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Each episode of GAIN Momentum focuses on timeless lessons to help grow and scale a business in hospitality, travel, and technology. Whether you’re a veteran industry leader looking for some inspiration to guide the next phase of growth or an aspiring executive looking to fast-track the learning process, this podcast is here with key lessons centered around four questions we ask each guest.
GAIN Momentum episode #14 - Engaging with Customers and Actionable Insights | with Adam Glickman
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[00:00:00] Jason Emanis: Welcome to the GAIN Momentum podcast, focusing on timeless lessons from global industry leaders about how to grow and scale a business in hospitality, travel, food service, and technology. I'm Jason Emanis, here with my co host Adam Mogelonsky. Our guest today is Adam Glickman, VP Brand Strategy at Actabl. Hello, Adam.
[00:00:31] Adam Glickman: Hey, and I'm gonna laugh a lot as we do this because we've got two Adams and we're never gonna know who you're talking to. So you're, you're stuck in the middle, Jason.
[00:00:38] Adam Mogelonsky: part of the fun.
[00:00:40] Jason Emanis: Yeah. Well, take it away, Adam M.
[00:00:45] Adam Mogelonsky: So, Adam, our format for this podcast is we're focusing on timeless lessons for business professionals. And that is about how to scale a business and looking from your expertise and offering timeless pieces of advice and wisdom from your expertise. So, the first question, Adam. When it comes to scaling a business, what is the single piece of advice you would give entrepreneurs from your perspective as a professional in hospitality technology?
[00:01:20] Adam Glickman: Sure, and thanks guys for having me, Um, before I kind of jump in and answer your question, just a quick little plug to say who I am, where I'm from. But, you're not familiar, Actabl is a technology suite of software designed to increase profitability and drive it, we call, up and to the right. And it brings together four tools or four platforms that have years of experience in our space, labor management through hotel effectiveness, business intelligence through ProfitSword, operations execution through ALICE and CapEx planning, through Transcendent.
[00:01:50] And so those four platforms came together and we launched Actabl, with that idea of how do we drive profits for management companies and increase asset value for owners. So with that background, although Actabl is just about a little over people are just about a year old as a business where the pieces have come together.
[00:02:08] We have teams that have worked with the four products for many years and they bring brought to the table, immense amounts of industry knowledge, their own culture, their views on how do we grow. And together we're growing this new business, um, Actabl. And so the way I'd answer this question, I'm going to kind of bring some personal experience in my personal life and some business experience.
[00:02:32] The biggest thing that entrepreneurs and growing businesses should focus on in my mind is, do you have a product that lines up with needs of your target customers? And is that offer something that they need to buy now or in the future. And what I mean by that is when you think about what you're selling, are you trying to convince them to buy something they don't know that they need, or can they point to it being a line item?
[00:02:57] Can they point to how it's going to help them grow or how it's going to help them drive costs down, drive revenues up, improve guest satisfaction? You've got to be able to show that exact set of metrics in my mind. But show it in a way that lines up with their own P&L. So you're not coming to the table, trying to convince them to buy something that they've never budgeted or never thought about before.
[00:03:19] That doesn't mean you don't have the opportunity to innovate or try to bring something new to the market. You can absolutely do that, but you, in my mind, in my experience, you do that under the guide of saying, how does it fit in the mix of what the target is willing and able to buy within their own budget?
[00:03:36] If you can do that, it is much easier to convince people to buy, it's easier to have, convince people to have a conversation with you about the value proposition you bring to the market. And somebody has a real good Actabl example about that. The number one challenge hoteliers face is labor and finding people and having people that can deliver on service, right?
[00:03:55] labor is top of mind for every management company, every operator. If you're working in this space, although you may not be able to bring new team members to work at a front desk or work in a housekeeping department, can you show how you can make your current team members more efficient or increase engagement and excitement from your current team members?
[00:04:12] That is a set of line items or categories already in the vernacular of hoteliers. It opens the door to have a conversation. So if For any entrepreneurs listening, anybody launching, looking to launch a new business, start a new business, I challenge you to say, where is what you're working on fitting in the universe of who your target buyer and customer is going to be?
