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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 #45 - Rallying a Global Tech Company Around Waypoints | with Phelim Pekaar
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Adam Mogelonsky: Welcome to the Gain Momentum podcast, focusing on timeless lessons for business leaders in hospitality, technology, food service, and travel. I'm joined here today with our guest, Phelim Pekaar. He's from P3 Hotels Software as the founder and CEO. Phelim, how are you?
Phelim Pekaar: I'm good, Adam. And, uh, thanks for having me on your podcast today.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, thanks for joining us. Uh, I know that it was a little bit rushed for, for booking you on such short notice, but sometimes things just work out, especially Post high tech, we are recording now in July 12th, and it's been almost just over two weeks since that whirlwind of a time in Charlotte. So coming off a little bit of a high for our industry. And we structure our podcast around four key questions, focusing on business growth and scaling a [00:01:00] business. But before I get into that, I was hoping if you could just give us the elevator pitch on P3, just to give a frame of reference for our listeners and viewers.
Phelim Pekaar: sure. the elevator pitch. I love that. where to start? The company started 25 years ago, so trying to put it all in one elevator can be difficult, but I'll go back to seven years ago. we've always been in hospitality tech really since I started the company. My first customer was Jewelry's Doyle Hotel Group.
Uh, it was kind of by accident. Uh, I didn't know anything about the hospitality industry, let alone. The hospitality tech industry, but I kind of, I learned my trade working with them, building software for them. In 2015, so let's cut to 2015, we kind of saw an opportunity to build technology, specifically booking engines, around the Oracle Opera platform.
we felt that not everybody was doing it well, so we decided to just build booking engines that work. Solely on that. and technology we offer today centers around [00:02:00] booking engines for hotel groups. And our target audience is essentially, independent hotels, hotel groups that have their own brand, and they're trying to attract direct bookings to their website.
so that's kind of our sweet spot. We wouldn't really work with, franchise companies like Marriott's, Hilton's, or those. It's when a company is really trying to build out their own direct booking channel. So we do Booking Engine, we can do online check in, online check out, we can do kiosks inside lobbies, we've got a gift voucher platform, other little modules around it as well.
But we coin it now the digital guest journey, not just Booking Engine.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah, I like that phrase that's, uh, we can get back to that because I think that's in a very important evolution for our industry. So question number one for business growth, , when it comes to scaling a business, what is the single piece of advice you would give to professionals in business?
Hospitality technology.
Phelim Pekaar: Perseverance, maybe?[00:03:00]
Adam Mogelonsky: Yep. That's a definitely one.
Phelim Pekaar: I'm presumably meaning a SaaS business, Adam, right? Scaling a SaaS business, because that's what we're obviously in. One of the pieces of advice I'd give is, to constantly test your model and your assumptions. I think what a lot of people do is, they kind of, technologists specifically, they build technology.
because they think it's a good idea or it's fun to build and it could be a handy little tool. But when you're building a technology company, you've got to make sure that it's offering value to the end customer. Um, that's what I mean by model, right? so what is your model in terms of, what are you offering to the customer?
Is it useful to them? And are you pricing that correctly? And then your assumptions are basing on where that's going. So your assumptions are seeing a a gap in the market, an opportunity in the market, you've got to constantly question that and view what others are doing or what's happening. I think what, like when I started the business, I actually was a [00:04:00] process engineer, mechanical manufacturing engineer before I got into software.
That's what drew me into the internet and building things, because actually fundamentally we were building processes. And early on in my career, what I did a lot of was I asked questions. Why do you need this? When a customer will come to me and say, Hey, can you build us this tool that does X, Y, and Z? I would always ask them, well, why?
Why do you want it? How are you doing it today? If I was to build this, why would it be of a benefit to you? probably the reason I did that was because I was afraid that I would spend time building something that somebody would then realize, actually, that's a waste. I don't need it. It doesn't offer any value to me.
as a process engineer, manufacturing engineer, that's what I was trained to do. Understand the value proposition of the product you're making. and we still do that today, I have that kind of built into the organization. We're constantly measuring the performance of the product that we sell to make sure it's [00:05:00] offering value.
