Hard Truths on Hotel Tech: Unfiltered Insider Advice - Josiah Mackenzie

Josiah: Hi, friends, it's Josiah here. And in this episode, we're going to do something a little bit different, and that is a deep dive into hotel technology. Of course, on this show, technology comes up a lot. I talk to people across the hospitality ecosystem, both hoteliers and technology providers, about what they're seeing, what they're doing, and what the opportunities are. And I have found from our community, technology is coming up more often and questions are coming up more often - so I wanted to record a episode that's going to be quite a bit longer than our typical episode. Hopefully, it won't be the very longest episode we've done on the show so far, but I wanted to record my unfiltered thoughts on technology because in the conversations I've had over the past weeks, I've had a number of people tell me that I have a really unique perspective and position to speak to this because I have spent decades of my career deeply involved in the hotel technology ecosystem as part of companies that have been building solutions for the hospitality ecosystem and then leading sales and marketing and business development. I got to speak and learn from hoteliers around the world at hotels, individual hotels, and hotel companies of all sizes. I've seen the problems they face. I've seen where technology companies can address those problems. And, you know, for better or worse, one of the challenging parts about speaking to hotel technology is that everybody has a vested interest in the outcome of those conversations. On this show, I try to keep it as real as possible. But I thought one of the best ways to provide a point of view into technology would be to share my own story, my observations, and things I've found have been useful in this because we'll pull out nuance and different perspectives and interviews I do. But I wanted you to hear directly from me kind of the opportunities and challenges and advice that I would have on this. And so in this episode, we're going to cover a lot. You're going to hear why technology matters in hospitality today. Technology is all around us. I imagine you are using a ton of it already, but I want to explain a little bit about why it is important to continue to invest time and money and attention and think about moving forward, becoming better hospitality providers with technology. I'm going to touch on my background to give you a little bit of a sense of where I'm coming from. That gives me perspective in to speak into this. We'll talk about what you should do before you start looking for new technology solutions. There are some things that I find people sometimes just skip in an effort to go shopping for tech, thinking tech's going to solve everything. You need to lay the groundwork, so we're going to cover that. We'll then get into how to evaluate technology. There's things that I've seen in the market, including as someone who was selling technology, that informed the way that I later became a buyer of technology and there's things that I learned in that shopping process that were useful for me in that, so we'll cover that. We'll talk about making the purchase itself, some key things to make sure you have covered in terms of the agreement, in terms of the commercial terms. And then we'll talk about implementation and success, right? It's one thing to buy tech, it's another thing to implement it. And it's often in that implementation is where you see or don't see the benefits of the technology. So we'll talk about implementation, making sure the technology performs for you, And then I'll share some thoughts around how to build long term successful partnerships with technology providers, right? This is really, really key. And a lot of people mess this up. I'm going to share some secrets that I found kind of working at tech companies, some little hacks, if you will, to get their alignment and make them have a vested interest in making sure that you are successful. So I'll share that towards the end. You can use the chapter feature in your podcast player or there's timestamps in the show notes if you want to jump to specific parts. I won't be offended if you want to skip my story, but it might help to give you a little bit of insight into the advice and the perspective that I'll be sharing here because I've seen technology built and rolled out on a global level across different functional areas within hotels. And I think some of my experience might be useful for you. So I wanted to record this solo episode to share it all. Would love your feedback as we go through this. The purpose of me recording this is to put a point of view out in the world, keep it as unfiltered and real as possible. But I recognize I have not seen it all. You might have a perspective and experience something that is valuable. for me to know about, for our community to know about. So, would love your feedback. You can email me, Josiah at hospitalitydaily.com or you can connect with me on LinkedIn. So, without further ado, let's get into it.

[intro]

Josiah: Alright, why should we spend time, attention, money on technology in hospitality, right? I mean, I imagine you spend so much of your day on your phone, on your computer, or are benefiting from technology in some way. Imagine at work you spend and your team spend so much time with systems. So, this is something we've been living with and working with for a long time, but I think we still need to view it as something that holds a lot of potential that still needs to be unlocked, right? And that is because technology matters a lot in hospitality. The reality is we're living in a world where there are so many pressures, things are changing so quickly, and technology really is a solution. It's not the only solution, but it is a solution in driving performance and a really important one that holds a lot of potential. Now, technology, of course, is so broad that I'm going to focus this conversation because if you just think about technology in the broadest sense and hospitality include everything from TVs in your rooms to the chargers you might have in your parking lot to building management systems, there's so many elements of technology. So I'm going to focus