How Hoteliers Use Tech in Budget Season for Faster, Smarter Decisions - Stephen German, Actabl [Sponsor Bonus]

Josiah: Hey friends, as you know, we are heading into the heart of budget season in the hotel business and the promise of technology is to speed you up, not slow you down. But I'm curious, is that actually happening with your hotels now? As you may know, I lead marketing at Actabl and one of the things I enjoy most about working here is getting a front row seat into how hoteliers are using technology. Now, Actabl works with 90% of the top 50 management companies in the U.S., so I get to talk with a lot of people and see how technology really plays out in processes like the budget planning process. One of our products, ProfitSword, has been trusted by hotel leaders for nearly 25 years. And in this episode, I'm excited to bring on Actabl's head of product, Stephen German, to talk about how hoteliers are using it to be more effective in processes like budget planning. In this conversation, we get into the role of technology, how it can help with budgeting, some recent investments that Actabl has made in ProfitSword, and the real world impact hotel leaders are seeing when they use technology in a planning process like this. So if you want a deep dive into how technology can help you this budget season, you won't want to miss this episode. Let's get into it.

[intro]

Josiah: What are some of the big challenges and pain points that you hear hoteliers facing during budget season?

Stephen: Absolutely. So budget season is just an incredibly stressful time. You've got to look in your crystal ball and try and keep track of all the things that might happen next year. The things that you know about, the things that you're not sure if they'll happen and predict the future, essentially. What is occupancy going to be like? What is ADR? How much do I need to plan for labor? It's a lot. And from a hotelier perspective, especially this year, where we're in kind of a time of more economic uncertainty, it's pretty hard to forecast. What is travel going to be like? Is tourism going to be coming back? Is it going to be picking up or is it going to be on a downtrend? Is the economy going to be roaring or is it going to slide into a recession? It's a lot to think through and process. And it's very difficult to do. But it's even more difficult to do at scale. When you're trying to do it, not just with one hotel or just with one department, but when you have to do it across a dozen or more hotels, the number of variables and things that you've got to get right, stakes are high and these are things you're going to be held accountable for. So it's incredibly stressful and incredibly difficult.

Josiah: Yeah, it's difficult and stressful and there's so many variables. Just this morning I was talking with a financial coach that helps hotel groups think about this. How can they navigate this? And I see all the reports, all the data to pull together. I think that's one of the reasons I'm excited to work at Actabl is thinking about some of our technologies like ProfitSword that does that aggregation, right? Just get everything in one place. It feels like what I hear from our customers is that really is a big piece of this process, making sure that there's total visibility everywhere. Is that what you've come across in your conversations with our customers as they think about budget season? I wonder if you could speak a little bit to some of the technologies you've heard them use in this process.

Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. And data is power. Unfortunately the hardest thing, especially as a management company is just apples to apples comparisons and being able to normalize that. When you have your policy of this is how we operate, this is what we're going to spend, this is what we forecast. Getting that translated into each difference and each nuance by hotel is really difficult to do. And if you're passing spreadsheets back and forth, it's really easy to get out of sync. It's really easy to make mistakes, to have the wrong version, to miss something, or to not be following the same recipe that's being set at the corporate level, actually translating it from the corporate level down to the hotel itself. So the alignment itself is difficult. And then just what is everything called? Does everything fit in the same line items, in the same expenses? How do you account for that without going crazy? The biggest challenge is trying to get your data straight and being able to actually just apply your recipe to that normalized chart of accounts and to that normalized budget and forecast that you're trying to roll out.

Josiah: Yeah. Well, and of course, at Actabl, we have four solutions between ProfitSword to give people visibility into what's going on in their business. We have Hotel Effectiveness to help them match labor with demand so they're rightsized on that front. And we have an ops platform with ALICE to manage guest interactions and the delivery of those guest services and then Transcendent to help hotels get the most out of their assets and manage engineering and all the maintenance and all that good stuff. I feel like what you've described there of getting away from spreadsheets, digitizing work, that's something that I see our customers using all four products to do. But I think specifically with budget season, it seems that ProfitSword is one of the first places that our customers are going to, right? Because it's that aggregation of everything. It's that one view into what's going on.

