Reimagining Hospitality Careers - Tom Luersen, CoralTree Hospitality

Josiah:

Whether you're experiencing a talent shortage or not, I'll bet that you're looking for ways to bring more bright, warm, caring people into your business, and our guest today is going to show you how.

Tom Luersen is the president of CoralTree Hospitality, and in this episode, you'll learn how he thinks about attracting and retaining talented people. 

As an industry, we've talked about the labor shortage for a little while, but it seems, whether there's a shortage or not, bringing talented people into hospitality is always a challenge. How do you get the best, brightest, warmest, most caring people? I'm curious how you're thinking about that now.

Tom: 0:59

Well, I can tell you, during the last three years of our global initiatives all were affiliated with a pandemic and something called COVID, right? We really learned what we didn't know before because the hotels and the restaurants and the spas and all the stores closed and the employees went home. And then when they came back to work, they didn't know if they wanted to do this anymore. I'm like gosh. I don't know if I want to make $12, $14 an hour, work on weekends, or work the late night shifts. So for the first time in my 40 years of doing this, the labor market in general questioned if the hospitality place was a place they wanted to go work. What we've done here before in our industry is look for someone who had experience. I'm going to hire a front desk clerk at our hotel in some city. Where's the best place to look? Well, let's look at another hotel that's got front desk people and we'll steal them. What we learned is when you do that, you're not really getting a fresh perspective. So we're now looking outside of our business. I go back to the gas station experience. I go back to going to a doctor's office and there's a great receptionist and she greets you and she talks to you And she needs to be in our hospitality space and we got to invite her in. We can train and teach skills. It's hard to teach a spirit of hospitality. You have to perfect. I think I've changed how I look at it. What I thought was needed 20 years ago, it's different than what's needed today. The services they change as we all change in our experiences. So we're looking outside our field. We're looking for people who want to be servant leaders. We used to say to everybody you had to work 40 hours a week and you had to be available on the weekends. We don't say that anymore. I'm like look, when do you want to work? If you don't want to work 40 hours, I'm loving to have you. If you want 20 hours, I bet you 20 hours versus 20 hours. If you're going to work 40 hours, you're going to be your best 20 hours. You're going to be your best self. So we're more flexible because they come to work with a good attitude. You know we're looking for the retiree. My wife's a great example. She comes from hospitality. She loves to take care of people. If she could go somewhere, she could care less about how much money she may. But if she could go somewhere and work one or two days a week, four or five hours, and just talk to people and help them. That's a market. So we recognize that. We started to go, try to find those people and we've had some success with it. Not enough success. There are never enough of the right people to fill all of our jobs. But we're working really hard at that And then we're working really hard at keeping the great ones. I think turnover is generally a healthy thing. Strategic turnover helps to constantly raise the bar. It helps to bring in new, fresh perspectives and that's a healthy thing in any organization and any industry. In my mind, too much of something becomes bad, but if it's strategic turnover it's really good. We have to work really hard to retain people. So we've also changed that. You know our industry said you had to come to your office every day. Why, when I come to my office, I stare at my computer, for you know nine hours because we're on Zoom calls, on emails, and we're on telephone calls. I can do that from my living room and probably be more productive. Do I want you to do that every day? No, because culture is important and you need to come in and feel the organization be with us. But we changed our outlook on what that means. People who are on reservations, for example, a call center if they could do that from the kitchen table at home, they're going to do a better job, they're not going to spend time traveling, they're going to be happier, they're guest that they're going to serve, is going to feel that and it's going to be a better experience. So we've tried to be more imaginative on how we can do things to track the right people and it's working for us.

Josiah: 4:53

I love that flexibility and I guess what I'd be curious to hear about is your pitch to people these talented, caring people, whether it's receptionist or someone at a gas station why they should consider a career in hospitality. I feel like there's a communication or marketing problem. Maybe some people have a perception of what hospitality is that may be a little misguided or they miss the opportunity. But what do you say when you encounter some of these caring, talented people, and why they should consider a career in hospitality?