this episode specifically on software. And maybe in the future we'll have another conversation about other types of technology. But why does technology matter today? Well, we're living in a technological world and I would say that technology can give you and your team superpowers. It doesn't always give superpowers, but it has the potential to, and it's that potential that makes this worth exploring and worth investing in. At its core, technology used well in hospitality, in my view, is really an extension of hospitality. And what I mean by that is a lot of the conversation I hear about technology in hospitality is all around, you know, it's going to make people more efficient, we're going to make more profits. And I think that's true, but I think it's too simplistic and it doesn't really cover the real importance, the real potential that we have here in hospitality. For me, technology matters because at the core of hospitality, hospitality that's most beautiful is all about understanding others and providing thoughtful, meaningful experiences for them. That's what a good host is. That's what good hospitality is. That's what we all appreciate. And that's why on this show, I talk a lot about the softer sides of hospitality. It is really, really important to me that we think about hospitality in a spiritual sense, both figuratively and literally. There's so much power to that, but it's not the point of this conversation. Hospitality is also a business, and I know this having worked in many different capacities within hospitality, doing some investing in hospitality. It's a business and it needs to make money, right? And so we're going to talk about hospitality in that context. And as part of kind of framing this up and talking about the context of this, I want to talk a little bit about the expectations that people have today. You know, so if you think about hospitality as taking care of people and The people that we are taking care of is they're operating in this world where technology companies are setting their expectations in almost every aspect of their life, of our life, of my life, right? If you think about how we get entertained, how we move around the world, how we connect with each other, So much is driven through technology, and our expectations have evolved to the point where timeliness, relevance, and usefulness are table stakes, right? You have trillion-dollar companies that are going all in on doing this. And I see this because I'm based in San Francisco, grew up here, you know, in and around Silicon Valley, and this has only accelerated over the decades, right? What happens is you and I and all of us, including our guests, are taking those experiences and those expectations that we're getting from everywhere into the world of travel, into the world of hospitality. As hospitality providers, if you're not empowered, if your teams aren't empowered with some of these tools that allow you to be thoughtful, to provide personalized service, and a really seamless experience and seamless interactions, you're going to be behind. Your business is going to be way behind others, right? And so this is where technology is table stakes. And again, I fully recognize that listening to this, you probably have a whole suite of technology you're using every day, but I'm emphasizing this point to underscore the importance of thinking about technology as something that's not static. It evolves quickly, and because of that, we need to put thought, attention, and investment into this. Now, before we get into it any further, I want to give you a little bit of context on myself, a little bit of my backstory, so you know where I'm coming from and why I'm qualified to speak to this. When I was in high school, I taught myself to code because I instantly fell in love with kind of the ability to use technology to make things. I was a bit of a nerd and loved technology. So my parents were living actually in northern Michigan at the time. We had moved from San Francisco to northern Michigan. And to be honest, I wanted a way out of that. And so I thought technology might be my path to that. So I taught myself to code in high school, mostly as a way, if I'm honest with you, to avoid some other jobs that weren't as attractive to me, and taught myself to code, build some software in the communication space. It was about sharing information through something called RSS feeds. You may or may not be aware of this, but it's kind of an early form of blogs and syndicating information. But basically, through software and through technology, I saw the power and the leverage that technology provides. One thing led to another, fell in love with travel. I've told my story about that elsewhere, and I can link to it in the show notes. We can hear that full story if you want. But one of the transformative things that was happening as I was wrapping up my college experience, 2007, 2008, were social media platforms were emerging and affecting businesses in a way that they weren't before that of course that they didn't come on the scene then and Depending on the platform, but platforms like Twitter and Facebook's Facebook were coming on the scene and I was noticing how this was fundamentally altering the dynamic with hotels and really every business of course where it wasn't just the business saying here's what we are here's what we do, but there was a level of transparency that required everyone, including hospitality providers and hospitality business owners, to actually listen to people. You couldn't just take a negative comment card and throw it in the trash so your boss wouldn't see it. The stuff was public, so there's a level of transparency there. It changed everything. Sites like TripAdvisor, I ended up joining a company called ReviewPro and working in a marketing capacity early in my time there, and ended up spending a number of years with increasing levels of responsibility in marketing and in sales and business development. I was responsible for selling a suite of guest feedback tracking and feedback analytics tools. First in a marketing capacity, and then in that marketing capacity, it wasn't just buying ads. And so we would create webinars and articles and case studies about how early adopters in this