The Chemistry Major Who Makes Hotels Better, One Data Point at a Time: Shozib Khan, Spire Hospitality

Josiah: Today, we kick off a two-part special with Shozib Khan, who is the VP of Hotel Performance and Analytics at Spire Hospitality. Shozib has a really unique perspective as he started out his career through an unexpected path. You're going to hear about that here in this episode, but what I really want you to hear from him is the process he used. It's something that I think we can all use to elevate the way we provide hospitality and the way that we support the people providing hospitality. It's an approach that he's used with great success at the hotels and companies he's worked with. So without further ado, here's Shozib talking about his approach to elevating hospitality through the scientific method. 

[intro]

Shozib: My story is very similar to most in this industry. I did not think that I was going to be in the hospitality industry as I was starting out my career. I was going to school and studying chemistry as my major. And I absolutely needed to find a way to generate some income as well. And so there was a hotel right next to the university that I was attending. And I signed up to work at that hotel and my very first position was shuttle driver. Shortly after shuttle driver, I moved over to the front desk. And less than a year later, the RVP at the time pulls me into the office. Hey, how would you like to be the assistant general manager? I was 19 at the time. At that time, this was a very interesting business. It was a business, first of all, it was the real world scenario. We were a hotel, smaller, but we were doing about $10 million in annual sales. The hotel was valued at about $25 million, and I was going to be the number two in command. And that's how I started in the hospitality side.

Josiah: Well, talk about career mobility and opportunities in hospitality. I think your career experience is one that many of our listeners are going to recognize and resonate with. It's just awesome what you can do early on in a career in hospitality.

Shozib: My background in studying science absolutely helped with me understanding the dynamics in hospitality. So it necessarily was not something that I started with where there was an experience that drove me to hospitality. But one of the things that interests me so much about hotels is that here you have a standing business. And when you're a smaller select service or focused service hotel, you're touching every aspect of the business. You're diving into sales and marketing. You're learning a little bit about accounting. You have to absolutely understand building engineering. And we can't forget the leadership and people side of the business is at the end of the day, it's just a building. The people are the ones that are bringing it to life. So early on, I realized the power of people because the building absolutely didn't have a soul, but the people there and the relationship between the people and the interactions with the guests that we were having. But most importantly, the things that were challenging our staff. So one of my very first experiences with data and hospitality was we had a maintenance team that couldn't understand why all the rooms on the second and third floor were always getting worn out. They just couldn't understand that they kept talking to the front desk and they say, hey, can you please start checking people in on higher floors? We have seven floors in this building. Why are the rooms on the second and third floor always getting worn out? My approach to that was, well, there has to be some kind of report in this PMS system. I mean, this is 2000. This is early on. The PMS system is still DOS based. It's still a dot matrix printer. So there has to be something that we can come up with. And surely enough, found a report buried deep within the PMS system that gave you occupied room statistics. The chief engineer knew that there was something happening that was assigning rooms on the second and third floor. I wanted to find data that supported that hypothesis. Surely found a report that showed that the rooms on the second and third floor were 20 to 30% more frequently assigned than the rooms higher up. Next question was why. And discovered that when you're going through the check-in process, it automatically started assigning rooms lowest to highest, numerical. And it was one quick phone call to support that said, hey, can you please change the setting and change the setting so that it starts assigning rooms highest to lowest? And instantly this challenge that our chief engineer was facing, that our building was facing, our front desk team was facing was solved. So that was my first way of using my approach to data where if there's anything that can be found that can support a hypothesis, what variables can be changed to make an impact on the outcome? And can we find a way to measure that change so that we know that we actually made an impact?

Josiah: There's so many elements I love in this because I'm hearing attentiveness to colleagues on what's going on in the hotel. I'm hearing a curiosity of what's behind this. And then you follow up on that curiosity to keep seeing how could our technology, how could our reporting address this thing that I'm observing in the hotel. And you're also engaged with your technology partner. One call. Can you change this? There's a lot on what you just shared. I think our listeners can learn from.

