Transcript: Episode 89: Prime Rib River
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor, Episode 89. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/89.
[00:00:13] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride 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.
[00:00:30] Susan Barry: I'm back with Stephanie Smith, CEO and digital matriarch of Cogwheel Marketing, learning more about Cogwheel Analytics, the business intelligence tool she developed for hotel management companies and ownership groups. I know, Stephanie, that our listeners have heard of BI tools like the STAR report. Can you explain what types of data Cogwheel Analytics provides?
[00:01:04] Stephanie Smith: Cogwheel Analytics is designed to be a STAR report, but for your digital marketing. Since the dawn of time, all of our digital marketing data has been compared against the hotels own data. If you want to look at the website revenue, you're comparing it to yourself year over year, month over month, but that data in and of itself is silos. How do we start looking at that data in a bigger way to make sense of what's good and what's bad and understand the true online story of that particular hotel?
[00:01:31] Susan Barry: What types of data does Cogwheel Analytics provide?
[00:01:36] Stephanie Smith: For any franchise or of multiple brands, someone that's working in digital marketing is aggregating data, copying, pasting, creating massive pivot tables from upwards of 20 different sources.Functionally, our reporting tool allows people to save time, so they're not doing that. They're spending time strategizing and action planning against the data instead of creating the report.
[00:02:01] We've mapped out data points for all the major brands so that you can see your channel mix. Visit some revenue you get, be able to identify trends there, and also paid media, incorporating Kodi data, Expedia data, Google data, so you can get a total online presence view of where your marketing dollars went, and what the performance of all those different initiatives have been.
[00:02:23] Susan Barry: How does having all of that information in one place help a company's commercial team?
[00:02:31] Stephanie Smith: It allows for that real time discussion. If you're sitting in a revenue strategy meeting, you have that data available at your fingertips to say, this is what's happening and this is what we should be doing to either correct that action or change or shift that strategy.
[00:02:46] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Chris Green is president of Remington Hotels, a top five hotel management company with a portfolio of more than 100 properties across the US. Chris joined Remington when Chesapeake Hospitality of which he was president and CEO, merged with Remington in 2022. To put it plainly, Chris has had a career full of very fancy titles, but he got his start managing quick service restaurants around the southeast. Today, Chris and I are going to talk about the hotel industry's PR problem and how we can reinvent top line revenue strategy. But before we jump in, we need to answer the call button.
(Call Button sound effect plays)
[00:03:38] Susan Barry: The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals and random strangers off the street who have burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at 850-404-9630.
[00:03:55] Today's question was submitted by Trey and Trey says, “How can I avoid getting typecast? I keep taking select service GM positions because they're in appealing cities, but I have full service background. How do I make sure that people don't forget that?” I think this is a great question for you, Chris. How can Trey avoid getting stuck in one rut when he wants to do everything?
[00:04:26] Chris Green: Well, first, thanks for having me on today. I'm super excited to be with you. And what a great question. You know, our industry is famous for allowing people to get typecast. And I've always told people in our business, you've got to own your career.
[00:04:41] So, my first word of advice would be to be speaking frequently with his superiors, whether it's his divisional vice president of operation, his corporate HR, and talking about how he wants to take his career and reminding them of his full service experience. Sitting back is the biggest way you get time cast. Just sitting back and expecting something to happen for you. We've got to own our outcome. Right? So, and until we do, and we really can't blame anybody else.
[00:05:08] Susan Barry: I think you're absolutely right. I think one of the maybe things that I would do differently if I could do my career over is take a more active role and not expect other people to recognize my achievements, if that makes sense.
[00:05:26] Chris Green: Today's fast paced environment keeps managers busy. We've got a lot of busy work, which is something I'm not super fond of. And if you're not really leaning into those relationships and hearing from the associate on what they want to do with their career, what their goals are personal and professional and listening as a leader, then it's really easy for people to get lost. And I think that's something we as leaders have to think about as well.
[00:05:51] Susan Barry: Like all of the best hoteliers, your career started in food and beverage when you were the regional manager for 42 quick service restaurants in Florida and Georgia. What was your actual first job in the restaurant business?
[00:06:08] Chris Green: So I was a manager in training with, uh, the company that owns Steak and Ale restaurants, and that would have been in around like circa 1990.
[00:06:19] Susan Barry:Okay.