[00:04:31] And where does it fit in the budget line items of what they can spend on?
[00:04:36] Jason Emanis: assuming you have conversations with customers to grab that vernacular, to grab those problems, how they articulated and roll that into your marketing and your sales, even your product development. What's that look like?
[00:04:55] Adam Glickman: I think the most important thing is to just have honest conversations with your customers about like what their needs are and what are their needs today? How are their businesses changing? Ask your customers questions, and just be able to relate to the challenges that they're going through.
[00:05:08] So personally, I try to, and my colleagues at Actabl, try to spend as much time with our customers as we can. We were talking right before the podcast kicked off. We were at the hospitality show last week. Big part of us being there was to engage with our many customers that are there. How many of our customers are members of the HLA and take part in HLA boards.
[00:05:26] And we want to hear from them about changes in their business. Big focus right now is how is technology, like you can't go two minutes without someone throwing AI. We'll sure talk about AI on this podcast, but how is somebody addressing changes in technology for day to day operations of hotels? I have a few.
[00:05:44] But today I'm not working in a hotel. I have in the past, and I'm bringing that experience, but who's working in a hotel today are customers and hearing from them, hearing the challenges that they have, that's how you kind of unpack what do you think about building, what do you think about developing?
[00:05:58] Adam Mogelonsky: To speak a little bit more about that from a branding perspective, which you're, you're an expert in, and what does that look like when you're solving a problem that can be, you can point to something on a P&L? How do you get that message across succinctly? And how do you craft that message and, and really hone it so people immediately know,
[00:06:21] what your company is and how they can help on a P&L?.
[00:06:25] Adam Glickman: You'll see, I'm sure everybody in your social feeds see case studies a philosophy, and everyone will throw out a case study here or there, and those of course are helpful. To me, the way I think you showcase how you truly impact the P& L is be able to have a one on one or real conversation with your customers to talk about the actual challenges they have, not generic challenges in the industry and then show them how your service product experience, offer, whatever it is, can impact that.
[00:06:51] And I kind of keep coming back to the, this core set of principles of, you know, any new entrepreneurs working on something, developing something, growing a business, how is it increasing revenue? How is it decreasing costs? How is it improving experience of our customers? Somebody on our team, Jeremy Ford, one of the original founders of Transcendent, um, really focused on Answering that and challenging his team to those three points, super simple, and I totally love it.
[00:07:16] as you're sitting with customers and matching back to P& L, can you answer those questions? You know, I own a small business locally, and as I work with our team and I talk to our team and I think about their own opportunities, it's the version of that same thing. It's like, how are you helping customers?
[00:07:32] How are you finding ways to drive new revenues? How are you finding ways to decrease costs? And at a global level, or at an actable level. That's something that we're constantly thinking about, constantly looking at.
[00:07:43] Adam Mogelonsky: Well on that note, Adam, we'll get into the second question here, which is what are some of the common pitfalls or failures you have witnessed that business owners should look to avoid when scaling their business?
[00:07:55] Adam Glickman: So I'm going to answer the question with one word, and I don't think be a surprise. The one word is no, and no is not my answer to your question, that is the answer to the question. It's learning how to say no. I'm a pleaser. I'm sure, you know, everybody has their own Myers Briggs status, and you know, are you trying to make everyone happy and love you?
[00:08:13] Are you hard liner? But I think as a Company that is trying to do a lot of things and Actabl is a great example of it. We brought four product lines of businesses together, narrowing down what we focus on, prioritizing the things that matter most to our customers that make their lives easier, prioritizing the things that will allow us to grow, recognizing that not everything everybody always worked on has to keep happening in the same fashion.
[00:08:41] That's hard. And I kind of simplify that down to the opportunity is recognizing, you don't need to be mean about saying no. And "saying no is not turning away someone's idea or being negative. It's making a trade off that allows the company to grow faster." And so as I think about kind of the biggest pitfall an entrepreneur can have, a startup can have, it's trying to be too many things to too many people at once.