Tom: 5:21

For me, it's so simple and maybe I oversimplify it, but it's a career where you can get in on the ground floor on that person. I couldn't have been any lower. When I started there was nowhere else to go but up from where I started. And yet today I'm leading a company that I'm proud of and leading quality assets and quality owners and institutional public high net worth owners that we relate with. I have the ability if I worked hard and love what I did, good things would happen, because there's so much upward trajectory, and not a lot of industry has that. You think about if you're an engineer or if you're a lawyer, you come in and you have that skill set and you can get wealthier, but you don't necessarily get to get new experiences. Here you get to have new experiences, so I think it's a great career. Back many, many years ago when I was starting, I went to college at FIU and got a hospitality degree, but at that time there were only 10 to 20 schools around the country that recognized hospitality as a career. Today, every major university has some form or fashion of that, so it's now a recognized place. It's not an industry that underpays anymore. You can go, make easily six-figure positions and grow in a company and have wealth, not just live comfortably. That's something that's changed in our industry because it's so unique about our businesses. So I think it's a great career. I would tell people about it. I also say you know, try it. I have three children, all grown. They're all on their own. They all ended up in hospitality in some different fashions. One runs a brewery company, another one's a general manager of a hotel, and another one was in a startup high-tech firm serving hospitality. My answer to them was to go find something you like to do. Actually, if you want to have a great career, first study yourself and know what makes you tick. What makes me tick and I think what makes people tick in hospitality is watching people smile and doing things behind the scenes. That then gives someone a great experience. It's also instant gratification. You know in our business if you did a good job as soon as you talk to the guest, as soon as you talk to the team member and you say how's our company doing? Are we doing well by you? What can we do better? If you ask that question, you can change it. What industry does that? You know. So I love it. I think it's simple. I think it's a great career. I think it's so much more vast than it ever has been. It's not hotels and resorts, it's excursions, it's airlines, it's destination management companies, it's spas, it's golf courses, it's retail. You know, in a resort, a property, it has everything kind of a small city has. You can be in marketing, you can be in accounting, you can be an engineer in the maintenance team, you can be an esthetician in the spa, you can be an agronomist on the golf course. Man. All these different skill sets come together in something called hospitality. That's awesome.

Josiah: 8:20

It's awesome And it's exciting to think about when you look at it more broadly, right, because sometimes people have this. Now I actually went to a job fair in San Francisco all industries and just walked up to people and said what do you think about working in hospitality? Like to a person they all thought it was being a receptionist at a hotel And that's one way. That's maybe a place you get started. But, as you pointed out, there is so much, especially at resorts and bigger properties.

Tom: 8:43

I think it's interesting back when we go to recruit to colleges for a long time, all the hotel companies recruited just hospitality students, like you know what. we ought to go talk to the marketing department and the accounting and the finance areas and the human resources area that are not in hospitality, because that's a discipline that can be in hospitality, and let's go recruit from them. And it opened up our doors. You know we were so narrow thinking oh, you're in hospitality, you chose that degree, so we'll go talk to the hospitality students and convince them to come into our area. Well, we go talk to a marketer who's thinking about getting into an advertising firm or getting into a tech firm, or getting into a hospitality firm. I think I can tell them why hospitality could be a little bit more fun and experiential than some of those other areas. And when that happened we've kind of explored that we're not just hospitality, we're employers of all different skill sets in a hospitality setting And we're constantly thinking about it, right? Well, we think about today. you know, maybe it's going to last for the next six months or a year, but you know, this is that entrepreneurial spirit that says you're constantly trying to understand the world around you so that you can adapt to it and stay ahead of the game. That's what we're trying to do. So who knows if the strategy will keep working, but we're going to constantly try to find some things, have some failures that we'll celebrate because we're trying hard, and then celebrate the successes too.

Josiah: 10:11

Well, I think our listeners, whether they're listening to this when this comes out or five years from now I feel like this is a constant thing to focus on, because hospitality is a people business And, regardless of labor shortage or not, we should have the best people working in hospitality right. There's such an opportunity to serve people and to create really cool things. It maybe is less of looking at it as like we don't have this many workers. That's a starting point, but it's more about we should constantly stand the edge of attracting the best into hospitality.

Tom: 10:42

Yeah, I don't think that will ever go away, right, I mean, I think we're always going to be striving to get the best talent. You know, in the business model we need higher average rates, we need higher average checks And that means the higher they get, the greater the expectation of the service and the degree. You're at a five-star property versus a two-star property. You're paying five times the rate of the two-star. Your expectation of the service is there. So there are so many different facets of it. So we're constantly going to be learning about the next generation that's coming up and how they're going to continue to be in this business. And one thing we know for certain it won't be the same as it is today. When I start in my 20s, it's very different than at the age of 60. Things have changed, but at the core, serving from your heart and loving what you do hasn't changed.