Why I Work in Hotel Tech & What I See Now - Josiah Mackenzie & Sloan Dean

Sloan: So you've been a marketing professional for the vast majority of your career. You've worked for multiple tech companies, now you're the head of marketing at Actabl. Give advice to other marketing professionals out there, whether they're working for a hotel company or a tech company in hospitality. What are some tricks of the trade? That's gotta be really frustrating, you know, that you're trying to market and hey, customer, and we're just really slow to adopt.

Josiah: It can be frustrating, but if we are creating AI tools for, I don't know, marketers, you'd probably see much faster adoption. But the impact is very significant when you bring innovation, you bring technology into hospitality. That's what's so exciting. If you think about the scale of the hospitality business, of the travel business, it is huge. It employs so many people. So you can build something extraordinary. You can drive real change. You think about all the people that work in hospitality, if you could make their lives better, there is so much opportunity there. So that gets me fired up. That's why I love the work that I do, is the chance to think about how do we empower the people who power hospitality. That's our mission at Actabl. It's been my personal mission ever since I can remember, is to think about how do we make their life better. Technology can do that. It's not a given, though. Some technology actually makes people's lives worse, and so it's not just throw technology at it.

Sloan: I have lived that a couple of times. Not to mention a bad rollout can cause adverse reaction. You know what I mean by that is if all of a sudden you guys have Labor Management Software, Hotel Effectiveness, if you roll that out poorly and the GMs and the people are not trained properly, they can almost, they just automatically have a negative, oh, well this makes, like you said, makes my job harder. Whereas you think it's making their job easier, it can have the adverse effect.

Josiah: And I think it's been cycles of technology being rolled out and not delivering on the promise happening over and over again. That has led to this environment where it's a laggard. There's very smart people, very creative, innovative people in hospitality. If you think about hospitality broadly speaking, if you think about innovations about how do we use physical space and real estate to engage people, how do we drive revenue, hospitality has often been at the forefront of innovation and creativity. I think it's been a laggard with regards to technology from the perspective of this is an environment where the real world is meeting the technological world. And so it's that interface of how is the technology used, how is the technology built? Take a step back. How do we think about building products that serve the needs of the people we're here to serve? And so I think as a technology company, we think deeply about that. We follow around people working these different functions of hospitality. So it starts on a product development level. As a marketer, I see my job as helping drive adoption for technologies I believe are gonna make a material difference in the individual lives of the people we're serving and also in the business, in financial outcomes. So I think it's table stakes, litmus test of great technologies, that's saving you time. Right? So I think for anyone listening that's evaluating technology, it's like, does it save you time or not? It also needs to drive financial outcomes. And going back to the earlier part of our conversation, just understanding the incentives in how capital works in a hotel business is really important here. I mean, at the end of the day, these are operating businesses, and they're also real estate investments, right? That's what makes hospitality interesting. But for both of those, you have to drive profits to increase the valuation of the real estate, right? So if you work backwards from that, then the key thing, the key metric to focus on is gross operating profit, right? I think RevPAR has been sort of worshiped in many respects as the leading indicator. I've seen more and more shift towards profits being the North Star. That's good to see. And then as a technologist, and as somebody who is leading marketing for Actabl, what I think a lot about is where do I see examples of the technology used in a way where they're driving real results, right? It's not enough to even, you have the best technology in the world. It's not enough to say, hey, here's your login, go have fun, go drive results. You have to empower people to use it well. Right? So there's an education component to it. There's a component where you're thinking about who are, you know, in a large organization there's often some pilots run where there's some individuals or teams that are testing this and kind of where do you see it working? Right? How do you put a spotlight on that? I've worked with so many different teams across the roles that I've held, mostly in operations, but I worked in revenue management for a while and I saw this again and again. There's often a forward thinking, innovative leader in a company that wants to drive change. They have a business goal they want to achieve. Working with them to understand why is that, making sure they have the tools. There's often internal selling that's needed. And so I think for, you know, you've seen this over and over again, Sloan, if you wanna make a change happen, you gotta sell it. And so I think as a marketer, I wanna give you tools to help drive that change, to sell internally the change that you wanna see. And then as it's being rolled out on the property level, whether it's a general manager or someone on the front lines, in any portfolio, there's always a couple that are doing really, really well. And so again, this is less about a technology company or thinking about it from a marketing perspective. If you just wanna drive change, you have to have a product that's actually gonna do it. Then you have to spotlight evidence of what change looks like, what does the impact, how did we get there? It helps everyone move forward. And so this isn't about just running an ad or hosting an event. You have to think very systemically around how are we gonna go from A to B. What's that journey look like? What are you gonna get if you go on that journey? Because you gotta do a lot of selling internally. I'm sure you could speak for hours on that.

