Inside the Malibu Beach Inn Turnaround: The Two-Year Journey to the Top of Luxury Hospitality - Gregory Day

Gregory: When I came to work for Mani Brothers and we got this hotel, they brought me out. We had dinner and I mean, it was very good. But it was so funny when I did a little tour of the rooms and everything. Unique thing about this hotel, no matter what, you could have it really almost be a dump if you wanted it to be, because every single room faces the ocean, right? So that's a unique thing. So your expectations are already met, so to speak, when you walk in the door. But I walked in and this was before dinner. This was maybe four o'clock in the afternoon. And whoever was the executive housekeeper at the time, she was kind enough to give me the tour and the things I remember seeing, out of curiosity, why are the curtains closed? And oh, it gets really hot in the rooms.

I'm just taking notes. I'm thinking, okay, facing the ocean, if it was turned down, if it was nighttime, okay, I get that. But this was four o'clock in the afternoon, which actually I think was the time to check in. I thought that's an interesting thing to do.

And the furniture I remember being, I mean, it wasn't bad, but I remember thinking to myself that if I had been blindfolded and taken, kidnapped and dropped in this room with the curtains closed and I had to guess where I was, I probably would've guessed Denver. It was dark woods and a giant leather chair and it just didn't feel like Malibu or LA. It just felt out of place.

A lot of the physicality of the property just wasn't right. It just needed a lot of work. I went in with that mindset. When we bought it, we inherited all the staff.

First thing we did was we closed down the hotel entirely and we redid the oceanfront terrace, the restaurant and what is now the reception desk, because that didn't even exist at the time. So I used that time. I brought everyone to our corporate office in West Hollywood and for four days I basically did a really intense TED talk and training with everybody on this is what, I'm not saying anything you did was the wrong thing. I'm just saying it's not what we're doing anymore going forward. This is what we're gonna start to do. And I'm not expecting you to do all this on the first day. I'm just wanting to give you guys a roadmap of what this is gonna look like.

It'll take us, I believe, and I said this, we bought the hotel in 2015. I said, it'll take us two years to get where I think we need to go both physically and from a training perspective. I need you guys all to understand what is gonna be expected of you. And there's no harm if afterwards you want to come to me privately and say, this isn't for me. We'll work that out, no problem. Otherwise I'm gonna move forward with this in mind. Well, I don't think anybody opted out, but within about two months, we had reduced the staff by about 25% because it just wasn't gonna work. They didn't understand, they didn't want to understand what needed to get done.

And there are little things that don't seem like a lot, but they mean a lot to guests. Using a guest's name is kind of a big deal. And so we put some things in place, like in the restaurant, we started the system where we started taking every guest name. If they were a walk-in, the printer chip comes up with the guest names on it and it's given to the server. So there's really no reason for you not to know the name. But we couldn't get people to do that. We couldn't get people, the staff, particularly in the restaurant, to serve drinks from a tray rather than carry them with their hands.

There wasn't much to do on the room side until we did the renovation. But getting the staff, that was a whole thing to get the housekeeping team to understand. Well we started putting, every room has, as you would know now because you're staying there, we've got an espresso machine, which I think every hotel has now, but what most hotels don't have, we've got a Smeg tea kettle. And that's for me because I don't drink coffee. And there's nothing worse than trying to run hot water through a coffee machine and put tea in it. It's pretty foul. But we added all these elements and the housekeeping team was like, we can't do all this. I'm like, you can, you're just gonna have to work with me. And it's not, it'll take some time, but you'll learn it. You'll adapt to it. And I worked in the first, I don't know, two months. I worked in every single position in the hotel in uniform as an employee because I thought it was important.

I mean, over the course of two months, it wasn't two months contiguously. Maybe I would do the overnight shift as an engineer, and I'd do turndown another night and then I go do my day job for a few days, and the next week I do something else. But I needed to do that to understand what the team needed and also what they're doing. Anybody can come in and start pointing fingers and saying, well, this is wrong and we're going to do this. I wanted to approach it as, let me understand what they're doing. Let me walk a mile in your shoes, kind of a thing. And then even if I still want to change it, I've got a much better context of how to do so rather than just simply saying, do it.

I mean, it'd be like, hey, you remember how we did the, what if we did this? And this is what took two years was getting, we turned over almost everybody within two years. There are still a few that are here from day one. But it was also getting the team to, you've gotta plant little seeds with everybody and eventually let them come to you with the idea. And because if it's their idea, even though it may have been yours to begin with, if you just kind of plant that seed and you're waiting and you're waiting and then two weeks later, hey, what if we did this? I'm like, hey, that's a great idea because people will support what they help create.

And we really committed to that. And my timing wasn't too far off because in January of 2017, we became Leading Hotel of the World and we got our Virtuoso accreditation. So it was pretty much what I thought it would be. It took about two years.