[00:06:19] Chris Green: So I went through their manager and training program. It was a 13 week training program where they took, they thought high potential people and they put them through a training program, which was really nothing more than 13 weeks of working every job function in a Steak and Ale restaurant.
[00:06:36] Susan Barry: Do you think you could do it today? Like if you had to go back and do it?
[00:06:38] Chris Green: I do. I loved it. Honestly? It taught me so much. And I think we've gotten away from that just because of speed to market where we don't do a great job of getting people in and spending the time they need getting well rounded training. So I thought it was something that was really brilliant and it gave me a foundation that has led me to a great career in hospitality.
[00:06:59] Susan Barry: That's awesome. I always think about this because I, you know, waited tables and stuff when I was in college and I still many years later have those dreams where I get sat every single restaurant or every single table in the restaurant and I can't get water out. Like I have those anxiety dreams to this day. I don't know if I could wait tables again. I always used to think like, “Oh, it's my fallback position.” You know, I don't think I can do it. I don't think I could physically handle it.I don't know.
[00:07:27] Chris Green: I think people that aren't in the business or never have been in the business have no idea the pressure it is when a rush comes in the door and the server gets, you know, sat four or five tables at a time and the ability of them to succeed through delivery of service. And then how that flows through - it's just fascinating business. How it flows through the restaurant to all of a sudden you're buried in the kitchen with tickets because you said everybody at once. It's just a, it's just things people don't know.
[00:07:56] Susan Barry: Everything is harder than it seems, right?
[00:07:58] Chris Green: It is. It is.
[00:08:00] Susan Barry: You spent more than 16 years at Chesapeake Hospitality, ultimately serving as president and CEO before your merger with Remington in 2022. We say it all the time, but you are yet another example of someone who starts a career without the so-called silver spoon in your mouth and winds up in the C suite, which I think it's a situation that doesn't really happen outside of the hotel business that often. What do you wish that line-level employees at your hotels knew about the broader industry?
[00:08:39] Chris Green: I think the biggest thing we need to know, that I didn't know when you start - So like you, when we all start in hospitality, we just, it's a, it's a job, right? We're looking for a paycheck and a way to make ends meet. But what I found in hospitality as I grew and opened my eyes by staying curious - which is one of my top tips! If you want to be in leadership is to stay curious. Is that in, in operations of hotels - A: you can be like me. No college degree background in, you know, working in service industries, but just coming from a family that taught hard work and hospitality, and you can make it anywhere in this business.
[00:09:13] But to do that, you've got to stay curious. You've got to be willing to stretch yourself, do things that you didn't think you were capable of. I don't love accounting, but I had to learn accounting. I don't love, I don't know very much about, you know, chillers and heavy duty HVAC, but I had to learn it because that's part of hospitality.
[00:09:31] But the most exciting thing is, is it's an industry in need. So today there's no better time ever than being a line level associate in hospitality. You know, for me, it took four years from the day I walked into a hotel to become a GM, right? And I thought that was fast. Today, I think you could do it even faster if you really put your head, you know, to the ground and went after it because there's such a need for great leaders.
[00:09:56] Susan Barry: What about on the flip side of that sort of the executive or finance, underwriter, broker type person in our industry that may not have ever worked in ops, what do you wish they knew about working on property?
[00:10:14] Chris Green: Well, I think they really need to get a strong hold on what it takes to deliver the outcomes that they expect. Right? So I could get highly technical here because I believe our industry has been driven pretty much since 9/11 occurred all the way through the financial crisis and through today by the banks, by the debt funds, by the lenders. So ultimately we as operators are running hotels, which are at their core a real estate play first, cashflow play second.
[00:10:44] Right? So those are things that they're driven by the, the, the debt available, the economy, what's happening. And so we've been as operators pushed to the brink. I call it the operational frontier. In order to deliver high EBITDs, which is earnings before interest and taxes and depreciation, right? So that's what we've been pushed to do and through all that, I feel like we've dumbed down hospitality
[00:11:09] Now just recently through the pandemic we've seen a resurgence in true hospitality. And I think it's because we missed it for so long and while we were forced to take that very strange break people had time to reflect and go, “Wow, hospitality is awesome” and “It's a great, it's a great thing to do with my time is to travel and vacation and spend time in hotels.” And we as hoteliers got a chance to take a deep breath and think about what was important. So, I think the brokers really need to understand it takes a lot to deliver that number to the bottom line and hotels are people, not numbers.