And then I benchmark the price that we, we offered as to make sure that it's below that value offering. Does that make sense? And the other piece of advice I'd say is, for anyone getting into the hospitality tech space, the hospitality industry is disaggregated. There's lots of players, lots of hoteliers, uh, lots of competitors, airline industry is very different.
It's less players both from customers and both from software vendors as well. so that's a challenge for anyone trying to get into it. I think if you do a calculation of the size of the hospitality market, it's in the trillions or the billions. It's, it's enormous. It's so big, we can't even comprehend how big it is.
what's important to do is kind of figure out What is your sweet spot, proposition, your value proposition, and who are your sweet spot customers? What are you going to go after? And for us, we did that in 2015. We recognized that there was a corner of the industry, that's a very large [00:06:00] corner, um, which was, Opera users that weren't being served correctly with integration.
everybody was offering what I would call a light integration into Opera. Whereas we were doing more and more around opera. Now we realized that if we went down that path, it would be difficult for us to replicate what we're doing on other solutions. But we said, Hey, let's just be the best at.
Integrating with Opera, right, and building platforms around it. That's good enough for us. It's not the, it's not the whole market, but it certainly is, it's big enough for us to get a wage and pay our way.
Adam Mogelonsky: but still within there, you had to make a very serious business decision. You had to assess the. service address, serviceable, addressable market, the SAM versus just the TAM saying, okay, our software serves independents and independent brands or small groups, how many are using Opera? How many are not using Opera?
And what went into [00:07:00] your decision there to decide on going full opera versus being more PMS agnostic?
Phelim Pekaar: Well, I'll be honest with you, I didn't do that, Sam, before I made the decision.
made me make the decision was we, we actually had our own booking engine, which I had built myself, and I was competing against lots of other booking engine companies. In Ireland, in the UK, we were trying to start thinking about getting into European countries.
And I recognized that there was none of us really that were uniquely different. and actually we were all going to end up competing against the OTAs, right? That was actually winning. I just saw that the opera side wasn't, we could do that better. So I went, look, even in Ireland and the UK, I knew there was a lot of hotels using opera.
And that to me, as I said, it was enough for us to pay a wage and live, right, and do well. Once we kind of started to, UK, we started to get a good reputation for doing that [00:08:00] work. And that opera community was, you know, telling each other, you should talk to P3, they really know what they're doing. We then started to look at the sizable addressable market, and actually I was quite shocked.
Maybe how small it was because our, our size of addressable market was people who were using Opera. They had to be an independent hotel and not part of a franchise. And they had to have their own brand that they're trying to drive. So you're talking smaller hotel groups. That are for independents, and who wanted to invest in their brand as well, right?
Not people who are going, let's just use the OTAs to get our customers. They were willing to advertise and push hard for people to book direct. They were the type of customers we wanted. That market was quite small. Um, I looked at Germany, I looked at the U. S. But at the end of the day, I said, look, this is, still big enough for me to make more of a way to, to build my company and get it better.
and then as you, as you start to turn that corner, you start to realize, actually [00:09:00] we built this tool and that could feed up into another subset of that market. So I think by actually closing the mind. On the market, it allowed us to focus and do what we do really well. And as we progressed and we were successful, we can see that the market opens up to us in different ways.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, that makes perfect sense. And a lot of people wouldn't even be able to rationalize trying to find that unique niche. They approach the hospitality market as the hospitality market, but it's so fragmented, as you said. To pull out one other point before we go to our second question, there's segmentation by type, by.
Integration with opera, but also right now you're in Boulder, Colorado, leading the U. S. expansion. And also you've focused on the DACH market, Deutschland, Austria, Confederation Helvetica, right? Uh, Switzerland.
Phelim Pekaar: Yeah.
Adam Mogelonsky: Why did [00:10:00] you choose that market? And I say DACH, I mean, the U. S. is kind of an obvious choice for expanding, particularly with a major PMS like opera, but why DACH?
Phelim Pekaar: So, uh, that's a good question. we were fortunate enough to be, before COVID hit us all, we were invited to be part of a program. There's an organization in Ireland called Enterprise Ireland. It helps startups and it ran a, like a diploma course called, Eurozone for Growth. So Brexit was happening, if you remember, before, before COVID.
