The People Side of Data: How We Spend Less Time on Reports, More Time with Guests (And Still Thrive) - Shozib Khan, Spire Hospitality

Josiah: Today we continue our conversation with Shozib Khan, VP of Hotel Performance and Analytics at Spire Hospitality. Yesterday in our episode, Shozib shared his unique journey into hospitality as a chemistry major in university and introduced us to how he used curiosity, you might even call it the scientific method, to make life better both for guests and his teams around him. And if you heard that, I'm sure you were asking yourself the same question that was on my mind, and that is, what exactly does that look like across the hotel business? How can you simplify your data and your analytics and your reporting so you can spend less time buried in reports and more time connecting with the people you're serving, both guests and team members? Well, in this episode, Shozib breaks down exactly how he and his teams did that, sharing examples like turning intimidating 50-page reports into really simple, clear, actionable insights, which frees up hoteliers, of course, to focus on the most important parts of hospitality. So if you're looking to escape data overwhelm and get more time back to deliver exceptional guest experiences for you and your team, you're going to love this episode. Let's get into it. 

[intro]

Shozib: My experience in ops helped me frame the strategies we're utilizing today in my current capacity. So a lot of the frustrations that I had when I was boots on the ground were that people were afraid of numbers. They thought that data and finding information were tedious, difficult, and time-consuming. The other side of it was that there was a lot of mistrust of the data that was available. You have folks who had been operating for years that just had a pulse and a gut on what their operations were producing. And sometimes that gut was 100 percent on point. But there were other times when the data didn't support that. There was also this disconnect between how much time we should spend on analysis of P&Ls, analysis of reports, versus being where it actually matters, being in front of our guests, being in front of our team members. All those frustrations that I experienced, of course, I did my very best to overcome them when I was on the hotel, even as a general manager, I did my very best. But I found success in changing that attitude by showing small wins to our team. How small impacts and how small decisions using data as support can potentially generate better outcomes. It's what led me to take on the role of hotel performance analytics for the management company. One of the very first items that I was tasked with was put together an outline of what data strategy looks like for Spire Hospitality. This was about seven, eight years ago. Instead of putting something together on what our data strategy looks like, we focused on preparing something where we can say the people side of data strategy. This ended up becoming the guiding principle for our department, where our principles were very simple. We wanted to create a culture where accessing data is not tedious, scary or difficult. We started with that at a time when we were reviewing P&Ls by printing out 50 page reports.

Josiah: 50 pages is a lot of stuff! I love this notion that you're getting at, because you're changing culture by naming it, but you're also changing it by showing the wins. So you look at this 50 pages, you're like, this could be an opportunity for some improvement here.

Shozib: A hundred percent. We had some of our veteran general managers that were using a ruler to go line by line on the P&L. And if they wanted to tie something from the first page to the last page, you had to flip pages. And this was 2018. This wasn't that long ago. This was seven years ago.

Josiah: So how do you do that? Okay. So you see 50 pages. I'd love to get really tactical. What are the next steps you take to simplify this?

Shozib: Well, this is a pretty interesting evolution. So let me share a couple more from our people side, and this will make perfect sense to you when I share this out. We started with a culture where accessing data is not tedious or scary. Then find ways to ensure that the data is complete and accurate. We knew that the department leaders at the hotel at that point were going to be future general managers or future VPs or future leaders in our industry. So we wanted to find a way where we deploy growth to not just the senior managers of the hotel, but folks that were like me, that were just starting out in their career. We wanted to find ways to encourage our department leaders to search for data insights that drive change. So things that I was doing, things that my team was doing, we wanted to deploy that at a greater scale to our portfolio of 30 hotels. Of course, everyone says this, every business is going to say this. We wanted to increase efficiency by eliminating manual processes. But the most important thing was we wanted to find a way to give time back. I discovered early on that the most valuable commodity that any hospitality professional has is time. In fact, that's the most important commodity anyone has. There's a set number of minutes that you have every single day. And we wanted to find a way to give time back. And that's where we started looking for tools and solutions that can help us with this people side of the data strategy. At that point, we had a partner called ProfitSword. It was not an Actabl product at that point. Surprisingly, the management company had ProfitSword and it was on the shelf for a couple of years. And we were using it just for income journals. So mission number one was finding ways to deploy ProfitSword so we could literally give time back. And it took us a year to really launch ProfitSword and ensure that it ends up becoming part of our culture. And we successfully launched it. And not only were we able to generate positive results for our ownership groups where we created value, but we also gave time back to our hotel teams and aligned back with the strategy that we had put in place where we wanted to focus on the people side. And that's where we took off. That's where I took off with Spire Hospitality.