[00:11:43] Susan Barry: I mentioned the merger and you're now president at Remington. When you joined Remington, you were melding a sort of a pure third party management company with a company that was mostly managing its own institutional assets. Can you talk about some of the similarities and some of the differences, like what were maybe points of friction and what were points of ease?
[00:12:12] Chris Green: So that's a great question. Um, bringing two hotel operating companies together, you would assume a lot more was similar. I can tell you that culturally we were very similar, operationally we were very similar, commercially, as far as sales and marketing and digital and all those things. Where it deviated was when you're institutionally managing assets, you've got one customer where you're handling a large number of assets. So everything is basically rinse and repeat. So the financial reports, the monthly reporting, everything's just kind of locked in and it can be done almost in a factory type process.
[00:12:48] Third party management is all about boutique or curated relationship style management. So those are very, very different things. And so bringing the two together created opportunities for us to use what we were very good at, which is complex analytical, financial reporting, high volume delivery of performance at complex assets and take all of that horsepower that Remington had and add it to what I would call the finesse of Chesapeake.
[00:13:16] And, and really when we blended those two together, what we've seen so far is the market has responded very well. I was always in development as the CEO of a midsize company you are doing development, right? You're growing your platform by talking and doing deals. And so what I've said is we've taken what was, everything was great about Chesapeake and bolted together with everything that's about great about Remington and created the, in my mind, the best management platform in the business.
[00:13:41] Susan Barry: So I'm a former director of sales and marketing. I think this is my opinion about this is going to surprise you, but I believe that our industry is over-invested in sales. If I were starting from scratch, I would add either more administrative positions or in a perfect world, more tech automation to handle things like inbound leads, CRM management, even customer research to a certain degree. And I would reduce the number of sales managers, but I would make sure they spent zero, zero percent of their time doing all of that administrative work.
[00:14:24] If you were starting the hotel business from scratch, what are some of the things you would do differently?
[00:14:30] Chris Green: First of all, I think that's a fascinating approach, frankly. And I do think that as the business grew, speaking particularly about sales and marketing, we did try to hire a sales manager for every single market without thinking about and using technology to help us to data mine for leads and for, you know, for optimizing the use of pure sales people's time. So I think that's fantastic.
[00:14:55] If I was going to reinvent the industry, I think I would start over with light touch housekeeping, frankly. I think I would have never made daily housekeeping a thing because frankly, we conditioned guests to something that doesn't get used that much. Now that we've gone through 2020, 2021 guests are very comfortable with hanging that sign out, maybe getting some extra points, and then just using their room for a couple days, right?
[00:15:19] It's only the rarest instance that we have a guest that just said, “I've got to have my room put back to brand new every single day.” And I think that that created a lot of operational inefficiency and extra demand on chemicals, load on the buildings, wash load, you know, you know, the, the, the impact of our, our businesses on the greater good of the planet, right.
[00:15:42] Susan Barry: Plus opportunities, chances to get it wrong. The more times you have to replace a towel, the more times you can mess it up, right?
[00:15:49] Chris Green: Yeah. And listen, it happens in every business. You try to refine things to a certain point where you over-optimize them to where, to the point of failure. And so I think we've proven that point out for this past couple of years, that that's not something that was ever really needed.
[00:16:06] The other thing is frankly, is F&B - or B&F as we like to call it. I would really have started over with um the model that we've kind of gone to where every hotel has to have a chef. That's just not, I mean when you're talking full service, that's just not actually what has to happen. Some hotels, the demand on the hotels, the markets they're in, the type of business they do, don't require having the presence of a five star executive chef in the building, right? You can deliver five star solutions with different staffing models that help the hotel to succeed. But we were very, because of the franchise model, you know, we only operate 127 hotels and there's 40,000 in the US think about that. And we're the fifth largest manager.
[00:16:49] So when you think about how many hotels there are, the easiest thing for owner operators to do and other operators to do is just copy paste, copy, paste, copy, paste. And I think that that's where we've got to be entrepreneurial as we head forward into the next decade.
