industries. Actually, when you had the shift from people working from home, one of the things that unfortunately highlighted is that a lot of things could be done without, needing to be in the office. And, some of those tasks did get removed or placed back on executives. And it is, it's a good question because I think that when, if you look at the distribution of work, it doesn't always make sense to have high paid employees doing some of these activities. 

[00:26:53] Susan Barry: It's wild to me. It's wild to me too, because I feel like there's some sense of morality wrapped up in it. Are you too good to make your own copies? No, dude, but you're paying me too much to make copies. That's the difference. Anyway, I could talk about this for hours, but let me move on. You explain a three part improvement cycle in your book, Results, Not Reports. Can you talk about that and tell us what that is?

[00:27:19] Peter Follows: Yes. So it's three, it's the basic parts of a project, really any project. So the front end is, it's trying to give some guidance as to where to look for improvement. And typically most organizations, they're looking at revenue cost and capital as their primary drivers of the profitability of that business. The first aspect of the project is to try to narrow in, you can't fix up everything. And logically you shouldn't. So to try to narrow in on what you're actually trying to achieve. And there is a switch between the sort of the financial objective to the operational objectives. You might say you want to target material costs or labor costs in hotels, you might want to target either of those.

The initial one is to just try to zero in on what actually are you trying to influence to change the financial outcomes? And they're obviously different for revenue cost or capital. So that's the front end of the analysis and the effectively what you're trying to do is baseline the operation. And that's not always simple either, by the way, as you can imagine. What you're doing there is you're just trying to establish what is the current performance on those key drivers of profitability and then where should it be? What is the potential improvement game? But to try to establish where you are is a little tricky because, pandemic was no good. It wasn't that easy to just shoot back to 2019 either, because the hospitality world has changed quite a lot in terms of rates, terms of everything. But that's the front end is trying to establish where you're trying to focus? And you're trying to get down to the operating drivers level. The second part is once you have that basic direction is what can you actually do to influence it? And that's when you go back to those three elements that I mentioned before if it's, if we're talking about labor productivity or efficiency, it's, you really have to get down to where are the bigger buckets of labor in the operation and look at it from those three perspectives.

[00:29:31] Susan Barry: I just want to ask a question about when we talk about the bigger buckets of labor, maybe be a little bit controversial on this one. I have a theory that the greatest change and labor savings may not necessarily come from the housekeeping department, even though that's the biggest bucket of labor in a hotel, right? I think that we've got an opportunity for AI and machine learning to compress those higher barrier to entry positions like revenue strategy, sales manager, et cetera, who spend a tremendous amount of time doing manual work that they don't admit to FYI, by the way. And that actually might be a better place to look for labor savings than the people who already don't make enough to live in a day to day life. What do you think? Am I off the base here? 

[00:30:32] Peter Follows: No, we actually had a similar kind of thesis because — and again, coming out of the pandemic changed a lot of things and the excess labor was less available. It was hard to hire people. It was hard, to develop them. The managers are now doing tasks that could be, should be done probably by the employees, that kind of thing. So we went down the same road that it's really the SG&A that starts to come into focus if you're trying to find compressible efficiencies or capture efficiencies. And there is a logic that says with, one of the gains of technology should be a reduction in the manipulation or movement of information. It's really supposed to do that for you.

There are some troubles with that though, too. It's AI for all its advantages. We're still quite a long way from it properly capturing all the source data that you need and the source data is often flawed. So there's quite a big exercise in cleaning up the data to get to that platform where some of the things you're talking about are achievable through technology. Yeah, now you could argue whether they're, there are, there's a sort of a continuum and there's some compressible or available opportunity that has nothing to do with that technology. It just has to do with better management or better use of the information that you have. So I think it's a good point. I don't know yet if, that will prove to be true. 

[00:32:15] Susan Barry: We should do a Top Floor Carpedia research project on this subject and see if we can prove it out. I cut you off before you said the third part of the improvement cycle. So I want to make sure I get to go back to that.

[00:32:28] Peter Follows: People, yeah. Probably the most important part. So on the people side, the, like one of the fascinating things is that the, a lot of the times efficiency is targeted at people. People should be more productive and so on. But in reality, the two other elements that I mentioned have an awful lot to do with it. So how you set up the process, so what activities people have to do and how you manage those processes has a big influence on the productivity of individuals. And when we look at them, we very rarely see people being unproductive by intention. They're often unproductive by the design of the system.