Josiah: I love it. I love it because even just to that last point, using ProfitSword, it's one thing to have technology. It's another thing to make sure that you have the right culture and you're looking for these wins. That's how you get value out of technology or out of a new process. And so you identify, hey, here's 50 pages that people are going through. Here's the technology that can make this all straightforward. You get the insights that you need to make better decisions. But I think what you mentioned around doing that all with the goal of elevating people, helping them grow and develop in their careers, because if you're going to advance in leadership at a hotel or a hotel company, you need to understand how these numbers work. So I think I'm hearing that you wanted to make this trusted, easy, and empower everybody to make better business decisions based on this.

Shozib: That's exactly right. And empowerment is key. And once you have data and if you have trust in that data, it allows you to gut check your instincts. And that is very powerful where when you have a viewpoint of how something is working, but you can find numerical backup or support that confirms your hypothesis. We started with that and then we took that and scaled it up a little bit. We discovered that with the right culture in place, with the right tools in place, there were still hotels that were performing better than others, which took us to our second phase of evolving. And that was really finding correlations between different data points, things that are instinctual, but you don't necessarily realize what they are until you're able to find data that supports it. One of the items that we started looking at across the portfolio was minutes per occupied room. Everyone looks at minutes per occupied room. And we have a very diverse portfolio of hotels that we have hotels that are big box, 500 plus keys with 40,000 square feet of meeting space down to a 69 room resort in Stowe, Vermont that has access to ski. So it's very diverse. What we discovered is that there is a direct correlation with minutes per occupied room and the length of service for that room attendant.

Josiah: Interesting.

Shozib: Yeah. We started looking at minutes per occupied room, trying to understand why some hotels were performing better than others. And we wanted to see if there was more than just culture on site. So we started lining up minutes per occupied data against tenure of room attendant staff. And it sounds natural that if you have a team that has been doing the same workflow, but they've been doing it longer together, they're going to be much more efficient. And we discovered that obviously hotels that had a team where their tenure together was more than three plus years, hotels that have a low turnover rate were performing much better than the hotels that had high turnover rate. So now we took this observation and said, okay, instead of focusing on minutes per occupied room, let's focus on finding ways to increase the tenure of our room attendant staff. How can we ensure that we keep them, we retain them, we manage them as not just productivity positions, but manage them as cogs in the big scheme of finding that culture that drives performance. If you are able to sustain team members for a long period of time, naturally, you're going to have wins. But now we are seeing measurable wins. So we partnered with the people in culture department. We came up with initiatives to really focus on not just minutes per occupancy, but focus on retention. And naturally, by focusing on retention, minutes per occupancy increased.

Josiah: This story is fascinating to me because I love the movie Moneyball and just this notion of how do you find these datasets that at first glance may not look like they're related, but you start to identify these interesting correlations. I guess my question for you is, how do you think about that? How do you come up with hypothesis and then test it to pull together these interesting correlations that might not be immediately obvious?

Shozib: That's the beauty of the hospitality industry, where it's 50-50 art and science. That's where a lot of stories of folks that are very successful in this industry, literally lived boots on the ground, touched it, worked it, they understood it. And instantly they were able to find ways to succeed and lead those workflows. I believe that if I was approaching this without having any boots on the ground experience, if I didn't spend the first 18 years of my career working in hotels next to my team members, if I hadn't done every position that's out there that potentially could be done in the hospitality side, I don't think I would be as successful in finding data points that converge and connect and correlate with each other. I think it's the experience that brings in the art of it. And then it's the data and not being intimidated by the data that allows you to find ways to correlate both of those two pieces.

Josiah: That's so great. And we can't have a conversation about data and analytics without talking about what data points matter most to you and you think are most important for a hotel business. My understanding is that the balanced scorecard you use at Spire has evolved over time. And I wonder if you'd be open to sharing some of those most important data points that you track that are on your scorecard.