[00:17:05] Susan Barry: That makes sense. What do you think? So this is the copy paste is a perfect segue into this. I have a phrase for undifferentiated upper upscale, upper mid scale, upscale branded hotels, sort of those brands that consumers have a difficult time telling apart. I call them the “messy middle.” So how can the messy middle do a better job of marketing to the top of the funnel? To the dreaming phase, the leisure guest who is not like, at the point of sale on Expedia or on the website or wherever it is, but really starting to think about her vacation and where she wants to spend her time and spend her money. How can those hotels do a better job of standing out? It's the hardest question in the world, by the way, so, you know,
[00:18:02] Chris Green: Actually, I'm fascinated with this. So, uh, Raul Morante, who's our Chief Commercial Officer, and I talk about this a lot. So, um, I think you're right. Like there's a ton of hotels, the autograph of this, the autograph that, and they're all beautiful hotels. If you get to stay at them, a lot of them are great, but how do you differentiate, how do you attract that customer?
[00:18:24] So the past couple of years, I've been very fascinated with what I call - it's not IP retargeting, it’s IP lookalike marketing. So IP lookalike marketing takes your best guests, so hypothetically, the, you know, if we take one of our luxury independents or soft brand independents. We take our best guests there and we look at where they travel from, who they are, what they do for a living.
[00:18:51] Basically, you can go out to the market and find IP addresses that mimic those. It's like lookalikes, right? It's like your clone. So if you like, for example, if you're traveling into Charleston, you might read Garden and Gun magazine or Southern Living, or you might watch Paula Dean cooking shows. You can actually go out and pay for IP lookalikes and serve them content before they're in the dream phase.
[00:19:18] So we did a test of this at one of our hotels in Atlanta and we went out and we took the money that we were going to spend on just direct marketing or GDS marketing or ad buys. And we put it into this IP lookalike marketing and the results were astounding, uh, frankly, so um, you're able to go to people who would love your building but may not find it by searching, okay? And you serve them up content. The next thing you know, the ROI, the first time we did it, the ROI was over 30 to 1. So I think that's a fascinating way to differentiate. The other thing is serving up dream phase to meeting planners. Same type thing. Understanding who the meeting planners are and then all of a sudden knowing that they've booked in wherever - LA or Denver - but you've got a building in Chicago serving them up the exact meeting offering ahead of time where they wouldn't think about Chicago.
[00:20:14] Susan Barry: I think that that is the most underutilized strategy for group sales in the history of our industry, looking at similar sized hotels in similar cities on a rotation. I'm not talking about city wides, right? But your 300 room or 400 room hotel with however, you know, 10,000 square foot ballroom, You're absolutely right about that. And nobody's doing that. Maybe you guys are doing that.
[00:20:43] Chris Green: Some people are doing it. Some people. That's the difference. I've always said, you know, I always make a joke. People are like, “Chris, what's the difference between Remington and other management companies?” And I say three or 400 basis points. Everybody chuckles, right?
[00:20:58] But I'll tell you this, when you do, when you pull every lever - which is my goal, I want to pull every lever. I talked to my teams about every dollar every day, right? And what I mean by that is how are we optimizing the pantry? How are we optimizing what's available in F&B? How are we optimizing room service? Every dollar every day.
[00:21:16] So if we focus on all of those, I mean, listen, controlling costs, that's table stakes. If you can't control costs, you shouldn't be doing this for a living. But if I can get four or five extra dollars out of every single guest for giving them something they want anyways, and I make a 50 percent margin that's how I add three to 400 basis points to my, my GOPs compared to my competitors, and that's what helps us to win.
[00:21:41] Susan Barry: Okay. This sounds like a good time to take a break. When we come back, Chris and I are going to talk about glamping, robots, and prime rib. Be right back.
(Elevator rings)
[00:21:54] Susan Barry: I'm talking to Stephanie Smith from Cogwheel Marketing about Cogwheel Analytics, her company's new business intelligence tool. Can you give us a use case of how your customers are using Cogwheel Analytics right now?
[00:22:13] Stephanie Smith: A lot of us in digital marketing, we look at our channel mix, how much revenue is coming in through our website, how much money is coming through the OTAs, how much is coming through GDS, and then from the hotel sales effort.
[00:22:24] So you can easily with our dashboard be able to look at the trends over the last 12 months and year over year and very easily see how your OTA demand shifts in certain season. It's a fairly easy picture to be able to identify those trends and then plan against that when you're looking at your strategies three, six, nine months down the road.
[00:22:45] Susan Barry: What's the typical size of the company that can best benefit from Cogwheel Analytics?
