How Becoming A Hotel Owner Expanded My Perspective on Hospitality - Jeremy Wells

Josiah: A couple of years into this ownership journey, I'm curious how your thinking may have evolved in becoming an owner, if at all. Have you noticed any kind of like change of perspective or new things that you're thinking about now as an owner?

Jeremy: There's definitely been a new perspective. Wearing my ownership hat. as a hotelier and then wearing my brand strategist hat at Longitude. I'm able to have a lot better, deeper, richer discussions early on with clients, letting them know that I understand what they're going through, their motivations, their thoughts, and what keeps them up at night. I understand all of that intimately now, and I can relate to that. And I can also provide a lot prior to becoming an owner. I didn't have a lot of understanding behind certain decisions, or at least on paper, I did, but knowing what the outcomes of that could mean. It's not just a matter of doing cool branding and cool visuals. No, it's ultimately the bottom line. It's how you run your business. You operate your hotel, it's how you build your culture, it's who you even bring on for your management partner, who you select for food and beverage, and all these different things, all these different considerations of your guest journey. It's branding and concepting and just having a solid strategy through all that is so important. And I've seen it even more so now as an owner, the benefits of that. Before, I could only talk about that, but now I can actually share my firsthand experience with it, which has been really great.

Josiah: I'm curious on the guest experience specifically, are there things that you're doing more of or less of now that you are an owner with regards to guest experience?

Jeremy: I would say just personally, I mean, I'm thinking about it probably a little bit more holistically in the sense that prior to being an owner, you know, I thought, and you might even read this in my book, my first book, Future Hospitality is, It's not just the on property experience and the approach to a hotel or how your stay is in the room or how, you know, staff treat you and all those are all important things. But even more so like, you know, a brand can and should be more and mean more than what a lot of times people make it out to be. You know, brands should impact not just the guests but also the staff. It should be impacting the community. It should be bettering people in that community and as a whole. It really needs to stand for more. There are a lot of brands and we're trying to not be this and to the best of our ability, but there are a lot of brands that are just very, I guess I hate to use the word shallow, but for lack of a better term, kind of the shallow, like we look cool, we say all the right things, but when you go a little bit deeper, Um, there's not much there and we want to make sure that any brands that we're part of, it's the best of our ability and our involvement in that project to make sure that they're really making an impact, making a difference, not just kind of a face level or, you know, whatever the wording is.

Josiah: Do you feel like by operating that way, you're able to build enduring value, even on a real estate level, like does the operating business become more valuable when you're investing deeper into this?

Jeremy: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think because a lot of that investment that you're talking about right now is a very long-term mindset. I read the book by the founder of Patagonia a while back called Let My People Go Surfing. I think he said something like this where, you know, he wanted to think through his brand as if it were like a hundred-year business, right? And so that when you think outside of just like a three to five-year return and exit in real estate and you think more long-term and more like you want to create a real impact, you're not going to see the fruits of that necessarily short-term from an investment level. But I think long-term you're building long-term value for that real estate and ultimately making a better impact on that community. I think you get a lot more buy-in from the community. You get a lot more excitement from guests because when you're really trying to make an impact or really trying to be collaborative and trying to connect to the locale where you're at, guests see that from just a service standpoint and a programming standpoint. So there is short-term value in it and there is value for the brand. But ultimately, just like you would if you're creating a brand online and you have to do all these SEO organic search type optimizations and you're not going to see value from SEO for six months, a year, two years, or more, but you have to start doing that out of the gate and then you're going to start to see the fruit of that. So I think it's a similar investment. It's just a lot of people are a little bit more short term or short-sighted when it comes to that type of thinking.

Josiah: Well, it's all about playing long-term games with long-term thinkers, right? And people, any sort of hospitality project is a collaboration, right? With not just the investors, the developers, and the operators but also the community at large. And so it's cool to kind of not only see how you advise others to do that, but that you're doing it yourself with the Ozarker. And it's also cool, you know, you've been preaching the gospel of this for some years, but you've become an owner, and your tune hasn't changed, right? You're still talking about this. You see this even with your owner's hat on, that this is the way to succeed in hospitality.