Shozib: Yeah, for our scorecard, and most management companies are going to have a similar type of approach, but different outcomes. Our view on the balanced scorecard is that if it doesn't make sense naturally by looking at it for 30 seconds, it's not an accurate scorecard. So we want to find a way to make it as simple as possible, but still find ways to ensure that it supports what we're trying to achieve from our business goals. And that's where there is a portion of our scorecard which cannot be measured. And I think that's the part that gives us the ability to really understand that there is an art to this business as well. It's leadership, it's subjective leadership and supported by narrative, not necessarily supported by numbers. That narrative, that story is different from hotel to hotel, general manager to general manager. And there's a quadrant that's set up specifically for that subjective piece for our leadership group to be able to subjectively share. Well, this is why this person has achieved this goal on their subjective piece. All the other data points are easily measurable. We know how they're doing on revenue. We absolutely know how they're doing on market share. We know how they're doing on the brand. All that data is available. But the quadrant that's unmeasurable is the people side of the business. So that's how our scorecard has evolved, where we use the combination of pure math, and we also ensure that there's humanity in our business.

Josiah: So cool. So cool. On the pure math side, I am just intrigued. You mentioned there's commonly used metrics, but I get a sense in talking with people in the hotel industry at large over the past 10 years or so, there's been more and more of a focus on profit. Is that something that you've increasingly focused on or how has that evolved, the focus on profit in terms of scorecards and the importance of that across your teams?

Shozib: It is an industry that provides opportunity for so many people, but it is still a business at the end of the day. And without profit, we don't have investors. And we need investors to be interested in our space in order to continue to evolve and grow our space. So profit is very, very important. Our view on profit, again, has a direct correlation on performance on the top line first. We absolutely focus on top line first in conjunction with profit. But we need to take a look to see what our opportunity is on that profit first. And then the way to take a look at that is that if we strictly focus on profit, but we didn't take a look at what opportunity it could be to drive top line, we would be leaving money on the table, which is really leaving profit on the table. A correlation that we started measuring, which is available, we decided to bring it in with ours, was really to see how our hotels are performing, not against the comp set, but against a sub market. When we take a look at how STR and CoStar break down markets, you have major markets and you have sub markets, then below sub markets, you have comp sets. Most folks spend most of their time measuring performance against comp set, which is great. Comp set information is helpful. Those are your direct competitors. Those are your four or five hotels that you're competing with. That's great. But that only tells a focused story on what's happening with those four or five assets. If we're not able to zoom out a little bit and take a look to see what's actually happening in the sub-market, we're not really able to benchmark your performance to what's actually happening around your neighborhood, not just the four or five hotels that you're working against. So measuring performance against sub-market and being able to forecast what we think the sub-market is going to do is really important in our framework. And then we compete against that. We compete against how we're performing against that sub market today. What our goals are against that sub market. And then we measure that to see how effective are we to be able to get there.

Josiah: It's so interesting because I was listening to an interview you gave a few years back and you talked about hospitality business performance being very much of a street corner sort of activity where there's so many ways to look at it, but if you only have one way of comparing performance, it sort of misses the picture. And so I think, hearing what you just shared and then thinking about all the different, frankly, here in 2025, there's a lot of headwinds to business performance. But if you just look at them without getting a real view into what are the actual opportunities, how do I improve on each area of the business, you kind of miss the opportunity. And so it's cool to hear you pulling together all of this and thinking a little bit more comprehensively about how do we get better.

Shozib: Early on, when I was in college, one of the professors had an impact on me where there was an experiment, it wasn't really experiments, more of a thought conversation where he said, okay, light is light. Here's a prism. You're looking at the same light from a prism, but each prism, there's three different facets. Depending on how you look at the light, you're going to be able to see it differently. And early on, I realized that facts are facts, but there are also different circumstances to your assumptions on those facts, depending on different viewpoints that you're looking at. Our performance numbers will not change. The numbers that we generate are real, they're actual, but the story behind them absolutely can change based on how you look at that story. If you generate a hundred dollars in RevPAR, it's a hundred dollars in RevPAR, but without knowing what your potential is, there's no way to measure if that's actually really, really good or really, really bad. So we find ways to correlate our data points against benchmarks that we've established for ourselves to really be able to measure if we're on track or not. And if we're not on track, this is our opportunity to be able to tell the story of why that is. Because telling the story of why we're not on track will help with getting back on track tomorrow, because we have another opportunity to win every day.