So Ireland was heavily dependent on trading with Britain. So Enterprise Ireland set up this program to get companies to start exporting into Europe. Now, as Irish, and I, I've recognized this in all the Irish, we see Europe and go, yeah, listen, we're going to expand into Europe. We don't really.
Understand that it's made up of many micro markets and trying to get into it is quite difficult. So Enterprise Ireland [00:11:00] set up this program and myself and another marketing manager, we did it for around for about nine months. and part of it was in Berlin and they educated us basically on how to assess going into a micro market.
European markets. So they said, don't just go into all markets blindly. You've got to do your research, do your analysis, and then you've got to decide which market works best for you. And we were a cohort of about 15 companies. there was all sorts of different companies, mainly technology. so when we did our research, what we realized was, okay, the German markets and culturally Germans are very particular.
about having things done right. You would have heard that, right? And they'll admit to it as well. Everything must be done in a perfect order, Yeah.
So we looked at the way, well, our product integrates so well with opera that actually that feeds into their kind of cultural requirements. We [00:12:00] do, like, everything just links really nicely together.
So we felt, well, culturally, this should be something of a unique selling point to them, right? Nothing will break It's engineered very well. Whereas if you look at the French and Italian markets, they don't really care so much about that, right? And secondly, German market, well, Micros comes from the US, Fidelio came out of Germany.
So it has an underlying huge user base of Opera users as well. so our research identified that. It also has quite a lot of independently owned hotels. And it has a couple of small brands that, sorry, small chains as well, which is our sweet spot customers. So that's what made us decide on Germany.
Actually, retrospectively to that, I had already done a lot of inroads into the French market. I had built up contacts, I had got lists of people, I was talking to hotels. So for me to make that switch, I knew nothing about Germany, was quite a kind of like, but I've made progress in this market.
This isn't going to work. You know, you're [00:13:00] cut felt. But I had to go with the LodgIQ decision and it's been, it's taken a lot longer, than we hoped. But I can see now with the investment we've put in, it's starting to pay off.
Adam Mogelonsky: that's such an interesting observation you threw in there about, uh, your inroads with the, with the French market. And it will be all too easy to back rationalize pursuing the French versus the German market. Because you have that, that passion and that cultural. Identity with that because you have friends there in France, you, you, and then you could find some statistics that would prove that it would be a good place to launch, but letting the logic overrule that is, I think, is something that a lot of people could.
And I'm going to start with a couple of questions that I think people could really benefit from in their analysis prior to, going into a specific market and in terms of their, actual sales strategy. So that draws onto our second question here, which is, Phel what are some of the common pitfalls or failures you have witnessed that business owners should look to avoid when scaling their business?
Phelim Pekaar: so I have [00:14:00] a couple of points on this. My father was a, my father was an accountant, he had his own business. I think that's where I first got my entrepreneurial buzz from. And when I was starting the business, he used to always shout at me, people, people, people. And I kind of ignored him. Like I was a technologist but now that I'm older and looking back, I can see what he was trying to say to me. I've learned a lot since then. So it's people and people are probably the two biggest pitfalls, and in two different ways. The first way is not having people in your team that are behind you.
So, when you're building a company, you're essentially setting a mission. We talk about missions and values and stuff like that, but it is true. As an entrepreneur, you have an, you have a concept, an idea of where you want to go. Essentially, you're, gathering a group of people together and you're saying, Hey, we're going to go over there and I think it's a good idea because of these reasons.
So, you've got to make sure that the people who are with you are aligned. To [00:15:00] your goals or your company's goals, and also that they themselves have aligned those goals with their own personal goals. You can't expect your employees to be as passionate about your business as you are. Some will be and some won't.
You know, they are employees. some have share options or whatever, but they do have different goals for their lives, right? But you do want to look out and make sure that those personal goals align with your company goals, and that everybody is aligned. To where you want the company to go. if you don't have people that are on board, you need to stop the bus, you need to get them off. And initially that was hard to do, but I recognize that much easier now, and I'm much more confident to do that in a way that suits everybody. Because if your personal goals aren't aligned to where the company's going, that person gets dragged. so there's just no point in the being, on your journey.