Sloan: Oh, a hundred percent. I mean, this is a judgment on the industry. We just do not do process change well. You know, if you look at other industries where, you know, like manufacturing or where process is front of mind and detail oriented steps, and then, you know, I think often a hotelier goes and buys a piece of software and then just wants to plug it in. And that's not the way things work. You have to train, advocate, like you said, get internal stakeholders that really believe in it and shepherd it forward and it's iterative. And I have seen more projects fail than be successful, unfortunately, because you can't just go buy something off the shelf and plug it in.

Josiah: No, but the importance of doing this is more important now than ever. The macro environment is uncertain. Top line demand is flat to reducing. So I think in that environment, you have to be really careful about costs. You know, how do you save money? That's how you're gonna drive profits. So that's a bit of a defensive move. And you can look at things like labor, typically the biggest operating expense. How do you optimize that? But also there's the offensive move about how do you grow? And again, it depends on where listeners are in the ecosystem. But if you're a management company, for example, you're gonna grow where you can demonstrate a track record of outperformance, right? And so there's something about stealing market share by building a better engine that can demonstrate higher performance. And so I think for the leaders listening, I mean, this is how you win today, regardless of the economic climate. I think you have to look at what is in your control today.

Sloan: Yeah, I totally agree. So when it comes to marketing solutions to hospitality companies, what has been the most compelling argument you make? I'm sure it depends on the customer, but what is your first reaction?

Josiah: The first reaction is performance. I think if it's not going to drive profits, to be more specific, it's not gonna happen. I think a fast follow to that is how do I do that? Because I think, okay, yes, you can make the profits increase significantly, but if it is gonna be a massive lift, that's gonna be really difficult for our team to pull off, that's challenging then, right? So I think there needs to be clarity around, hey, here's a big unlock you can make, here's the proof where we've seen others, your peers that are doing this, and here's the path to getting to that result as quickly as possible. You have to be truthful, right? I think in some circles, marketing and communication gets a bad rap because of marketers that have been less than truthful. The reality is, and this is especially true in the hospitality industry, people are talking to their peers when they're making decisions, right? You're not gonna see an ad and buy a multimillion dollar piece of software, right? And so you have to have a track record of actually delivering results and being a true partner, a trusted partner.

Sloan: I completely agree with that. I mean, it's like your best salespeople are your current customers, you know? Getting them on the phone. I mean, anytime I was in the CEO seat and make the final decision maker on either software or a big change, I would always wanna talk to two or three references. And it wouldn't just be the people they would give me. I would go out and source, you know, oh, you know, my friend who's also a CEO of a third party hotel management company. I would go talk to them and, hey, I know, I hear you're using Hotel Effectiveness. Does it really increase productivity? Does it really drive down overtime? What do you think? And that really has a lot of influence.

Josiah: A hundred percent. And I think we talked a little bit about product. We were talking off air about did Actabl ever kill a feature? And the answer is so many, so many. I'm not gonna give a specific feature or product because we kill so many or move them back in the roadmap because we are moving up in the roadmap upgrades on core products, or we're always assessing where is the market now? What do our customers need? And so there's things that we think are like, this would be really cool to have. And then we talk to customers and it's like, what's going on in your world? And so a couple months ago we released this digital night audit product where the night audit process is so antiquated and we're hearing from so many people, observing in so many situations, hey, this is a high point of leverage, right? So we bring that out, we push other things back. It is a constant dance to stay relevant and helpful.

Sloan: So that highly automates the night audit function.

Josiah: Exactly. And so instead of hours and dozens of pages of paperwork every night, it's, besides the time savings, there's also just the digitization component. And I think you very sharply pointed out, in an AI driven world, it all comes down to data. And I do want our listeners to be experimenting personally and professionally with AI, thinking about what this looks like. But data is the underlying aspect. And so a lot of my time and attention and organizationally Actabl, our focus is on digitizing these work streams. Because unless these work streams are digitized, you have the best AI models in the world, they're not gonna do much. Right? So there's a huge opportunity now to think about digitizing these processes. How do I make sure it's not living in some back storage unit in crates, binders full of pages. And instead it's all digitized and then you can apply AI. And I think that's a part of the AI conversation that's missing now and a big unlock for many listening to our show.