[00:22:52] Stephanie Smith: The platform is made for enterprise level. It's designed for companies that have 20 or more hotels in their portfolio. If you happen to oversee 20, 50, 100 hotels, you can buy where your quote unquote “problem children” are and then spend time digging deeper into those individual hotels.
(Elevator rings)
[00:23:10] Susan Barry: We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every episode of Top Floor with a couple of very practical, specific tips to try in their businesses or in their personal lives.
[00:23:24] Chris, a lot of people have said that our industry has a PR problem, that younger adults or early career folks just don't realize how great hospitality is. And if we do a better job of explaining it, people will want to make their careers with us. What do you think are the specific obstacles keeping our business from attracting new talent?
[00:23:51] Chris Green: Spending time doing it. I think that things like this, and I appreciate you for doing what you do, letting people who have been down the road 30 years tell the truth about what our industry can be and the career you can have, and the opportunities to see the world and the growth, you know, you want to see growth.
[00:24:08] Yeah, you can, you can go spend four years in a, in a university and you can get out and you can have a great career doing, doing something in that, in a field that requires that. Or you can come spend four years in a hotel and you can be the general manager of the Hilton and you can experience that. I mean, it's just a great place. And if you love people, you are interacting with people at such a personal level that this is where true hospitality comes out. Because remember, you're giving people basically two things: something to eat and a safe place to sleep. And so when you think about that, that is as critical as possible, right?
[00:24:43] What other things are more personal than that to people, than where they sleep and where they eat? Maybe where they shower! And we're doing that too, right? So, so I think that we're just missing spending time talking about it because we are - as I talked to my team about sometimes - too focused on the immediate, right, the tyranny of the urgent instead of where we're going. This urgent matter is, it's not going to solve itself right now, but if we don't work on attracting people who want to be in this industry, we're going to have a challenge down the road.
[00:25:15] You know, I talked to our Chief Human Resources Officer the day, and we've got to stop with this, and I can be guilty of it too. “Oh, it's a 24/7, 365 day business. That's so demanding on people's schedules.” What about this? We have 24, 7, 365 when people could choose to work if we would get out of our own way and say, “Hey, maybe the sales admin wants to work from 5 to 11 to support her family,” right, and be home with the kids during the day? She can pound out the contracts and send out leads and do BEOs. What do we care? We've got, like I said, we've got to get out of our own way first.
[00:25:52] Susan Barry: I love that. You know, I think there's another piece that's similar to that too, which is our industry is such a great place to build a career, but it is also a great place if you want a job that you can forget at the end of the day. Like you are a guitar player and that's your real life and your real love, but you've got to make enough money to buy groceries. Our industry is a great place to do a job that you clock in, you do great work for eight hours, you clock out, and then you spend the rest of your time playing guitar. Does that make sense?
[00:26:26] Chris Green: It does. And I think that's extremely well said because I can't tell you how many thousands of people I've had the opportunity to work with that I've been blessed by working with them in my career. And I always say in hospitality, you may have people for a long time, or you may have them for a short time, but you should enjoy them while they're here. And I truly believe that. If you just want to be the best bartender we have two nights a week, I love it and I can use you for sure. So it's the optionality that we offer, you know? You don't have to come in and if you're a bartender, “Okay, do you want to be the bar manager?” You say “no” - no problem. That's great because then I have a bartender I can count on. Um, I think it's just a tremendous amount of flexibility and optionality.
[00:27:13] And with some of the new on demand Uber-like staffing services. If you're a pro at something, banquet server, room attendant, you actually can go out and sign up for some of these services, and you can go to different hotels and work all around when you want to work or not.
[00:27:25] Susan Barry: And pick the places that you like to work at the best, so then the hotels have to be competitive. Um, I know you're a top line guy, and we agree that things like managing food costs and expenses are like table stakes, you know, price of admission in our industry. You can't cost control yourself into a profitable hotel. So what are some changes that you've made or that you recommend people make to top line strategy over the last couple of years?
[00:27:54] Chris Green: All right. Can I just say that… you said something, “You can't cost control yourself into a profitable hotel.” So I have to tell you that one of the greatest quotes I ever heard was from a restaurant manager when I was in that training program some 30 plus years ago for Steak and ale. And he said to me, “Chris, If you always focus on cost, you'll get your revenues down to where you can handle them.” And I thought that was beautiful.