new wave of technology, mostly in Europe to start with, and then globally. But we're using this and benefiting from it. And then I moved from a marketing role to a sales role. I moved to New York. I was responsible for sales for that company in the US. And through that, I got a front row seat into how hotel companies were thinking about this problem, this opportunity. And it was a tremendous learning experience. I got to visit all these clients and prospective clients from individual hotels to the very biggest hotel companies in the world and talk with their leadership teams about what they were seeing and doing. And that led to a role where I was leading global partnerships for the company and got to see what organizations, including non-hotel organizations, tourism boards, advisory groups, were doing with regards to all this data and the analytics off of that data. And so basically all of that experience gave me a very deep dive into operations, how hotel groups of all sizes around the world purchase technology. It was an absolutely fascinating experience. After that, I took a role as the head of growth at Duetto, which is a revenue management company. I got to see the world of revenue management and the importance of revenue management. To be honest, I think before I got into that world, I thought about yield management and revenue management more from the consumer side. I saw prices go up and I thought, this isn't good for me. But I got to see it from the business side, where if you think about it, if you're revenue managing There's always rooms available, so anybody who needs to stay at your hotel has the option to do that. But, and I think this is something that I've really grown in my appreciation of revenue management, revenue strategy over time, is that if you're doing that well, you're making more money for the business, which is really important if you want to have the money to invest in guest experience, if you want to pay your people well, if you want to expand to provide the sort of hospitality you're providing to more people. critical, critical functions. So I got to see that world of revenue management. From there, I moved to a company called Juniper Square, which does investment management and led growth for them as well. They manage investor relationships with some of the biggest investors in the planet. And one of the core areas of focus for me, and actually got that job just a couple of weeks before COVID, And so I ended up spending a big part of my first role there on doing a ton of market education, market research, and benchmarking around how investment managers were allocating capital in managing investment decisions. We had hotel investors as part of that, but it was a little adjacent to hospitality. One of the big takeaways I had as it relates to technology and how it affects hospitality is a couple things. One is the power of peer benchmarking and getting peer insights and sharing that among clients, in our case, in that context. The other is the power of customer success. And I'm going to talk about this a bit later, but we had so many super, super smart people within the organization that we hired from elsewhere, and we're helping our clients succeed So it wasn't just, you know, we're building technology. I was seeing the power of this, the financial impact of this. So all of that to say, I've seen the world of technology from all these different angles. And, you know, as I was moving into more leadership roles within these companies, so also buying a lot of technology and implementing a lot of technology, And so all of these experiences are going to inform what I'm going to share with you in the rest of this episode, because I've seen a lot from different angles. And as a bit of a sidebar, I have to say, working in the world of technology is fascinating. On the show, I'm always trying to Show the diversity of careers you can have in hospitality and I certainly found that in my own experience I feel like every year I had working at these companies was just an opportunity to learn at an insanely fast rate and so Very grateful for the experience I had there and I want people to know I think you know that that's definitely a very interesting area to work if you're interested in hospitality, but Let's move on to talking about where to start if you want to kind of continue down this road of making sure that you have the best technology to support you, your teams, your hospitality business. And before we even get into evaluating technology, I want to talk about what you should be doing before you start looking for technology because sometimes people will say, Hey, you know, I need X, Y, Z solution. They start jumping into evaluations, but that's a mistake. You need to start with problems. You need to start with problems and those problems can lead to opportunities for you. I can't remember where I heard this, but I heard somebody say something to the effect of innovators fall in love with problems. And that's always stayed with me. I think by seeking out those problems, listening to them, it takes a lot of conversations. It takes time. It takes looking at data. It requires observing not only what people say or the data that you are seeing, but how they actually act. And that is true for your guests. It's true for your teams. It's true for your organization, for other market participants. observation is really, really critical. And that's what I try to do on this show is bring on people who have, uh, I think, you know, great powers of observations. They can teach us all, but this is where I encourage you to start your technology journey or continue it. Cause I, I know you probably have many technology solutions in the mix right now, but to, to move forward, I really double down on observing what are the pain points, right? These could be things that you keep hearing from your teams. They're telling you that this or that is distracting them from providing great hospitality. I think what's really useful here is to start with your mission. Why do you exist as an organization? And then everything else ladders down from that. And if you think about your unique perspective of hospitality, this is where your mission and your vision and your values become so