[00:09:07] And so I'm gonna put my brand hat on for a second and I kind of answer that same question in a slightly different way. A great brand leader that I worked for many years back kind of spoke to this idea that the most powerful brands, the ones we love, the ones that are meaningful, mean something to someone.
[00:09:27] But to mean something to someone, they can't mean something to everyone. So pick any brand you like, I'm not going to throw out examples. Pick any brand you like, anyone you resonate with. Does every single person on earth love that brand? Do they have people that dislike that brand, don't connect with that brand?
[00:09:42] If the answer is yes, then they have a potential to be powerful. What brands out there does everybody love? Unequivocally love and alliance to everybody's needs. It doesn't exist. So to succeed in business is very similar. If you want to be a powerful business, you've got to know who is your target customer.
[00:09:58] How are you supporting them? How are you supporting them better than anybody else? How are you creating solutions to their problems? And that means you've made trade offs to say you're not going to solve problems for others in the same exact fashion. And as you think about Actabl and one of the really amazing things that we are doing is positioning ourselves and recognizing we are here to empower hoteliers.
[00:10:21] We're here to add more value for above line leaders and enable on property team members to be more successful in their jobs, happier in life, because it's easier to do the work they have to do every day. And the key thing there is. Who are we focused on? We are focused on hoteliers.
[00:10:36] We've made that trade off to recognize we are not delivering software for every industry and every vertical. We're focused on optimizing the lives of hoteliers and that's above property folks and on property folks. And I'd encourage any entrepreneur to think about their business in the same way.
[00:10:50] Jason Emanis: Yeah, a lot of people don't want to niche down, they're afraid to niche down so far that but you can be. I mean, I've experienced it myself, become the master of that where you niche down, then you can think about that next jump.
[00:11:08] Adam Mogelonsky: it's interesting that you raise that talking about a finding the niche, finding that, I guess owning a category or subcategory. How does that happen? How does a company discover what they're best at and then make the decision to be that brand for that category?
[00:11:27] Adam Glickman: I don't know if there's a scientific answer to that one, Adam. I think something that it's art. Yeah. And I kind of think about branding. Branding is not a science and it's not just an art. It's this height. It's this blend, right? Great branders, great brand strategists recognize you have to pull the insights and analyze the data and there's the science of it, but there's an art side of it, of what's going to connect with your customer and what's going to matter.
[00:11:50] Just like marketing, what campaign is going to work and why is it going to work? There's data sitting behind it, but there's the art and that's why there's creatives and they are so powerful in branding. It's so important branding. As I think about like, how do you make the decision? How do you figure out where your sweet spots are?
[00:12:07] I kind of will keep coming back to customers. Don't try to figure it out on your own. Let your customers tell you what to do.
[00:12:14] Something I heard last week and she did a podcast on it and it's super inspiring leader. One of the keynotes, the possibility show was catcall. She did a great job kind of sharing her story, but one of the comments she brought to the table and kind of offered up was she talked about the story about a different point in her career of working with franchisees and working with folks that she, she was close with, in her business and she challenged them.
[00:12:38] To say, ask the question of when do we say no to our customers? And what she meant by that, and she's explained this, and she's a podcast that talks to this, but she explained this idea that what she meant by that was, when are we not selling something or offering something that our customers want?
[00:12:52] Because we're basically turning them down and saying, no, you can't buy this product, you can't buy the service. And to me, that is the way you figure out where your sweet spot is. And I'm going to bring that right back to Actabl and bring it back to a lot of the value we are providing. As the pandemic was rolling through and labor became very challenging.
[00:13:10] Company after company, management of company after management company, and I got to go to an AHLA meeting and ask the question of who uses contract labor and lots of hands get raised. And management companies were not able to compare and contrast their contract labor team members to their direct team members, their employees.