The second people piece of advice, which I think I've learned probably in my more latter years rather than my former years, is yes, you'll have [00:16:00] people who are on the bus who are as passionate as you, they're aligned, they are part of the journey, they want to see this company become a success, but unfortunately their skillset isn't attuned to what they should be doing in their role.
and I didn't really see that, probably in the first 15 years of the business so much because we were growing very slowly as a business, like the business kind of trundled on with kind of a, a certain amount of revenue or turnover. It wasn't growing like 20, 20, 30%. It's only been in the last four years that the company starts to grow at 30 percent year on year, right?
So it's, so we're starting to, um, have that. That success that we talk about on startups and stuff like that, but much later in the lifespan of the business. So now what I'm experiencing is certain people have that passion or whatever, however, their skill set is not aligned to what we need in the business.
Um, I read a great book recently by Ben Horowitz, The Hard [00:17:00] Thing About Hard Things. Have you read that? Oh my God. It made me laugh. It's the first business book where I actually laughed out loud. but it does, it talks about that and it resonated with me pretty quickly to say, oh yes, I can see, you know, where people haven't personally developed as quickly as the company and we've got to talk about their roles.
and that's really, that's really, really hard to do. On the flip side of that, there are people who progress quicker than the company in terms of personal development. And you either, you have to, you have to, Push them along or you have to kind of catch those people so that they don't leave the business because you need them and get them to change their roles, get them to accelerate their own personal development that fits with the business.
So that's, that's people and people. Um, the other thing, just going back to my first point is mistakes I've seen other businesses make is really understanding the end value of their product versus their pricing. So going back to the [00:18:00] value proposition of what you do, when you sell. Product, right? I don't think early stage companies do enough, is they actually sit down and ask, what value does my product give to my customer?
And actually more importantly, what financial value does my product give to my customer? Tech businesses tend to look at value based on time. We save time for people. But it can offer value in so many different ways. So it's trying to assess the value and talk to your customers consistently. Hey, this online check in system, is it giving you value?
You know, and you want to get down to the root question. Is it saving you money? And it might sound quite brutal, but with online check in, I'd be saying, Okay, you know, do you need to hire as many front of house teams now? No, we can take one person off the second shift. So now I understand their bottom line is changing.
Because of our product. I also know that [00:19:00] our online check in, we measure every week the conversion rate of people checking in online. And I know if that percentage drops for a particular client, there's a strong likelihood that they're going to phone me in the next couple of weeks and say, we're switching this off.
It doesn't offer, offer value. And I've seen that happen with two or three. So I'm pushing, when I see those metrics drop, I'm pushing back to the team, Hey, Hey, Hey, what's going on? We need to get that metric up. Something's broken. The customer is not pushing it internally with their customers, their guests.
So, it's constantly driving, that there's value out of our products and what P3 offers to our customers.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, to pick out one thread, because, you know, you mentioned about driving value for your customers, and that still comes down to your teams and how well they are able to support their, their customers, the hotels, the end users, and develop that relationship, the customer education on how to use the product, et cetera.
Getting back to your point about people and people, I want to put in a little bit more context here because you're in [00:20:00] Boulder. You have your headquarters is in Ireland.
You have a sales office in Munich and you have
a, a dev shop in Romania.
is that
Phelim Pekaar: yeah.
Adam Mogelonsky: correct? So you talk about people and people, but a lot of times you're managing people remotely,
how
do you effectively guide a team across four countries and multiple time zones?
Phelim Pekaar: Uh, yeah, it's been really, uh, it's been really interesting. I was, um, before COVID, I was a sucker for, you gotta come to the office. Everybody had to come to the office. And people would say to me, oh, I'm not feeling so well today, do you mind if I work from home? And I go, no, if you're sick, you can have a sick day.
Right. I didn't want even any sort of, any sort of wedge in that people could start working remotely. I was, we're in together, we work as a team, you know, it's cross how collaboration that's how it happens. Um, But when COVID hit, I moved [00:21:00] to the States and the reason I went to the States was because I was managing the company through Zoom anyway, for effectively two years, you know, or a year and a half.