[00:28:18] Susan Barry: It’s so good!
[00:28:19] Chris Green: It's brilliant because if you're only cost control, you're eventually going to forget about sales. So top line goes away. So, so I appreciate you bringing that up. That's a great thing to say. Um, listen, you gotta, you have to underpin what you're asking people to pay with an offering that's worth it, but you also have to not be afraid to pay.
[00:28:35] We've done a lot over the years again, I get back to this “copy paste philosophy” where we search the market out and if a chicken dinner for banquets is $17.95 down the street, we're $17.95. Why? If our offering is clearly better and we have a better, you know, venue and a better staff and the service, we're five star rated and step service - what in the world are we doing, right? You need to be willing to charge what's right and what's fair for that, but also be proud, right? And we've seen that that the hotels that have deserved pricing power have gotten pricing power over the last couple of years. The hotels that didn't have been stagnant, you know, and we operate a lot of hotels.
[00:29:20] So we've seen some of that in our, in our own portfolio, and then we have to think about, “Why is this hotel able to continue driving price and performance in different areas when this hotel can't?” And a lot of times it comes down to, “How well is the asset maintained? How is the staff trained? What's the service delivery? What's the delta between the great hotels and the bad hotels on pricing because of service delivery?” And it really all comes down to that. You're only talking about filling somewhere between 200 and 1,000 rooms a day. And it might sound like a lot, but when you think about the breadth of the industry, going a couple hundred rooms a day, you're only looking for 200 guests that have told their friends about you or that know somebody that knows you or believes in what you're doing or wants your offering or has been in your dream state marketing. So that's what you've got to be focused on and making sure that when they get there, you don't disappoint.
[00:30:15] Susan Barry: Easy as pie.
[00:30:15] Chris Green: I wish it was that easy, right? I mean, it's great that I can say things from this chair that I sit in, but I always tell the teams in the hotel, you know, I can think this and I can believe this and I can do everything I can to support you, but I can't make it true. Only you can make it true. So all of you out there that are in hospitality, if you want our industry to be everything that it can be, only you can make it true.
[00:30:40] Susan Barry: It makes sense. Okay. This is another question with a long preamble. So again, stay with me. If we think back to like the mid-to-late nineties when the OTAs came about - looking back hindsight's twenty twenty. It's very clear that they were the OTAs were able to steal market share from hotels because they were great at marketing. And they just got better and better and better at it and able to invest more and more and more into marketing. So, you know, looking back hindsight's twenty twenty. If we could invest, if the hotel industry could invest as much in marketing as the OTAs did, might be a different situation now than we're in, right?
[00:31:28] I have this feeling that we're going to look back at short term rentals in a similar way. And my guess is that we're going to think that they won on product differentiation. So short term rentals sell experiences as a service. Hotels sell service as an experience. Right? People will take out their own trash to stay in a tree house in Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia. That is wild to me. Is there a world in which hotel companies like yours should do more to open their umbrellas and include non-hotel lodging? I don't mean the brands. I think some of the brands are doing that or experimenting with it with cruise ships and homes and villas and stuff like that, but operating companies like yours.
[00:32:31] Chris Green: I think it's a great point and I agree with you. So at the risk of being run off the show, I use Airbnb once in a while, or I use VRBO once in a while, because I have a need that a traditional hotel can't fill, or there's a locational thing that I want. We stayed in a glamping tent, my wife and kids, uh, in Utah.
[00:32:50] Susan Barry: How was that?
[00:32:51] Chris Green: It was fantastic. I mean, I didn't think I was, I mean, listen, I've been in hotels for a long time. So I really wanted, you know, hot shower and all these things, but I loved it. I don't think I've slept better than sleeping outside in that beautiful tent. It was great. So I think there's definitely a need for it. And to just kind of maybe put your mind at ease, I can tell you that we're actually exploring several glamping opportunities and some opportunities to do with like the, uh, highend, um, RVs.
[00:33:20] So it's nontraditional housing and lodging because I think the market is expanding that way. And when you take an organization like mine that has the complexity to deliver it in a fashion, maybe better than somebody that's just posting their own house on VRBO or wherever, where we can deliver a seamless experience where you could maybe even spend part of the time here, spend of the time in the resort. I think there's tremendous opportunity, so you're going to see some of that for sure. And you'll probably, you'll definitely see some of it from Remington here in the near future.
