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The HotelTechInsider podcast interviews the top leaders at the convergence of hotels, travel and technology. Guests include founders, executives, top hoteliers and industry organization leadership. Find all of the episodes at hoteltechreport.com
I personally think in the world of AI, we are gonna have to become more people focused and people driven because that's one thing AI can't do for a while, if ever, is provide that human touch.
Speaker 2:From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider, a show about the future of hotels and the technology that powers them.
Speaker 3:Today, we have Harmeet Mann on the podcast. Harmeet is the CEO and cofounder of Mayer Consultancy. In our conversation, Harmeet talks us through the tech stack her team uses to keep everything running smoothly. And interestingly, this tech stack includes several pieces of software that are not hotel specific. In addition, you'll want to hear her take on AI versus humans when it comes to managing hotels over the coming years.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast today, Harmeet. I'm really looking forward to chatting with you. To kick things off, I would love for you to introduce yourself. Tell us a bit about your role and your business.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me here. So, my name is Harmeet Mann. I am the CEO and co founder of Mare Consultancy. We are a third party management firm based in DFW. We have been mostly growing in the third party space but we also do sales and revenue and consulting and a few other services as well.
Speaker 3:And can you tell me a bit about the hotels that you manage? Are they branded independent? What's the average key count and typical guest?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So, we're in the limited service, select service space. We have usually like your Hamptons, your Holiday Inn Expresses, Courtyards, to full service Holiday Inn's Embassy, that level of hotel. Typical key count is usually about 80 to one hundred and fifty, two hundred keys. The type of guests, the markets that we're in are usually some primary but mostly secondary tertiary markets.
Speaker 1:So, get a lot of transient guests. We get a lot of Monday through Thursday corporate clients that need to come work in the smaller markets. So that's a lot of what we see.
Speaker 3:I can imagine there a lot of challenges in operating a portfolio with different brands, different types of hotels in different markets. So I'm looking forward to learning more about how you keep everything running smoothly. To start off with, I'm curious to hear your perspective on what is the most critical piece of technology you use. If there's one system that you can't part with, what would that be?
Speaker 1:I have two. Hotel side, I think it would be Inflow. We partnered with them about a year ago, so we've been using them across our portfolio for a little over a year. We use them for time and attendance, scheduling payroll, and accounting and bookkeeping. And the reason we wouldn't survive without it is because it helps us have transparency with our owners.
Speaker 1:They're able to log in and see all expenditures and see a monthly P and L. It helps us stay organized. You can do your budgets in there, you can do your forecasting, and you have all your financials in one place. There's a good amount of BI in there too that helps us kind of view the health of our portfolio in terms of like a holistic portfolio wide night audit report. So, in one dashboard, we can see ADR occupancy and out of order rooms across our portfolio.
Speaker 1:If you tell me to get rid of that software, could we survive? Possibly. But I think the solution would then be fragmented having one solution for time and attendance, labor, and punch clock, and then having a different one for accounting and bookkeeping. So, I love that it's in one spot. The other software is not hotel specific, but it's monday.com.
Speaker 1:And even though it's a task management software, we use it as our filing cabinet. We're a Google Workspace company. So, I find monday.com to be a little bit more secure than using Google Drive to file things. We have 2FA set up in Monday. And we kind of every single hotel has a employee board where all the employees are there, all the employee files are saved there.
Speaker 1:We've got all our permits stored in monday.com. We've got all of our brand waivers stored. And of course, we use it for task management as well. So, ever since implementing that, if you ask anyone on the team to find the status of a task or find a certain documentation, we've just become so much more organized.
Speaker 3:I wanted to touch on monday.com for a bit. I know when we were reviewing your tech stack, you included several systems that are not, I would say, purpose built for hotels, things like Slack, monday.com. Can you talk to me about how your team uses those systems in conjunction with some of the more hotel oriented systems?
Speaker 1:Definitely. So we use Slack for communication amongst our corporate team and with our hotels. And I think that's very important. We wanna be accessible as a company, accessible by our owners, accessible by our general managers. We don't want people jumping through hoops to reach out to us or anybody on our corporate team.
Speaker 1:Right now, across 35 hotels, we have a corporate team of about 40. The reason the corporate team is a little larger is because we do in house sales and revenue too. So, there's a few people dedicated for that. With Slack, we have created a channel for every single hotel. And in that channel is my entire corporate team and the general manager from that hotel.
Speaker 1:So, all communication stays in one spot. General manager does have a point of contact, a boss, if you will. We call them director of operations. Every Director of Operations handles five or seven hotels. So, the general manager comes into their Slack channel.
Speaker 1:They have a question for their Director of Operations. Director of Operations can loop in accounting right then and there. They can loop in HR right then and there. There is a track record, a history, a transcript of the entire communication that's been happening at that hotel. We discourage DMs unless it's personal information.
Speaker 1:That in conjunction with larger tasks then become tracked on monday.com. So if they're having a conversation in Slack and something turns out to be an action item, it then goes to Monday and lives in Monday until it is completed. Between our softwares, we have some level of integration. Like, we'll integrate Monday in Slack so that if there's things that are needing attention, you can get notifications in Slack because everyone pretty much lives in Slack. The other thing we kinda hacked monday.com for, and I don't know if I should probably share this, but we will.