So I said, well If I've done it for a year and a half, I should be able to do it from the States, for a year and a half, and then I'll go move back to Ireland, and we'll go back to the way things were. But I've recognized that things are never, ever going to go back to the way they were. I am a firm believer now, when I look back at how we used to, there'd be 17 of us crammed into an office, right?
And people will be commuting three hours a day to get to the office and back again. And how people's lives have changed from remote working. We have no hope of getting people back to the office. It's an industrial way of thinking, right? That's how I see it. So, but the question remains, how do you motivate people, manage people across multiple jurisdictions and multiple time zones?
It's early starts. It's a lot of this, you know, doing things on Zoom. But one of the things that we have always done, which I think has helped is We have set, [00:22:00] and I'll probably come to this a little bit later, we set out, what we call quarterly, we have quarterly, meetings, QBR's if you want to call them.
But in those meetings, it's setting out what are the goals, where are we going, I don't call them goals, I actually call them waypoints. Because goals can sometimes be seen as well. We didn't hit that goal and therefore, you know, we've let ourselves down.
Adam Mogelonsky: too, too much finality in the word goal.
Phelim Pekaar: Yes, yeah, yeah. But in my mind, a waypoint goes back to the idea of saying, hey everybody, we're going that way. Are we all on board? You know, that's what I, so I call them waypoints. And yes, are we eventually going to get there? That's good. Sometimes we get there a little bit quicker. But are we going in the right direction and are we testing our assumptions?
in the direction are we going So, it's being open and transparent about that every three months. Guys, this is what I'm thinking, these are the waypoints, this is what we want to try and achieve, this is why we want to try and achieve it. and we look at our financial numbers and then [00:23:00] we do some other stuff as well, but we do that kind of every three months.
We try to get together at least once a year. So we have a company like, just to get together and we spend two days together. This year, we're going to spend a week in Dublin together, three days working, two days having fun.
And every, like, you know, every year we go, Oh my God, it's going to cost so much money.
But like, and that's something that's very difficult to put a finger on value, right? But we feel like without having it, that people and people breaks down, you know, making sure that everyone's aligned, where we're going, they understand where we're going is, is so important.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, yeah, the, the people development and just meeting and people building a community around a company. Right. And
It's not just about the reading PDFs together and reviewing reports and analytics. It's getting together and sharing a meal, sharing a pint together. That's really how you build a solid culture and a cohesive unit that is, uh, aligned [00:24:00] around waypoints and, uh, and also personally and, company as well.
So on this note about waypoints, it's a good segue into our third question, which is where are we going? So, Phelim, what do you see as the key opportunities and challenges for hotel technology companies in 2024 and beyond?
Phelim Pekaar: you're going to laugh at me here. I tell you what I'm not going to say, AI. I'm going to book the Trent, right?
I have been pursuing AI and maybe I'm, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they'll put me in the founder of BlackBerry, that box, uh, somebody who didn't see the change coming, but these are my reasons why.
Okay. So the opportunity. That I see for people who want to get into the hotel, hotel tech space today. The two thing, two things hotel operators really need is automation and security.
So there's a lot of smaller players, let's start with the second first, a lot of smaller [00:25:00] players in the market. It's a disaggregated, it's quite competitive, the small tech companies.
From a CIO's perspective, the biggest concern they have is security. If the product I'm buying is secure, I've got customer data in there, what happens if that company gets hacked? What happens if that company, that, data gets stolen, is really what's wedged into their back of their mind. and the second thing is automation.
I think the days of cheap labor, unfortunately, are over for U. S. and Europe as well. Um, why that is, I don't know. Inflation, migration, the millennials not wanting to work. There's a variety of different reasons, but
certainly all of the above.
you know, coming out of COVID, there was definitely a labor shortage.
people didn't want to go back into the hospitality trend and everyone felt like it'll pick up again. You know, it'll, it'll come back, but it's not coming back. all I'm hearing from my, my customers and potential future customers is how can you automate? How can you automate? How can we take [00:26:00] out tasks within the process that somebody has to do?
