From Chaos to Clarity: Using Tech as a Force Multiplier in Your Hotels - Kevin Kelleher [Sponsor Bonus]

Josiah: This week we've been learning from Kevin Kelleher about leadership and hospitality and the tough challenges that hotel leaders are tackling every day. What I really appreciate about Kevin is how he brings his own operational experience into those conversations. It's something that he shared with us on the show this week and something that he does every day in his role as account manager at Actabl, helping hotels run more effectively with the right technology. In this special sponsored episode, Kevin shares a framework that I think is really useful. And it's how elite teams like Navy SEALs think about performance and what that mindset can teach us about using technology in hotels. He also walks through real examples of how he and our teams at Actabl are helping hoteliers work smarter, save time, and scale their ability to deliver great hospitality. So if you want to better understand what technology can do for your team and get some practical ideas that you can put into action, keep listening.

Josiah: When you start having some first conversations with a hotelier, how do you help them think about what they need to be performing in a way that helps them hit their goals?

Kevin: Absolutely. In my reflection and learning and reading and investing by myself and reading things outside of hospitality or general business stuff, as I look to elite operating forces, such as Navy SEALs, Green Berets, Delta Force, they call themselves force multipliers. And there's a number of reasons they call themselves force multipliers is we do more with less, right? We may have a unit of 8, 10 people out in an unknown environment against way more people. So they need to be able to communicate well. They need to be able to be experts of their craft. They need to be able to utilize technology, whether it's through GPS or satellites or communications. These people are the best in the world. So I've taken those learnings and it's resonated to me on my leadership, but also the way I look at technology and the way you look at current state of number of bodies you have in your hotel to be able to handle these tasks, manual tasks. So technology to me is a force multiplier. Whether it's ProfitSword by creating your budget and forecast, be able to understand your numbers through there, understand salesperson productivity, not through a manual process. That allows you to do more with less. You look at a tool like Hotel Effectiveness. I can do more with less and be a lot more accurate there. And then you look at a tool like Alice and Transcendent and Alice, I worked on it. It was the most... Of all the things that the team came back to after we reopened the hotel was Alice was the thing that they were most excited about. Not the lobby, not the rooms, not the uniforms, but Alice. Because before we worked on three or four different systems, we had a concierge system, we had a guest ticketing system, we were using PMS for opening the house. We were using a text messaging service. We got everything under one screen. And that allowed them to do way more with less. They didn't have to do a walkie talkie. They didn't have to flip over this screen. They could see it all on one screen. So again, doing more with less. And then you get into a transcendent tool where everything is managed for them. The director of engineering doesn't have to map out their preventive maintenance. They don't need to make a ton of different checklists. They don't need to know what's the life expectancy of this equipment is and have to figure out how much it's going to cost to fix it. And when it's going to happen, that takes a lot of manual work. So a lot of hotels where you had a director of engineering, you had an assistant director of engineering, you had a project engineer, you had shift engineers, you had all these specialty engineers. Now you don't need that with a tool like Transcendent because everything is done for you for the most part. So again, when I look at technology, it's how can I multiply the amount of work that my team can do without a huge investment. Some of the things you may want to achieve with technology, without technology, you're going to have to invest in another FTE or another employee or leader to be able to do your analysis or hire an extra operator or hire an extra house attendant, hire an extra engineer, hire another director of engineering. You're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. With doing that with some of our solutions, you're going to be paying an absolute fraction of it. Plus, there's an ROI on it.

Josiah: That's amazing. Where does Hotel Effectiveness come into the picture and what does that allow some of the hotels that you've seen using it well do?

Kevin: I would say Hotel Effectiveness is one of your critical systems. There's so many benefits, but if you look at what it impacts and what it controls, it controls your people, your product, and your profit. Product being your service or your actual room product or maintenance, right? Again, if you have a system like Hotel Effectiveness, it's going to control your largest manageable expense. If you have your labor under control through a spreadsheet, I can guarantee you do not have it under control. I've been there. I've done it. I've done budgets that way. So having Hotel Effectiveness, there is a huge return on investment. If you look at all of your expenses, you're doing your contingency planning right now. And you're thinking, geez, I'm hitting my numbers where we need to pull from. I need to pull out of my technology stack, and you have owner saying, what's this? And all these expenses are going up. Thing about Hotel Effectiveness can differ from all of your expenses. Your electric's going up, your water cost is going up, your supply cost is going up, your liquor cost is going up, food cost is going up. You really can't control those things. And it's not going to give you really any return on an investment. Like electricity, what's that going to do? It's not going to attract more guests in because you have your electricity on. Hotel Effectiveness is going to bring you so much more money back into your operation. I have had customers that have seen a 40, 50% reduction in overtime year over year just by using Hotel Effectiveness. Within one month of using it, they saw a 45% reduction in overtime. It's not even just the dollar and cents of it. It's also going to make the lives of your managers so much better. They're going to spend less time creating their schedule. They're going to trust the way their schedule is. They're going to spend less time trying to figure out what happened this week, and they're going to be spending more time in the operation. So if you are in a tight operations and you have a tight labor model at the leadership level, if you're going to be doing it through an Excel model, how much time is it going to take them to do it? And then you want them to work on the front desk. You want to do these administrative things. If you could get a schedule done in 10 minutes and be able to, instead of doing it in an hour, then you can have them do multiple jobs, but give them the tools to be able to do multiple jobs.