critical and hopefully move beyond just being something that's on some sort of corporate values document, and it's more about how you operate. Because once you know that, it really guides listening because you're going to have a sense of what the people on your teams or in your organization are being held back from. in doing what they want to do to help you towards your mission. That's key. I think, obviously, looking across different key areas of your business performance financially, you want to think about the goals that you have if you're a functional leader. I used to lead marketing teams, so there was marketing goals that we set. And this is where analysis is really important early on to dig into where we held back, right? What do we want to achieve? What are we held back by? And that's going to uncover what you can do to figure out how you move forward. I find this process to be really important because there are established categories of hotel technology. I'll use a property management system as an example. It's one that comes up more than any other category, if you will, in the conversations I'm having these days. It's, of course, an old category of technology. This is not new, but it's a technology that's evolving quickly. And so if you just start out with saying, hey, we need a new property management system, which sometimes happens, it's probably more likely you already have a property management system. You're trying to figure out if you have the right one. But if you just start out with that category, you're probably going to be limited by preconceptions of what the category can offer. You know, I see more and more technologies evolving to this place where capabilities are baked into platforms that didn't used to be there, right? So if you start with the pain points that you have, the challenges that you have, as opposed to some category or endpoint solution, I think you're going to be able to come up with more innovative, more effective ways of addressing that. So start with those pain points. All right, so once you have done that research, you've looked for challenges, what's holding you or your teams back, I want to talk about how you should evaluate technology, right? You've identified that pain point. And sometimes when you do that, the category of technology is immediately obvious, right? And there's market participants that are clearly the ones to go to. But I think what's really helpful at this stage, once you've done some of this digging around in your environment, your context, your company, is asking other hospitality professionals that you trust what their experience has been with the challenge or challenges that you faced and what they're doing about it. Obviously, you want to go to people that you trust, that you have that relationship with, but also look for top performers, right? I think if you want to outperform the market, you want to kind of learn from the best out there. So I would start with those conversations. But I wouldn't exclusively rely on them because I've also seen in many cases there's innovations where maybe a company that is doing something really impactful and powerful hasn't spent a ton on marketing and brand building over the years. or maybe they're a new company. And for whatever reason, there could be the situation where it has a little less awareness than it should have. I've seen this in some of the roles that I've had where you have a really interesting company and interesting technology, but it might be in a part of the world where it could help hotels equally well around the world. But people have this perception that you're based here, so you can't help me there. And that's not always the case. And so if you're only relying on market awareness, that isn't, I'm not gonna say it's not the best way to approach it, but it might be holding you back from opportunities that actually could help you. And so I think this is where shopping the market can be useful. And in doing this, of course, many people think of conferences and trade shows as what first comes to mind. can be helpful, but I think what's even more useful and of course far more efficient than a trade show is leveraging online platforms. I actually recorded a conversation with Jordan Hollander from Hotel Tech Report, which is of course the website that so many hoteliers around the globe use and trust to make their technology decisions and to help in that shopping process. What I love about it is it's organized by category, right? So if you've identified what the challenge is, the category is immediately obvious. I would just go to that category on their website and look at all the different companies providing solutions in that category. And of course, on Hotel Tech Report, you can read reviews from other hoteliers. You get a sense of what is the market saying. And I find this so useful because I've been to so many trade shows, and I've also spent a ton of money leading marketing teams at trade shows as an exhibitor. And so I know what the game looks like from both sides of this. As a buyer going to trade shows, the challenge is that booths are not typically organized perfectly by category. And so it's expensive, it's time consuming. And it can be a little tricky versus starting online with a site like Hotel Tech Report provides a really nice starting place for that. So I'd recommend doing that as a way to kind of start the shopping process. I think, of course, that sort of leads to the discussion about, you know, how do you evaluate different providers out there? We've talked about a number of elements of this. I think talking to others is so useful in this process. I used to work in sales, as I mentioned earlier, and when I was selling hotel technology, I had this pitch deck that I thought was pretty good, but it had, I don't know, 18, 20 slides, and it was like, here's the market opportunity. Here's what we offer. Isn't it cool? Here's all the other people saying good things about us. And I could give that pitch in my sleep. I knew it cold. And I think sometimes people found value in that in early meetings, but it's a bit one-sided, right? And I think I became especially aware of that as I moved into being more of a buyer of technology where people would give their