So once automation and security becomes the bedrock of hospitality technology, I do think there's going to be aggregation as well in the market that might follow suit, let's say like the airlines. There'll be bigger players, especially within the PMS space. But once you have that bedrock of automation and security is covered off, I think that gives a flourishing starting point for AI to really start to work.
AI, in my opinion, works when you've got a massive data set. It has a lot of data to work off. It can really start to add value.
Smaller data sets, it works, yes, but does it really offer value? to the end user, the end customer, right? Take, let's just take ChatGPT, for example. It has basically swallowed up the entire internet, okay?
And it's using all that knowledge to spit back out information. I watch my kids use ChatGPT to solve [00:27:00] algebra and calculus problems. It's incredible. They put the problem in and it comes back and it's telling them, well, this is how you do it. If you took ChatGPT and you shrank it down by a 10th, It wouldn't have the power to do that and therefore it wouldn't offer any value to any student around the world.
So AI to be truly effective, I think has to have a massive data set. So I think by, by, by bringing automation into the industry is going to create a lot of data and it's going to create more players, the security aspect of it. So 2026 maybe is where you'll start to see AI truly add huge value to the hospitality tech space.
In the interim, our focus will be on automation.
Adam Mogelonsky: So to pull on your thread and we could go to LLMs and Gen AI versus machine learning, but your thread of automation. And one of the features you recently released was [00:28:00] the P3 ancillary. And, uh, that feature, I mean, I work in the luxury space and the Holy Grail is. The Single Booking, where you go from the room, uh, you're sold on a package with Restaurant Spa, and then you're brought right back in to book those ancillary experiences and get them right in, right from the booking, so that way no one has to call you up afterwards or you're left with something that has to be redeemed once you get on site.
And I'm wondering if you could draw out and paint a picture for the process, both development and integrations and partnerships and strategy that you went through to build out that automated booking journey, uh, that has just been released before high tech.
Phelim Pekaar: Sure. That's a good example of where we're pushing for automation. So if you think of that scenario where you're booking a hotel room and then you've got to book your spa time afterwards. So talking to hotels, what was happening was [00:29:00] people book the accommodation and they tend to book it with maybe, you're talking a 60 day window, right?
And then 10 days beforehand, they email in saying, Hey, I'd like to book a spa. Right. Cause now they're starting to think, yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Let's, let's do that. I'm going to, so the email goes in, I want to book a spa. The response is no problem. We have availability. What time would you like?
Well, I'm thinking three o'clock. Well, I only have 3. 30 to 4. 30. Back again. All right. I'll take, let me, let me check with my partner, traveling partner. Two days later, I come back. We'll take 3. 30. 3. 30 is gone. Do you want to do 4. 30? Right. Back on 4. 30. You can imagine. The time wasted on the front of house teams managing that communication with that person in terms of the spa booking.
Or they're saying to them, here's the number to the spa, ring directly and the person has to ring and then talk to the spa directly in terms of the availability. when we started to say, okay, let's put this online, right? So that they [00:30:00] can book the spa or the golf. within the room accommodation at the same time.
Some of our customers were saying, Hey, can you build like a mini booking engine that will hold that inventory on your site? But we knew that doesn't really work in a practical sense. Because the person who's managing the spa has a spa software, which would have what we call the single source of truth, right?
Who's on? Who's available? Which beauticians are available? What time slots can they offer? That's your single source of truth. If they had to go to our system and manage that separately each day,
it'll never work. It goes back to when we started selling rooms on the internet in 2003. Do you remember there was everyone on the A Extralets and then they were in the PMS and then somebody came up with the bright idea of saying, let's, let's build a channel manager.
Right.
right. So we said, well, let's cut that out. We're not building a separate system. We're going to, we're going to [00:31:00] say, Hey, does that spa software have an API? Most of them do. So when you're booking your spa, it's now talking to the spa software and it's getting the inventory from a single source of truth. And there's automation. We don't have to. Nobody's to ring the front of house spa team, get them to check the system. It's doing it all automatically. But there's no AI behind it, Adam. You know, it's just simple
programming.