Stephen: Absolutely. Yeah. ProfitSword lets you normalize that chart of accounts, lets you take all your different GLs, all your different line items and roll them through uniformly. And then as you set a budget, you can set it at the corporate level and you can apply it down to the property level. You can add the different permutations and nuances to it whether that's by region or by location or by time of year or time of month but you can set it and you can push it down and you can keep that visibility and keep that alignment there. There isn't versions of spreadsheets that are passed around. Everything is in real time. So as you make changes and push it down to your properties, they can see what you have put in. And as they make changes, you can see how they're progressing. And it's all real time. You're not waiting for the next email and you're not tripping up over a different version of it. You've got it all the same. And what's really the most game changing within ProfitSword is the way that we do comparisons. So when you're setting a budget and you have your forecast, you have your primary forecast and you're trying to look at next year, you don't have to start from scratch. You can start with maybe what you forecasted last year and add 3% or add 5% for these hotels and add 6% for this other hotel, you can do that. And as that gets applied and as that gets spread over to the hotel, they can then be looking at what is realistic for them and they can push back and they can look at different comparisons that have been set up for them by the management company, whether that's are there groups of similar properties or other chain scales within that metro? Or maybe it's their forecast from last year, their budget from last year. It gets them that reference point and it puts it on the same screen as what they're forecasting. So as they're making those changes, as they're figuring out what am I going to spend and what do I think I can actually make? It's not just all pulled out of the air and they've got that data and it's contextual for them. They can see it and they can change what they're looking at. They can run it through multiple different dimensions and really know that, yeah, I feel good about this. I think I can actually achieve on that budget. And the other place that Actabl is able to help just within budget season as well is within Transcendent and within that CapEx tool. It's difficult to remember everything that needs to be replaced. And it's really embarrassing if you have to go, well, not embarrassing, but it's annoying if you have to go back to ownership midway through the year and say, Hey, I forgot, we need to replace this asset. We need to change this thing out. We forgot that its life cycle was ending this year and now it's gone bad and now it's an emergency thing. And it just takes the guesswork out of it because it gives you your 10 year plan and tells you what you should probably plan for and what may be a surprise without it becoming a surprise.

Josiah: That's interesting. I appreciate you sharing that. What's interesting about Actabl is the company as a whole is only a couple of years old, but it's a collection of former companies that are now product lines for us. ProfitSword, for example, founded in 2001, nearly 25 years old, used for decades, trusted. What's interesting to me is talking with our customers who have brought ProfitSword into new jobs. They use it, they rely on it to drive performance. They take a new leadership role, they bring that to their company. So it's working for them, right? There's a history of it working. That's great. But what I find really cool, we got into this a little bit in our last conversation here on the show, talking about digital night audit, I'm going to include a link in the show notes, because we got a little bit into how you think about product development. And you don't see this as static, you and your teams are always talking to customers, you're always building new things, new offerings. And so even over the past year, there's been a lot of investments made into these technologies to help hoteliers through budget season, but obviously beyond every day of the year. I wonder if you could speak a little bit to some of the investments that your team has made into the product over the past year and how that helps hoteliers now.

Stephen: Yeah, some of the biggest things are just we don't want the technology to be a blocker. We want the technology to be an enabler. And a big thing that we've been doing is there's always the laws of physics that are immutable. If you're trying to generate a report that's tens or hundreds of thousands of lines, it's going to take a minute to do, but it shouldn't mean that you're held up. It shouldn't mean that you are blocked. And so a big part of what we've been doing over the last year is moving a lot of that to the background. Things that are heavy, things that are intensive, things that take a long time to do. We don't want to be the source of anyone waiting. No one should have to sit in front of a keyboard and wait for something to finish. They should be able to press a button, continue through their day, and when what they need is ready, it's available to them. And so we've done a lot of that with moving things to be more asynchronous while still having the value of that real time data visibility where you can see every change and you can see it as it's happening. But as you're trying to do the heavier things, we do it in the background so that you can continue with the other dozen tasks that you need to complete as part of budget season. And of course, we've also been leaning into our driver logic as well. How you set and adjust the ability to set your recipe. What are you driving your cost per room off of? What are your different triggers? What are your assumptions for that? So instead of just making a best guess, you're putting in your assumptions of what it's going to be and the math is taking care of the rest. And we're working to take that a step further and to add that at an even more granular level and to also improve how we run the spreading and the totaling of all the budget assumptions that are coming through. So really just trying to streamline and remove as much of the technology stress as we can from the budget season.

Josiah: There's enough stress out there already. So technology should make your life easier, right? I think it's a good litmus test of technology that can help you. So what I'm hearing is ability to crunch more data than ever before, do it in the background, move faster, and then the ability to make really informed decisions on this. It's like you're giving hoteliers the tools to do this. I'm curious. I know your whole product philosophy is very collaborative, very iterative around you talk to a lot of customers, you take that feedback, try things out. I'm curious if you could speak a little bit to some of the efficiencies that you may have seen or heard about in some of these conversations so far and some of the impact of these investments you made over the past year. What are you hearing in terms of feedback?

Stephen: So generally we're hearing that things are moving a lot quicker, that instead of waiting for some of these things to happen or taking days to manipulate the data because you're setting it and you're waiting, you're setting it and you're waiting, now we're seeing folks that are able to do what was previously taking them days essentially in hours and they're not restricted to sitting there in front of it. They can walk away, they can have a cup of coffee and it will continue to work and continue to finish while they're away. So we've heard great things from our customers so far. They've been overjoyed that the tech is not the blocker.

Josiah: That sounds great. I mean, taking stuff that used to take days turn into hours. Is there anything else on your mind before we go? Any advice maybe to our listeners as they think about navigating budget season?

Stephen: Data and data-driven decisions are the pathway through a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. One of my favorite quotes is, if we have data, let's go with the data. If all we have is opinions, go with mine. And as we step into a season of economic uncertainty, using the data as the way to justify the budget, a way to plan for the future, and doing everything that is possible. We don't know the future. We never will, but the history can give us an okay indication of what it can be.

Josiah: Love that. Always fun to talk with you, Stephen. Thanks for taking the time.

Stephen: Absolutely. Thanks, Josiah.