pitch and, you know, it wasn't that useful, right? I could have read this on your website. And so I think what is really, really valuable is having conversations and hearing it, having as many of those conversations as you can, because you want to get a real sense of a company's ability to hear the problems that you have, and then specifically address how whatever they're offering can help you address your problems. At its core, technology is all about problem solving. If you want to get a sense of not just the product or the solution a company is selling, but how they're really going to help you solve your problems, it's really key to get an understanding of how good they are at listening to the challenges that you have and then coming up with solutions to help you. And that solution might be software, it might be in some work that you do with their team. But this is really, really key in this part, part of the evaluation process is get a sense of how are they going to solve your problems. And I would just ask them that, right, share your share your problems, see what they can do to help you solve those challenges. And I think through these conversations, you'll get a really good sense of what it's going to be like to work with them. I think people who don't know technology, who don't know problem solving really well, might hit you with all kinds of technical jargon. They're going to make it seem complicated. And in my experience as a buyer of technology, that has not led to good things. If you On the other hand, speaking with a team that is listening well and coming up with solutions that really address what you need to get done in a way that feels intuitive, then chances are good that they're going to be carrying that way of operating into your working relationship if you decide to work with them. One thing that I've observed over the years is that there's a huge range of differences in not only how good technology is, but in the quality of teams. And so that's not immediately obvious, because I think if you look at one category, you might think, is this property management system or that one, it's probably all about the same, or this payment process or that one, just flip a coin and we're probably going to end up the same in the end. and you want to find one that is really going to provide the best fit for you. And that takes some work, right? It takes some work. So I think, you know, going through this process we've been talking about of collecting the challenges, you know, hearing those problems. I think, you know, as you go through that, I should have mentioned this earlier, but as you go through that, try to collect questions and needs directly from your team members. I think the organizations that I've seen have done the best job with evaluations and end up buying technology that really drives results, usually have that in common. They collect questions and needs from a wide range of stakeholders. Most technology that you buy can and should benefit more than just the end user. If you think about any category of technology, hospitality providers that are using the product. And for those people, the interfaces of the technology need to be intuitive, needs to help them move faster, needs to help them cut down on the time it takes just to use the technology so they can spend more time with people and provide great hospitality. But then you're also going to have managers that need a sense of trends. How are each of my team members performing? Who might be underperforming and needs more coaching or training? And that, I think, only increases as you move up in leadership. You need insights. You need analytics. How do we run our business more effectively? And so there's a wide range of needs, I would say, for almost every technology category that's really critical to uncover in this evaluation process. And that's where conversations with technology providers are so, so key. I recommend actually in the first conversation or first conversations with a technology provider, Keep it pretty high level, right? Talk about the problem. Explicitly ask for their help on what they can do to solve your problem. And as you go through these conversations, I think there's very quickly going to emerge a leader or leaders that will then make up a shortlist of providers that you'll dive deeper into exploring. Depending on the scope and the significance of the solution that you're considering, it's often a good idea to involve the people who will be key stakeholders in these meetings with the technology company themselves. Because you want their buy-in, and to do that you need their feedback. I think, you know, kind of going through this process, I have learned that technology companies are, or can be, I should say, incredible resources. And I think there are some in the industry that view tech companies as just vendors. I think that is missing the opportunity here. I found that tech companies, even the small ones, are typically having conversations across the board around the globe with so many different hospitality professionals in companies like yours, companies different from yours. And so they typically have a really, really interesting point of view into the category that they operate within. And a lot of hoteliers miss that, right? They miss the education that you can get in having these conversations. And I think one of the factors behind that is a lot of technology solution providers are really, really focused on an area or maybe a handful of areas, and they invest a lot in understanding the needs, the opportunities in those areas, because the stakes are really high for them. I think one thing that may not be immediately obvious is when you're working at one of these technology companies, typically they're venture-backed, especially in the early stages, and there is incredible pressure to grow, has a wide variety of ways of manifesting, but one of it is they have to get this right. The stakes are really high. It's existential for them if they can identify and solve problems for you, because if they can't, they're not going to last long. That's why looking at partners is really key. I had a conversation recently with Jyoti Chopra, Chief People Officer at MGM Resorts, and she oversees and