Adam Mogelonsky: it's an API that's been properly implemented to pull the data to where it needs to be to therefore improve the guest experience and to save time in indirect ways like having people having to phone the spa receptionist and you mentioned it's like oh the 3 30 nope and then 4 30 and then each time the overall guest satisfaction is just going like this slowly downward because they're frustrated because they're it's taking them longer and they're not getting the exact time they want
Phelim Pekaar: and hotels as well, like they've grown over the years, they've developed more [00:32:00] ancillary services to their hotels. So hotels are kind of, I think, are doing a bit of a flip. Like I remember being in a Marriott back in 2005 and they had nothing, they had no restaurant, no breakfast. They wanted you to leave the hotel and do that.
And I think a lot of hoteliers are actually recognizing the value now of offering in house services where they can increase their revenue. So it's really coming back and you're seeing these, a lot of hotels, you know, in the Caribbean that are building out these luxury resorts where you can pick and choose what you do, what you do.
And I think that will, I think that will stay, I think that's what people are looking for looking for holidays where they can just go and be completely looked after. They've got plenty of activities and they don't have to. the second thing, Millennials love to plan ahead. Oh, it's part of the fun.
If their holiday isn't planned,
Adam Mogelonsky: of one
Phelim Pekaar: If their holiday isn't planned to like every minute before they leave, they're not satisfied.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, yeah, [00:33:00] because, you know, uh, the phrase plans are useless, but planning is essential. And the whole idea from my perspective is I want to lock everything in as possible that when, when I get there, I have the most time available to maximize my experience, knowing that time is the limited variable, and the most valuable resource ahead of money.
Phelim Pekaar: That's interesting you say that. It's like. 10 years ago, people didn't think like that.
Adam Mogelonsky: Yeah. It's the experience economy. So, Phelim, to wrap up here, we've had a great conversation. Of course, people, speaking of time, they, they want to maximize their time with quick in quick out, the ADD nature of, podcasting these days. We'll close out with your, with your thoughts on the final of the four key questions. Phelim, what are the key things innovative leaders and entrepreneurs should prioritize and focus on to gain traction for their business?
Phelim Pekaar: I think what entrepreneurs or leaders should focus on is creating, passion and belief [00:34:00] in what the company is doing and where it's going. you gotta have that. I've learned, I think, how to do that better over the years. I made mistakes probably early on. I wasn't communicating enough to my team members and my colleagues about why.
We were doing certain things. I think probably as an ent, as an entrepreneur as well, or as a leader, as a CEO, you know, everything, everything's in here, you know? And you assume foolishly that everybody else knows that. Of course they should know, but actually when you talk to them, they go, oh God, I have no idea.
Or half the company knows, and the other half the company knows something else. So it's very important to consistently and repeatedly create that belief. And the passion that goes with it of why you're doing something. there was a brilliant CEO, I don't know if you've ever heard of John Brennan. He was the CEO of Jury's Inns Group, which had thousands of employees.
And every quarter, he got a video created of the company, of goals, of where they were going, of what was happening, and everybody could log [00:35:00] on and see that video. And this was back in 20, God, it was 20, 2008 maybe, 2007, I guess, a good while ago. And I remember I was, cause I had to distribute that video as being part of the digital team.
I used to watch the videos and it resonated with me, going, here's somebody that's sharing that board level stuff with every single employee in the business. And I could see juries go through a transformation change in the seven years that he was CEO, uh, from the people I was working with to actually the growth of the company.
It was really, it was really cool. So that was a lesson I took. Um, so yeah, I think is probably the strongest thing. yeah, just making sure they're aligned.
Adam Mogelonsky: Well, alignment, belief, passion. These are all things that are core to our industry and they're lessons for everyone because they supersede and underpin technology and, everything we're trying to do with helping hotels to help guests get good experiences and to help our, our onsite [00:36:00] teams. Phelim, it's been a fantastic conversation.
Can't thank you enough for coming on.
Phelim Pekaar: Yeah, thank you for having me. okay, we'll see you around.
Adam Mogelonsky: Of course.