[00:13:28] And our version of asking a customer, what can we not provide, or what are we saying no to, was how can we better allow you to look at your contract team members side by side to your, employees so that they can swap shifts, or they can, you can compare the productivity and the value and the cost per period or set of rooms cleaned or HPOR, whatever metric you want to use, but comparing contract labor team members to your own employees. And that is an ability that our customers needed because of the rapid growth in contract labor. And so us as the business, it was our customers telling us, Hey, I would love a tool that lets me swap shifts, or I'd like a better visibility into how do I compare contract labor team members to my full time team members to know where I'm investing or what I should invest in next.
[00:14:17] I would love to know if, you know, pre pandemic everyone looked at overtime as this bad thing, like you want to avoid overtime at all costs. Well, guess what? During the pandemic, overtime was not a thing you avoided at all costs. Overtime was a thing you actually went to try to go get because if you could get your own team to do overtime and they were willing to, and it didn't cause them a higher rate of attrition, you would not need as much contract labor, which was at an even higher cost than overtime.
[00:14:41] So those are the kinds of things that I'd say by talking to your customers, engaging, probing. Figure out what you're not solving that someone else is, that'll help you understand what you should focus on.
[00:14:53] Jason Emanis: totally Customers will tell you, and he you articulates the problems best as the solution. And you combine that with niche so let's just say you take that example and that was an example from, I'm just a 200 hotel, hotel management right? This is exactly how they outlined the you have, mastered it. You have mastered how to articulate it and you just take that down the street. If you've niched down and you own and everybody down they can't help but think Adam's got the answer. I mean, listen to the way he talks. Listen to that case study that, you know, the guy down the street looks just like me. He solved it.
[00:15:42] Adam Glickman: Yeah, look, if you're focused on a business that's in hospitality, one of the cool things about our industry is it's very incestuous. We all know each other and we're all connected, right? The people that, the person that I worked for is my first DOS 20 some odd years ago. We're on LinkedIn and she's bounced to three other companies and one day we will work together.
[00:16:02] And that is what makes our industry so fantastic. It also allows us, if you're an innovator working in hospitality, to recognize, if you create something, you sell it to a few folks, have a few people try it, it's very easy to expand that as those team members move elsewhere. For me, that's part of why I love our business.
[00:16:21] Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, I guess that's, uh, the, your customers are moving to other hotels. all this, uh, talk about maintaining relationships with customers, that takes up a lot of time though. How do you manage that? How do you ensure that you have enough time to actually reach out to customers and find out their needs as well as run a business?
[00:16:42] Adam Glickman: again, that's a question that I feel like there is not an answer to part of being an entrepreneurial company.
[00:16:47] I think Adam, as you're addressing. How do you engage with customers, do all the things that need to happen? I think about it as prioritization. And there are some businesses that recognize working closely with customers and engaging with them is always going to be top of that priority list. My personal view is those are the, those are the companies, those are the businesses that win.
[00:17:10] Those are the entrepreneurial endeavors that grow. The sales will come. If you can engage with your customers, if you can show value to your customers, the sales will come. Differentiate, you know, based on what your business is, do you have the best reviews? Do you have local relationships? Can you answer those questions wholeheartedly?
[00:17:29] Invest your time there.
[00:17:30] One more area that I think we haven't addressed yet on this, on this podcast, but I think is a, in my mind, again, a life lesson around any business, whether you're in hotels or not. Invest in your people and your people will deliver your customers. And I think that is another area, Adam, that I would really challenge your listeners to think about.
[00:17:53] How are you engaging with your frontline team members? Are you thinking about the challenges that they have today? Are you thinking about how those might've been different than they were a year ago? And what are you doing to enable them so that they can both do their jobs? And do their job successfully, but also engage with your customers.