serves more than 77,000 people, right? And she talked about doing this with the biggest companies in technology today, but I've also seen individual hotel operators get benefits from this as well. So I guess my point is, regardless of the size of your organization, this is a really big opportunity and really to view it as such. All right, so we've looked into how to evaluate different providers in the market. Let's say you go through that whole process. You find a partner you think is going to be a great fit for you. You want to work with them. How do you make the case and get buy-in to get the investment you need to get the deal done? Now, you might be in a great position where you have discretionary budget. You can make the decision on your own. But much more typically, there's others that you need to get involved in the process to get their buy-in to make this happen. You know, one of the things that stood out to me as a salesperson is Everybody has a boss, right? Everyone, even corporate leaders that have thousands or tens of thousands of people looking up to them. They were always, always behind the scenes working to get buy-in and approvals. Even if you're CEO of a public company, you're reporting to the board, you're reporting, you're going to want to make sure that you have a compelling storyline for your investors. Everyone has a boss. Everyone needs to build buy-in. I think regardless of where you're at in your career, the better you can get at identifying challenges, like we've talked about earlier, building support cross-functionally, building a strong business case. That's how you get stuff done, right? It's incredibly important career skill. So how do you do that? Well, you need to kind of root your business case or your investment proposal in the pain points, right? What are the challenges you see? Where is it holding you, your teams, your organization back from what could be done from your goals that you have? The more that you can link this investment into high level goals, the more likely you are to get the deal done. That's where going through the exercise of building the case for investment into this is so important. And I've even found this on my own when I have been in a spot where I can invest money without checking with anyone else. I find going through the process is really important for convincing myself, right? There have been cases in the past where there's technology that looks cool. I've wanted it. But by going through the process, having structure, having rigor around it, it's made me a better professional because it helps me understand what I really need to spend on and what's going to drive that return. And I think great professionals inside and outside of hospitality always think about spending company resources like it's their own money, right? I remember having a CFO that would tell me for every dollar I give you, you know, you better create this money making machine that gives me $2 back in profits, right? And I've never forgot that. It's always good to operate with that mentality of What is my return here? How am I going to measure this? How do I use the investment that I'm taking? I'm making on behalf of the company and use it to make more money for the company. So really, really key in my experience. But, you know, let's see, go through the whole process. You get approval. It comes time to negotiating the contract, right? And the ins and outs of negotiation are, of course, beyond the scope of this conversation. One little thing that I want to share with you, it's got an insider knowledge that, I don't know, tech companies might hate me for this, but I think the right ones will appreciate it. And that is technology companies, and I will fully admit I used to do this as a salesperson, will try to lock you in for long contracts. As a salesperson, the bigger the contract, the bigger the commission I got, it gives the company you know, more security, more money. And you might hear things like, you know, there's big switching costs and you need to sign multi-year agreements to make sure that you have alignment and buy-in internally. Maybe we'll give you a discount and you need to evaluate your situation. You know, on a discount, for example, maybe it's worth doing for the discount. But in general, I like short contracts and I like contracts with an out. I like contracts where I have options. Because contracts with clauses in them where it gives me some flexibility, we're in a world where things change quickly and it mitigates my risk as a leader. If something goes wrong, I have an out. And so I like to think about this. I think, you know, great tech companies today aren't going to try to sign you in or lock you up for a 10-year contract. That's old school legacy technology thinking. Modern companies are more about providing value. And we've been kind of operating with this whole notion of software as a service for some time now where you're only paying for what you use. You're paying for what you're using as long as it's useful for you. And I see more companies adopting this model, but it's so key. It's so, so key. And if you do this, if you set up your contracts in this way, you're going to set yourself up for success and there'll be alignment with your technology partner, right? Because they are only going to make money if you're making money and you're succeeding. All right, so let's go through that whole process. You have an agreement that is set up that is going to be good for you, good for the organization. You get the agreement signed. Congratulations, you bought technology. You're good to go, right? Well, how do you get the most of that? I want to talk a little bit about that here, because buying is actually just the first part. And if you've been on this journey, you've gone through all the steps that I've talked about so far. It feels exciting, right? You got to win. You got what you wanted. You have a partner you're excited to be working with. But this is actually where the opportunity just starts. And it's actually the most critical point in my experience. I think in mountaineering, they talk about, you know, most of the accidents happen coming down from the mountain. And I think the same is true for software. You know, a lot of