And this is across industries, by the way. So we look, we work in healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, logistics, and it's a very similar kind of picture where people come to work and they they have every intention. They want to be productive. There's, we spent so many hours watching and observing people. It's not that they intend to be unproductive. It's that obstacles get in the way to the course of the day. So whether that's lack of information, some of the things I mentioned earlier, coordination of resources, availability of supply, whatever it might be — things occur, which causes them to do workarounds that unproductive time is built into the system. And again, cross industries, people operate roughly between 50, 60% productive. So if you look at the time of full time of a day, there's 40 or 50 percent of the time and it's not that they're not working. They're actually working very hard. It's that they're, it's doing things that it's like rework, duplication, making copies, waiting. So it's non productive work. And that's what you really have to try to fix and capture. And you can't capture all of it, but you can get rid of some of it by rethinking the way you schedule the operations, and manage the operations and also rethinking the process of what people actually do.

[00:34:47] Susan Barry: Let's look ahead into the future. What is next for you? And what's next for your company? 

[00:34:53] Peter Follows: We're fascinated by what you mentioned, by the way, the sort of the potential of something like AI to to have an impact on operational excellence. And it's a little bit what I said before. If you can envision it, you would like this, this data hub or this information platform that captures all the little pieces of information that come from all over in this case, a hotel operation. And that could be everything from, guest requirements from, weather forecast to, cover predictions to maintenance issues. All sorts of things could feed into a central repository of information that can give you realistic guidelines in real time in terms of where to allocate your resources. It's a little pie in the sky, but it's —

[00:35:47] Susan Barry: I don't think so. I think it's probably very doable. And again, I would like co authorship on anything that you produce moving forward. Thank you very much.

[00:35:57] Peter Follows: I'll give it to you.

[00:35:58] Susan Barry: Okay, folks, before we tell Peter goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all the best stories get told.

Elevator voice announces, “Going down.” 

[00:36:12] Susan Barry: Peter, what is a story you would only tell on the loading dock? 

[00:36:16] Peter Follows: I thought I'd keep this in the the hotel framework. 

[00:36:19] Susan Barry: That's where the best stories come from. 

[00:36:21] Peter Follows: I don't know if this was the best story for me, but it didn't exactly highlight my powers of observation. We were actually doing a project, it was down on South Beach at a beautiful property. And we were up, I was with a colleague of mine, we were up on the top floor. I think at the time it was something to do with the restaurant up there. Can't remember exactly. Anyway, we jumped on the elevator and we were coming down to the lobby and somewhere, I think, roughly halfway through, about the 10th floor or something, the elevator doors opened, and a couple people walked in, and the woman that walked in was stunningly beautiful. And I was a little taken aback at the time, slightly awkward and I didn't want to offend her companion and I didn't want to, but she was a beautiful woman.  

[00:37:21] Susan Barry: She took your breath away! 

[00:37:22] Peter Follows: She took my breath away and the elevator doors shut. And I didn't want to gawk at her or stare at her. And elevators are full of mirrors, so it made it difficult.

So I remember consciously focusing on the little buttons, and, playing games with myself and my brain to do these things. So anyway, we got to the lobby and they left and I stepped out and my colleague said, he said, “That doesn't happen every day.” And I thought, yeah, at the time it struck me as a bit of a weird thing for him to say. I wasn't quite sure what he meant but I said, “Yeah, she was quite something.” And he goes, “She? I was talking about the guy. That was Michael Jordan.” 

[00:38:09] Susan Barry: Are you serious? You're like, who knew she was too beautiful. I didn't even notice Michael Jordan. That's amazing.

[00:38:18] Peter Follows: So having spent an hour here talking about the power of observation, that was a little bit embarrassing.

[00:38:26] Susan Barry: We will share it with your clients. Peter Follows, thank you so much for being here. I know that our listeners learned a lot and I really appreciate you riding up to the top floor. 

[00:38:36] Peter Follows: Thanks, Susan. Thanks for having me. 

[00:38:39] Susan Barry: Thanks so much for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/169. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer and all around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like. 

[00:39:14] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor Podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 850-404-9630 to be featured in a future episode.