[00:33:51] Susan Barry: I'm so glad to hear it. And I cannot wait. Well, we have reached the fortune telling portion of the program. So we're going to predict the future, maybe cast some spells, wave our magic wands. What is a prediction that you have about the future of automation and hotels?
[00:34:09] Chris Green: Well, I really have two. I mean, I think we're going to with with the challenges in some of the line level labor, we're definitely going to see robot usage for sure in, uh, cleaning and exterior care, lawn care. A lot of that stuff's going to be, um, automated. I think we're going to see a lot of that happening. The other thing I think is I'm a huge revenue management guy and the number of inbound channels is getting to be so complex that even some of the companies that are on the front edge right now. I don't think are there yet. I think that artificial intelligence is going to really take hold in revenue management and be minute-by-minute adjusting pricing, offering, length of stay, um, to a point where it wouldn't be able to be done by a human, frankly.
[00:34:52] Susan Barry: I totally agree with you. A hundred percent. And I'm ready for that to happen now. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the state of diversity in the hotel industry, what would it be?
[00:35:08] Chris Green: I would accelerate us 20 years from now. There's no question, there's a massive commitment to diversity in our industry now, but I'm an extremely transparent guy and it's awfully little awfully late. And the reason that it's that way - and it's not, I'm not proud of it - is nobody created the inbound funnel of diverse applicants into leadership 25 years ago. They just didn't. And a lot of that is falls on, you know, unconscious bias that was occurring or whatever. You can, a lot of things, but you can see how far we've come in just a short time by being aware. But man, I wish we were more aware 25 years ago. I can't, I can't fix it now. That'd be my magic wand was that we'd be starting 25 years ago because we have so many talented people in our business, but because we didn't look deeply into housekeeping or we didn't look deeply into the kitchen for talent and then really invest then we ended up pulling out just a few. And unfortunately, those few look a lot like me and I wish they didn't. I really do. So I'm an advocate and I'm working on it and we're working on it at Remington, but this is not something that's going to get solved overnight, unfortunately.
[00:36:27] Susan Barry: What is next for you and what's next for Remington? Aside from glamping and fancy RVs, I hope.
[00:36:36] Chris Green: So, uh, for me, I'm just excited to lead this organization. You know, we were about a third the size at Chesapeake and to get an opportunity to lead a much broader organization is exciting. I love challenges. I always joke that there's a song from the eighties by this band called Garbage, I'm Only Happy When It Rains. And I think that if you're a true operator that even though you complain about it, like after a tough shift, you also love the tough shift. So, you know, we're growing, we've got a lot of opportunity both in the continental U. S. and in the greater, uh, Americas, so I think you'll see for Remington some expansion beyond our national borders, so I'm excited about that here this year. And then we're, you know, we are working super hard on several things, our diversity and inclusion, and also our core culture, right? We're the place where passionate people thrive, and I think for that to be true, It doesn't matter if Chris Green is thriving. It matters if every single person that fills every single role believes they're thriving and thriving in a way that matters to them, not what matters to me. I can't define, I can't define your thrive, right? And you can't define mine. So we have to work to understand how to make that possible for everybody. So I mean, those are big jobs, you know, and that's what I think about daily is because if you're thriving, Susan, in your role, the company's thriving.
[00:38:00] Susan Barry: Even if I'm playing guitar eight hours a day after my shift.
[00:38:04] Chris Green: That hotel is probably awesome because I got an eight hour guitar player or a bartender that can pick up the guitar. I don't know. It's just, It's just a great business. I hope more people get in it and enjoy it like I have.
[00:38:17] Susan Barry: Me too. Okay, folks, before we tell Chris goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told.
(Elevator sound plays. Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”)
[00:38:29] Susan Barry: Chris, what is a story you would only tell me on the Loading Dock?
[00:38:35] Chris Green: You know, I thought about this. I knew you were going to ask me this question, so I thought there's so many stories. Uh, the one that came to mind was actually about, since we were talking about food and beverage early on, I remember as I was a young food and beverage director, and I ran a hotel here in Florida, we had a yacht called the Jacksonville Princess, which was a 58 foot, you know, dinner yacht. And so we would always hold big events on that. And so one year we had an Easter cruise planned and so I can't remember the exact menu, but we had 50 or 60 people, maybe 75 people booked on the, on the yacht and it was going out, I think around 11:30 in the morning and the menu was prime rib and lobster and a bunch of other things, right.