Shozib: And it was just exciting. And so that was where my love for finding ways using the scientific method and leveraging the technology and the resources that we have in hospitality, they just came to an intersect. And from there I evolved to revenue management because revenue management at that point was still a new concept. When we take a look at how revenue management evolved and when roles of revenue management really came in, it was really in the early 2000s where companies started adopting it. For me, revenue management was, there's now data that brands are measuring. And they're sharing this data with you. But what do you do with it? And took a curious interest in understanding what that data was and finding ways to implement strategies. That's literally what revenue management is. Implement strategies, sell strategies, rate strategies, fill strategies, length of stay strategies and finding to see how that data that the brands are applying is going to change once we pull all these levers. And so my career naturally evolved from the room side of the business to revenue management, from revenue management into senior leadership. I ended up doing for a little bit a director of sales and marketing role as well. I remember early on investing in Yahoo AdWords. And this is before Google was really a thing. And you're really adopting pay-per-click marketing and finding a path from pay-per-click marketing to our revenue management strategy. And just getting excited of, at that point, IKEA was a demand generator for our market. How many room nights folks were actually picking up that were just traveling in to go visit IKEA? That's amazing.

Josiah: It's amazing. So you're seeing all these different areas in these different elements of a hotel business. Today, you're leading hotel performance and analytics at Spire. I think there's so much of what you described there I want to get into, but I have to ask you, I always ask my guests, why do you still work in the world of hospitality? You've kind of seen it all. What keeps you in this industry?

Shozib: It's so exciting and rewarding because it's ever evolving. From my viewpoint, hospitality is usually on the leading edge, but it's also on the lagging edge, both at the same time. There are things that we're doing that are innovative, cutting edge, but there's also legacy that we have to account for. We have some hotels that have PBX systems that are still 20 years old. And if you take a look at how technology is evolved, if I asked you to utilize a phone that was 20 years old, I don't think you'd want to utilize it. So we have challenges that are dated and then we also have opportunities that are cutting edge. And that's why there's no dull moment.

Josiah: Tell me a little bit more about the opportunities that are cutting edge, because I've heard a fair amount and I've seen a fair amount around hospitality being behind other industries in terms of technology adoption. I'm curious on being on the leading edge. I mean, I think what you mentioned earlier, revenue management, hotels were among the first industries and businesses to adopt these practices. Not the very first, but I would say among other sorts of businesses that could use revenue management, they were early. Where else do you see hotels or hospitality being at the leading edge of innovation?

Shozib: From my viewpoint, airlines typically find ways to make things and come up with solutions that hospitality then finds ways to adopt to. It's really the genesis of revenue management started in the airline industry and hospitality took that and evolved with it. When we take a look at a lot of the innovations that airlines are trying to do to ensure that their planes are a hundred percent full, that ability to check in at least 24 hours. So there's a touch point with the consumer that you're going to be on that plane. We still don't have technology in the hospitality side that's adopted universally that allows that checkpoint with the guest. There are different brands that are coming up with different initiatives that allow you to check in on your phone so you can get that data, get a key assigned digitally that forces you to. But airlines, you need a boarding pass. There's no boarding pass that you need to check into a hotel. That's where they're lagging. But on the leading side, we are a people business and where we end up leading mostly is when it comes to taking care of our team members and taking care of our guests. At the end of the day, we are providing a service. Airlines are too, but we're providing a service where there's true human interaction for a long period of time. And we have the ability to make memories. Airlines necessarily don't. As I matured in my career and evolved into higher roles, we started harvesting the data. This is going to be 10, 15 years ago. Started harvesting the data that we had available to find ways to create an experience for a guest that was checking in. I'll give you an example. Most loyalty programs have the ability to record month and day for your birthday. If you look hard enough and deep enough, you won't find their year, but you'll know what month and what day they were born. So every single day as part of our process, we would go through our arrivals list and we would find guests that had a birthday coming in during their trip. And we would find that information and manually handwrite birthday cards to guests that were coming in, that were going to be staying with us. And yes, it was not automated. It was very manual and you had to check the arrival list and it was work that needed to be done, but we were able to create memories for folks that they had never experienced before. And so from leading, it's not necessarily leading edge tools, but the creativity side, in my viewpoint, is the part that hospitality is really, really good at. We are really, really good at being very creative.

Josiah: I love that example because it positions, I guess your whole framing of what you just described as innovation stands out because innovation isn't always technology. Sometimes it uses technology, sometimes it is supported by technology. It isn't always the technology itself is where the innovation or where the advantage can come from. And I think your example is perfect. I've heard you talk a lot about the power of people and what you just described, you need that data, you need systems that help you collect and organize it, but there's a human element to it. And so it's interesting, I think, in the context of innovation, sometimes hospitality is seen as an industry that lags, but this is an area of opportunity where I think our listeners can stand out and I see where you demonstrate leadership in your organization and standing out in this area. So I think it's remarkable.