Josiah: I love that. Before we go, in our preparation for this, we were interacting and we wondered if we should talk about the two-letter word that is popping up all the time now, AI. There's a lot of talk about AI transforming the industry. I don't want to necessarily take that as a given. I'm curious how you think about this in general, and you're thinking about preparing Spire for what the future could hold, which may or may not be increasingly AI driven. I hear you talking about a very comprehensive way of thinking about the business. So I guess my question for you is, how do you think about preparing Spire, your organization, your teams for the future?

Shozib: One of the items that we're working on actively right now is we know that there's data. We absolutely had a big effort into centralizing our data and now it's centralized. The next portion on that is again, led by finding ways of giving time back. Give you STR report as an example. Every revenue manager spends at least at bare minimum, 30 minutes a week on looking at that weekly STR report finding trends and insights. Our vision is that's never going to go away. But can we supplement that by feeding all of these data points that are on a weekly STR report and having an output that comes out that gives insights on that weekly STR report that, again, can be validated by the revenue manager? The people side is never going to go away in our business. That's the key of hospitality. That's the heart and soul of hospitality. But there are tools and resources out there that can give time back so that we can focus on things that actually matter. Taking care of our team members, taking care of our guests, driving results for our owners. And that's where I believe AI is really headed. It's not necessarily saying, hey, we're deploying AI tools. But it's really what tools are you deploying that are going to, in my viewpoint, give the most amount of time back to our team members so they can be more strategic in their decision-making, so that they can be empowered with more than just instinct and gut. Instinct and gut has been around for thousands of years, and we've been very successful using instinct and gut. We've been very successful without AI. AI is supposed to help us evolve to the next level.

Josiah: Interesting. That's so fascinating to me. And I mean, I think it all starts with what you mentioned of centralizing data. And we're using ProfitSword to do that centralization, get it all in one place. And then you have a way to build on top of that.

Shozib: We are. We're one of the few management companies that are out there that are leveraging ProfitSword, but also a tool within ProfitSword that not many people know about. It's called Profit Wizard. It allows us to directly connect to the ProfitSword database using an Excel connection. So ProfitSword ends up being our user facing tool that our operators are utilizing. Profit Wizard is the tool that our analytics team is utilizing behind the scenes to harness that data that's on ProfitSword. So we have our own dashboards, we have our own benchmarks, we have our own reporting utilizing the same data that's available to ProfitSword, but 100% proprietary to Spire Hospitality.

Josiah: That's so interesting to me. It's so interesting, and it explains a lot of the cool things that you've been able to build. I think it's you pulling from your operational experience, you being attentive to your colleagues, you being very dialed into what's going on in the hospitality industry, allows you to help Spire build into the organization it is today and whatever comes in the future. You're building a foundation that's going to be very flexible. Very agile. Before we go, Shozib, I would love to get your thoughts, anything else on your mind. I'm curious what you're excited by, what you're thinking about. I know we've covered a lot in this conversation, but is there anything else on your mind as you think about what's going on in your business and the world today and in the years ahead?

Shozib: Yeah, I think that the people side, the humanity side of this business can never go away. I'm a father, a proud father of three little girls. They're three different age groups, 12, 8, and 4. And our family's adopted hobby is Disney World. That's where we go. But that really correlates to a quote that inspired me early on. It was a Walt Disney quote, first think, second believe, third dream, and finally dare. There's so many different ways that quote can be interpreted. And for me, really, that ties back directly into our people side of the data strategy. First think. Second, believe. Third, dream of what could be and then dare to act on change. That's where we ensure that in whatever we do, we don't lose sight of what's truly important. It's what our guests are doing, but most importantly, the experiences our team members are creating for our guests. And naturally, if we get those two things right, we'll drive performance for our owners.

Josiah: I love it. You are building and you have built the "Disney of hotel data" at Spire, and it's really remarkable to see all the magic that creates. So thanks so much for taking time to share your story. I really enjoyed this conversation. I know our listeners will as well.

Shozib: Josiah, thank you again for having me.