[00:39:18] It's going to be a great day. So I just remember. Um, walking through the kitchen, talking to the chef, looking in the Alto Sham ovens and seeing the prime rib all ready. And then going down and seeing everybody in their dresses getting on and having mimosas or whatever. And so it came time to take the food down to the yacht and the way the yacht was set up, there's a lot of exterior decking, so everybody was out on the deck having a cocktail or a fruity drink or whatever. And I had a new cook in the kitchen and he loaded all this prime rib. I think nine prime ribs onto what we call a rack and roll, right? So it's an aluminum rack that carries trays and they're not super well built. They used to be very, very flimsy.
[00:39:58] And so as we're going down to the yacht to load all the food onto the, the, the Jacksonville Princess, we get down there and the Jacksonville docks are a little bit bumpy. And so as we're approaching the dock we get very close to the dock and everybody looks and they see and he uncovers the prime rib, and it's steaming. And he goes to give it one more little push towards the yacht and it slowly starts tilting and the top the top tray slid, and then the second tray slid…
[00:40:26] Susan Barry: Oh no!
[00:40:27] Chris Green: And so nine or 10, probably $200 a piece prime ribs went diving into the St. John's river in front of all the guests and I was mortified. I mean, I was watching people's faces. Like, first of all, they're like, Oh wow. And then they're like, where am I? What's going to be, what am I going to eat?
[00:40:45] Susan Barry: Oh God, what did that guy do? Did he just jump in after this?
[00:40:54] Chris Green: There was nothing to do. The St. John's River is not very clean. It was over. Um, so those people, most of them got refunds, but they also ate chicken fingers for their Easter lunch that day. So it wasn't the best Easter lunch, but I felt bad. The poor person was horrified and dumped all that. So…
[00:41:13] Susan Barry: Oh God, that is terrible. Well, Chris, Green. Thank you so much for being here and giving me flashbacks to my off-premise catering days. I know that our listeners got some great insight and great tips from you, and I really appreciate you riding with us to the Top Floor!
[00:41:32] Chris Green: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:41:35] Susan Barry: I am wrapping up this interview within an interview with Stephanie Smith, CEO of Cogwheel Marketing. Stephanie, I want to know what your customers are saying. How are they reacting to Cogwheel Analytics?
[00:41:52] Stephanie Smith: The users in our platform tend to be people that are already doing digital marketing, but also people that are in the sales and revenue management field that want to take a full commercial strategy approach. The feedback is what a time saver. We have management companies that we've supported on the agency side that we're spending up to one week out of the month just doing ownership reports.
[00:42:14] So as painful as that is, how can we ease the pressure for them on a report side? Number two, it's. Speed of getting the data we've built best in class with our service so that we're pulling large amounts of data in a very small amount of time where we want to go is helping be that star report and that benchmark for the industry.
[00:42:32] So, once we're aggregating larger sets of data that we can really establish the best practices is on the branded hotel side to be able to say, this is what the expectations are and be able to say, is this good, bad, a total scorecard for your. Total online presence.
[00:42:47] Susan Barry: I love that. So you're going to have data at such scale that you can truly set some benchmarks for hotel properties.
[00:42:56] Stephanie Smith: Exactly, Susan. Took the words right out of my mouth.
[00:42:58] Susan Barry: What's the best way for someone who's interested to get a demo of Cogwheel Analytics?
[00:43:07] Stephanie Smith: We certainly invite anybody that's coming to Toronto this summer for the HSM AI Cogwheel and HITEC conferences, we will have a booth at high tech. So we welcome anyone to come by and demo either cargo analytics or talk to us about agency services. Otherwise, feel free to visit our website at CogwheelMarketing.com and we can walk you through what the visualizations look like.
[00:43:32] Susan Barry: To learn more about Stephanie Smith and her company, be sure to go back to episode 19 and listen to it from start to finish.
(Top Floor Theme plays)
[00:43:44] Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/89.
(Top Floor Theme continues to play)
[00:43:54] Susan Barry: Top floor is produced by John Albano, who also composed and performed our elevated elevator music, with vocals by Cameron Albano. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with your friends and colleagues after you leave us a five star review. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you like to listen.
[00:44:20] 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.