[00:18:12] Cause they're the ones that are going to most likely prevent churn and customers from going away or help you get new ones. An example of that is, you know, thinking about our industry. We all talked about kind of the revenge travel since July, right? And we're all watching the stats. Florida as a tourist destination at the moment is not doing fantastic because it's down compared to how it did a year ago and two years ago when there was a huge amount of domestic travel in the U. S. because people weren't leaving internationally. And this summer there's a larger volume of flights to Europe than ever before. You know, everyone's going away cause they couldn't go away for a while. Right. What I mean by that though, and why I'm thinking about a real life example, think about all those frontline hotel team members that worked at resorts in Florida or California, hawaii, your destinations that were literally bombarded during the pandemic. How was their day to day job? How hard was it? There were higher ADRs, which meant customers were paying more, which meant they had a higher set of expectations. There were fewer team members working to do the same job that two or three years ago maybe had 1. 5x people doing the same function. How did they feel? How were they embraced by their managers? What engagement tools were put in place to both keep them and retain them and make them feel part of their teams? I'm willing to bet that the management companies that had the most success during the pandemic with retaining team members, seeing lower turnover, are the ones that built.
[00:19:37] And I've talked on panels with folks from partners like Davidson or Peachtree, and you think about how much work went into culture building and platforms. Those are put in place and really meant to say, how come we're a differentiated employer to deliver for our frontline team members because our frontline team members are the ones that we're delivering for guests.
[00:19:56] So that's kind of how I think about it. It's like if you're not engaged, if you're not doing all these actions by engaging with your customers directly, but then putting the hours and time into engaging with your frontline team members, because they're the ones that are most likely engaging with your customers, then you have an opportunity where maybe you are not going to succeed to the level you want to.
[00:20:14] Adam Mogelonsky: That's fantastic. Um, you mentioned earlier about what's working and finding what's working and that ties into our third question here. Adam, what do you see as the key opportunities and challenges for hospitality technology companies in 2023 and beyond?
[00:20:33] Adam Glickman: don't think anybody can go a day now without AI being, you know, be on a newsletter, engage, learn about, and everyone should. I think it's awesome and there's so many cool things that can happen between LLMs and using tools to help make life simpler on a day to day basis or pushing out.
[00:20:50] Marketing messages, whatever it might be. But to me, the opportunity for hospitality companies in an area that we're really dialing up at Actabl is focusing on how do you translate data into something that's actionable? And so the way I think about it is data is the input, lots of data, tons of stats, tons of information, more ways to benchmark and compare and contrast than we've ever had before, but it can be very overwhelming.
[00:21:19] And not every person in an organization needs all of the same data. The information a housekeeping manager needs to make better decisions about staffing his or her department is different than the COO needs for thinking about a group of 20 hotels, which might be different than the person at a brand organization needs that's thinking about the brand health of Brand X.
[00:21:40] And so the single biggest opportunity in my mind that will kind of change in our industry as we move forward is how do you convert data into actionable insights and the right actionable insights for the right person? And that's, I think, what will be the pivot shift, so to speak. We've always been an industry that I don't want to say is anti technology, but just been slower to embrace and take action on new tools, new platforms.
[00:22:09] And a lot of it comes down to like the historic GDS and reservation systems. Many of us are used to knowing that, you know, green screen is still just a few years ago, right? don't think we are afforded that opportunity anymore because we're going to have to think about how do you leverage. Whether it is AI, or it's broader databases, or it's insights from a database, or rules engines, whatever it looks like.
[00:22:30] How do you leverage those to be more efficient with the labor and the teams that you have? How do you leverage that to get the same task done at a lower cost? Or leverage it to figure out how do you drive a little bit of incremental revenue? So that's my take. How do we turn data into actionable insights and let make sure that they are the right actionable insights for the right person so they can actually use them?
[00:22:52] Jason Emanis: a lot from hoteliers an area of need? I mean, are they have so much data, it's like, I don't know what to do with this.
[00:23:03] Adam Glickman: Yeah, like, look, I think someone may not come to us or me and say, Hey, I have an infinite amount of data, but you think about the number of systems and tools that are out there and it is overwhelming. And I interpret or interpret, I can't say that word, I interpret. Somebody saying, I'm getting emails and calls nonstop about selling me this new product, right?