things go off the rails after you've bought technology. And so if you've been going through the process that I've described here so far, done your research, got buy-in from the team, been very thoughtful in how you find the right partner, we can have a collaborative, productive working relationship. That's great. You can have a foundation, but it's really, really key that you roll out technology well. And I talked a little bit earlier where in some cases, actually I think in many cases, it actually makes sense to bring in the cross-functional team that was involved in framing up some questions you were using to evaluate providers. It's really important to think about kind of bringing them into the process of rolling out the technology. And what that looks like specifically is going to be different depending on the size of your organization. If you run a company with a lot of properties versus an individual property, it's going to look a little bit different. But if you're in an environment where you have multiple properties, I think one thing that I've seen work quite well is doing a staged rollout where you have a hotel or a restaurant where there's interest and desire to be the pilot, kind of the first one rolling this out. Start there, do the implementation there, and you're going to learn a lot through that process because you're doing it, right? You're not just talking about it. And things that you learn through that process will help you as you roll out the solution to other locations. And it's also going to be really, really useful in gathering feedback you can share with your technology partner as you do this. One thing on the rollout, I really recommend buying professional services in assisting you with the implementation. Yes, it will cost more money, but it can be incredibly valuable. This depends a little bit on the category of technology. I found in some categories with some companies, they have really, really good internal services organizations where they do the setup for you, get everything teed up, and it is a great return on your investment into those services. And most of the best ones that I've seen in the market intentionally have a plan to kind of ramp down that working relationship as quickly as possible because they see success as getting the outcome, not in maximizing billable hours. So that's something to dig into as you're evaluating this. But I found it often to be a really, really good investment. I've actually, typically when I've bought software, I've spent as much or even more on the services than I do on the core technology. Because I've often found that service teams that work at technology companies that you believe are good partners have really deep expertise in what it takes to get the most out of that technology. Those technology companies have a vested interest in doing this because they're typically paid on a software as a service model where it's subscription based. If you're not using it, if you're not getting results from it, they're not going to have a great business. They typically hire really, really talented people to help you get the most out of the technology. As with evaluating software, we talked about this quite a bit, but you should do the same process for evaluating service teams at those companies. The best participants in the industry that I've seen have also really, really good implementation teams. In some categories, there's also consultants or consulting firms that do implementation well. My preference as a general rule of thumb is to work directly with the companies that are providing the technologies on the service side because they know their technology better than an external partner will. But there's some nuance to that. And so as part of your evaluation process, you might talk to individual consultants, consulting firms. There are some cases where having a third party is really useful. in the working relationship with your technology partner. But again, my preference in general is to work directly with the tech companies, just because there's typically more efficiency, there's deeper knowledge on the solution that you've purchased, but you need to decide what's best for you and the dynamics that you're working with. There's a lot of variables at play here, so it's hard to give one rule that works in every context. Once you begin rolling the software out, you'll learn a lot, as I mentioned, in terms of how that rollout goes. I have found, and this is kind of something else that's really useful in the early days of working with a technology partner, what's really important is to do a lot of internal marketing around the rollout. It's something a lot of folks miss, but you want to promote the initiative, the technology partner really heavily internally. It's true for any sort of change management, but if you can communicate with the people that you're serving what you're doing and why, it's really helpful and invaluable because it's going to take work, right? And these people that you are serving are probably already overworked. They have probably seen technology that's been implemented poorly. It's very likely that their first reaction to this is that the technology is just one more shiny new thing that's not going to deliver as promised. But if you've done your homework, you have chosen a solution that's going to drive real change, and it's going to be really, really important to helping you move your business forward. You need to communicate that. You need to advocate for this. Just like you advocated for securing investment from leadership for the technology, you need to advocate internally to get that buy-in, to make this a priority, to make sure it's implemented and used in a way that drives actual real results. And so leverage your internal communication channels. Something I have found to be really useful is to join existing meetings that are already set up. If you have weekly meetings with a team, if you have monthly cross-functional meetings, if you have a, I don't know, a standing lunch or coffee with your counterpart leader on a different team, these are all touch points you need to leverage, right? Try to take advantage of existing touch points as opposed to creating new meetings because nobody wants new