[00:23:23] How many, just you guys, case study of two in the last day, how many unsolicited bot generated sales emails did you get? I'm willing to bet that that is north of 10, I'm sure, right? Our hoteliers are getting the same thing. All these people trying to sell them all these things and each one of these things have another dashboard or another email summary, right?
[00:23:44] It adds up. It's how do you choose what to focus on and the companies in my mind that are going to win. are the ones that are able to identify the right things to focus on and serve those up very seamlessly for their customers, for their users. And that's what Actabl is focused on doing. We're taking the tools that we have and serving them up more broadly to our customers.
[00:24:05] So if you're a customer that uses ProfitSword and Hotel Effectiveness, the information from those two platforms actually comes together now, making it much easier to interpret, much easier to make decisions off of. Those are the kinds of actions that in my mind, the companies that win are going to take just as there's more and more stuff out there. It's noise. And how do you turn the noise into not noise?
[00:24:26] Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, the whole idea of noise, in data is, is just,it's tremendous. it's almost too much, but I've also heard that actionable insights are only as good as the questions you then ask against those insights. So I'm wondering if you could just provide an example, just a specific example of actionable insight that could be derived from one of those integrations and then what questions you can then ask to get even more granular to guide to guide a hotel business from there.
[00:24:58] Adam Glickman: Yeah, so I'm going to answer the second half of your question and then revert back to first half. And I think why I'm going to do that is I want to show you. Give an example of something, you know, something that we've noticed as we've moved from 19 to 20 21, you know, think about how many mid level managers, operations managers left our industry during the pandemic when everyone got laid off.
[00:25:16] Right. And then a lot of them moved to other industries and they did not return. What that resulted in is we have a larger number of new, or I don't want to say inexperienced because they're not inexperienced on a big picture, but in the industry, less experienced. Leaders. And if you are a newer assistant GM and have never been one before, maybe didn't go through a full on management development program, or you're a GM has not been a GM for years and years, you just don't have as much experience working in hotels, you haven't worked in 15 or 10 or whatever the number is during your first one, As I think about actionable insights, and I go back to my earlier.
[00:25:51] What I said earlier, it's delivering the right information to the right person. So can I highlight and red flag up considerations to a new GM that they may not know? Can I look at a team member that has worked repeatedly multiple overtime shifts and flag up that if we don't engage with that person, there's a risk that they're going to turn quicker because they're going to be overworked?
[00:26:13] Or if I look at team members that are disengaged because they've called out For X number of shifts and you can actually see where those are, what do I do to prevent that person from leaving, right? If I can flag that to a newer team member that maybe just doesn't inherently have the experience to know those things because they just haven't worked in our industry as long, that could help the business much more broadly.
[00:26:35] So, to me, the thing about Actionable Insights comes to understanding who are the leaders and the managers and the users, the frontline team members that Insights go to and delivering the right ones for them that can help them in their day to day jobs. Knowing that might be very different from a seasoned COO who's been in our industry for 35 years and leads a large scale management company.
[00:26:59] They don't need that tactical level. They need to know, how do I pinpoint which exactly of my 35 hotels is the biggest red flag, where the most profit loss opportunity is living at a global or an estate level. As I think of other really civic insight examples, you know, there is a tool embedded within the hotel effectiveness engine platform called a five minute daily labor check in.
[00:27:23] And the whole premise behind it is... For a team, a manager in operations to really just check against the labor standard of the brand of hotel that they're running against the future looking next two weeks of the labor that they have or the team members that they have staffed. Where are they under?
[00:27:39] Where are they over? Where are they not matching up to standard? What are the kind of things to be looking at so they can literally pinpoint it? And that's a tool that's part of the platform that we've had, for years. Taking that idea and then blowing that across a hotel operation. Think about, can you pinpoint things like our You know, operations costs in the front office too high because you are overstaffing on what are forecast to be slower periods.
[00:28:07] And you have a risk of bad guest experience because you're understaffing on what could be higher periods. If I'm a newer manager and I don't know my exact trends and pattern changes, the total staff in a time period or a week or two weeks might be fine, but the way it's broken down might not be. And if that could get flagged up, if that insight could be served up, not after the fact, when I'm looking at a labor report, but before it actually happens to make schedule changes, think about how that can improve guest experience for the guest that happens to show up when it would have been understaffed or the day would have been understaffed. Think about how it can make the life of the manager better at that period, which would reduce their stress of dealing with upset customers who are waiting too long in a lobby.
[00:28:51] Think about how as housekeeping is turning rooms, they can engage with the front desk because it's staffed, again, what that hotel needs at that exact micro moment. But those micro decisions, right, those can get lost in a overarching budget or a labor schedule or whatever you might think about. Where technology adds value, that actionable insight comes by serving the right insight up to the right customer, the right team member at the right time.
[00:29:16] Adam Mogelonsky: Adam, to close things off here with our fourth question, what are the key things innovative leaders and entrepreneurs should prioritize and focus on to gain traction for their business?
[00:29:29] Adam Glickman: I kind of answered a version of this before, um, but I'll answer it in a slightly different way. I think the singular largest thing everybody should be thinking about are your people. And to me, your people are your employees, your team members, and your customers. So how do you gain traction? You have a really close pulse on your team members and you know, how they're feeling, what their opportunities are?
[00:29:51] Are you engaging with them? Something that I've, I've talked a lot about in the last 12 months or so is think about the number of Gen Z team members working in hotels and what platforms are they using in their daily lives? How are they scheduled? How are they talking to their friends? What social media are they using?
[00:30:09] And then I think about a hoteland I'm asking this as a rhetorical question for everybody that's listening to this podcast, but how many hotels out there still print a schedule that is two weeks long and put it on a board with a push pin? I guarantee you a lot of hotels still do that. How does that line up with the team member that their entire life is in their phone and they're making snap decisions on the moment, they're literally changing their plans by the second, they're communicating, they're texting. How are you engaging with your team members? Another really fun example of this and I, I laugh and it's personal. It's like, you know, I'm sure we've all, everybody that's listening to your podcast has gotten spam texts non stop, but has anybody been just randomly added to a stream from a, an outlet, an F& B outlet, a hotel?
[00:30:50] For people about shifts, like I accidentally had my phone number like a month ago added to, I don't know where it is, but some restaurant that was constantly like dropping servers, adding bartenders, rescheduling, and it was whoever the manager was, there's 15 people on it. And I just thought it was entertaining.
[00:31:03] It was like, okay, I need to cut two people tonight. I need to add one person tomorrow. It's just a bunch of phone numbers. How, is that really the best way to engage with your team? And for a month and a half, some person that worked with this out, this F& B outlet, Should have been on that tech stream, but I was on it instead.
[00:31:18] Right. And they were never even engaged in the loop with all the rest of their colleagues. So how as an industry are we engaging with and communicating with our team members to support how work has to happen in the future? So that is the first thing I'd say, how are you engaging? How are you kind of bringing the experience to life for your team members?
[00:31:36] And that parallels exactly to your customers. You know, what are your customer's biggest needs? Are you asking that question? Are you asking your customers the simple question of how can you better serve them? How can you better help them? What are they, what would make their lives better? Can you deliver that?
[00:31:52] It doesn't mean you say yes and do every single thing every customer tells you, but you should at least have the answer so you can use the answer to make your own internal business decisions.
[00:32:02] Adam Mogelonsky: it's the emotional intelligence of it where, you know, it's not just about being smart, it's about understanding who these people are and connecting them with an emotional level, which. means connecting them on the channel that they prefer. And Gen Z, they're, they're on their phones.
[00:32:17] So you have to be on your phone in the right way that's quickly accessible to them and, and can be adjusted on the fly for however, which way the life goes. So Adam, on that note, four questions in 30 minutes. It's been fantastic to have you on. A ton to think about here from many sides of the equation. So thank you for coming on to the podcast.
[00:32:41] Adam Glickman: Hey guys, good luck and I'm thrilled to do it, happy to be here with you today.