meetings. Let's be honest, right? The whole point of this is to try to be as efficient as possible with people's time, because at the end of the day, that's why you're investing in technology is to try to drive more efficiency. So try to take advantage of what's already in place. Leverage existing communication channels. If you're using Slack, if you're using an intranet, if you have email, If you have staff break rooms, think about all of the existing touch points you have and how you can advocate for and communicate the innovation that you're going to be introducing, why you're doing it, and what's going on. Once the technology is up and running, you want to keep a really close eye on it. I think the, I don't think, I know the market is constantly evolving. You know that too. Guest preferences are always evolving. And so technology and innovation and getting better needs to be an ongoing conversation on an ongoing basis, right? I highly, highly recommend staying in close contact with your technology partner. Make sure that you have a sense of what's new and you have a voice in that. I want to talk a little bit about behind the scenes and how you can do that. And I think these are things that sometimes get overlooked. But one thing that I have found to be a great use of time as a buyer of technology is to become part of the technology's user community, user groups. Many of the best ones have customer advisory boards. Try to talk your way into that. Yes, it will take time out of your day to day. but it also gives you the chance to shape the future roadmap of the technology and the solution that's ultimately going to help you. It's a really high return on your time. Advocate for that. Ask for it. Raise your hand and ask to be an active role in that. I've found that often that's going to be welcomed by your technology partners. A couple other sort of insider tips, I would also recommend early on in the process being really upfront when you kick off the project, actually even before that, in kind of very early as you're finalizing your relationship with this partner, is say that you want to be the customer face, the customer reference, the case study for this company in your industry. And your goal in working with them is to create the best implementation that they have seen to date. That aligns your interests. You're going to be paying them a lot of money, but the time that you're committing to this relationship is even more valuable than that. So what you want to do is think about, how do you have that shared goal of creating an incredible customer case study? That's going to be good for them. It's incredibly valuable for them. It's going to motivate them on every level of the company from the executive team to the individuals you're working with on implementation to get the best results possible. And then actually do that case study, right? Work with them on that, be the spokesperson for them, offer to speak at conferences about the implementation. I guarantee you that if you're up on their website, if you're that customer face of the company, you're going to get a different experience than all the rest of their clients. And I can tell you this, I've, you know, worked at technology companies for 15 plus years, and those customers, there's always a couple of them, they get priority access to everything. And so I think it's a bit of a hidden hack that I think not enough folks know about. So that's it. We covered a lot here. I hope you found some of that useful. Again, my goal of recording this was to provide my point of view, share my experiences, I would love your feedback on this though, right? I tried to give you a little bit of behind the scenes view into what I've noticed as a both a seller and a buyer of technology, but I'm sure you've had different experiences. I would love to add to this conversation, right? I'd love to get your voice involved in this for our community. So whether you're a hotelier or a technology provider, I'd love your feedback. What did I miss? What did I get wrong? What has your experience been? You know, what have you found useful? You can email me, josianthospitalitydaily.com or message me on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear your story. Maybe we end up recording a conversation for this podcast. Maybe we work together in some way that will be helpful and beneficial to you in our community. But I hope you found this useful. And I guess I'll just leave you with, as I mentioned at the top, I think technology is incredibly valuable. It's important. It's evolving quickly. And I think even with all the conversation that is happening around technology, I think a lot of people get it wrong and view it as either very transactional or just kind of see a sliver of the potential. I hope this episode gave you a sort of behind the scenes view into some of the potential here. Obviously, we're in a world that's increasingly powered by artificial intelligence. There's an exponential nature to the technology that's being created now. And some of the fundamentals and best practices I've described in this episode, I think are going to put you in a position to succeed and thrive in this environment where the hospitality business technology in the space is going to be evolving incredibly quickly. And I really think this is a unique moment to stand out as a hospitality professional. If you do this well, it's gonna be great for your career, it's gonna be great for your company, it'll be great for your owners, investors, great for your team, great for your guests. I think it's one of the things that I'm most excited about is this idea of technology being this opportunity to empower others, whether it's our team members, so that they can serve guests, if it is empowering guests themselves to really enjoy their travels. And so I think there's a huge opportunity to delight people with this and also to make money. This is a business and your business needs to make money so that you can pay your people well, you can invest in a great guest experience and do more of what is so cool about what you're doing in hospitality. So I hope you found this useful. I'd love to hear your feedback. Let me know. And I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.