Speaker 1:So, we used Monday forms, which is a simple functionality of monday.com. And we created a sales lead sheet that we bookmark on every single front desk computer. So, every computer has a unique sales lead sheet. Front desk gets a call, someone's interested in staying at the hotel. They fill out the form really quick.
Speaker 1:And then it gets sent to our CRM in Monday, where my corporate DOS or the hotel DOS then tracks the life cycle of the sales lead. They'll contact the guest, they'll get a contract going, they'll upload it into the PMS system. Similarly, we do daily rate management. Front desk has another form bookmarked through Monday. They will just input kind of the going rate.
Speaker 1:And then it gets integrated into Slack. My revenue managers see it. They're able to up or down rate within minutes, daily, multiple times a day. So, we've also kind of implemented some workflows like that that people may not traditionally use these softwares for. I feel like we're already paying for it.
Speaker 1:People are already using them. They're logging into them. They're comfortable with them. The more things you can have verticals of the better.
Speaker 3:Can you talk to me a bit more about your business operations tech stack? Like, use Slack, you use monday.com. What are some other tools that you've implemented that have helped your teams run smoothly?
Speaker 1:A corporate setting wide kind of tech stack. We have Google Workspace and Slack Monday, and I would say things like PandaDoc to send out our client contracts, send out our new hire paperwork across all of our hotels. We like PandaDoc over some of the other signing softwares because it allows us to bulk send without many extra charges when we are doing a hotel onboarding. So, I can send out 20 new hire packets at the same time. I also like their variable functionality.
Speaker 1:So, now I can have a general new hire packet and have blanks for hotel name, EIN, address. And that stuff is gonna show up many times throughout the packet, but I just have to fill it out once and then it plugs in. We use Hireology, which is more hotel specific, but it's nice to be able to put out ads for our hotels when we're hiring. And it can kind of, instead of doing LinkedIn, Indeed, and other kind of softwares, it's just one main dashboard. And we have all of our hotels there, all of our ads there, and it's a lot easier to match.
Speaker 1:On the hotel side, we've got Inflow for accounting. We've got Certify, we use for credit card authorizations and some sales contracts. We use Canary and Kipsu for guest messaging depending on the brand standard. We use Kipsu Exceed for our facilities management. So all of your maintenance work tickets, deep clean logs, housekeeping logs, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3:Is there anything on your wish list? Any vendor you've seen on the market that looks really innovative that you're considering adding?
Speaker 1:There's a couple. I think we just recently added XQuick. They do kind of OTA reconciliation for you and I believe they also offer to do chargebacks. So, that's a relatively new development. We'll see how it goes.
Speaker 1:But that was a recent need that we wanted to address because we were doing it in our corporate team where we were having the general managers do it and things were falling through the cracks. There's a couple, not necessarily software wishlists, but things I wish some of our existing softwares could do. Like, for example, we use Hirology to put ads out. I wish there was a candidate management in there. So, now I'm interviewing people.
Speaker 1:There is a small space to take notes, but if I could just see in a dashboard view, everybody that I've interviewed, it's just so much easier to compare. So, what we're doing is we are screening candidates in hydrology and shortlisting and sending them a message to come interview with us. After that, we move to monday.com, where we've got a Google Sheet type situation going on within Monday, where we've got the candidate's name, interview notes and everything else we would want to kind of track. So, I think a lot of softwares, especially hotel softwares, I've noticed there's a trend where they will add other modules like, they will have offerings that not be related with their main bread and butter. So, having things that are a little bit more symbiotic, if that's the right word or kind of relational, it would have much more value add.
Speaker 1:So, if Hirology is already like an HR candidate kind of recruiting software, having candidate management in there would be amazing.
Speaker 3:Shifting gears a little bit, I know you've implemented a lot of process improvements or process developments as well, not strictly related to tech stack. I wanted to ask about a couple of your top business objectives. What are you working on now, and how is technology helping you get there?
Speaker 1:So, I think one of the softwares I missed in the beginning when we were talking about our list of softwares is Trainual. It's kind of become like a training manual and Wikipedia for our team. In the past year, any software overhaul that we had, we were documenting it in Trainual. And it was great because it would help us wrap our heads around and remember the workflows we were coming up with. And it would help the rest of the team see it too.
Speaker 1:It was like an announcement training all in one. Now our traineeal has become like 10 chapters with like fifteen, twenty pages in there each. It's become really extensive and it's so good for new general managers, new people on the team. It's a requirement that they take it. One of my kind of ongoing business goals is to keep improving that, keep improving our workflows and our SOPs.
Speaker 1:And one thing I'm working on deeply in the past couple months and still working on it, I feel like the more I work on it, the more I uncover and it's gonna get worse before it gets better, is our accounting kind of processes and team. About six months ago, the head of our accounting team left and I thought it was a perfect opportunity to become the head of the accounting team. And kind of go elbows deep in that department and figure out inefficiencies, figure out where things are going wrong, and then use the softwares that we're already paying for to their best ability. Example, my accounting team was saying one of the complaints they had was sometimes new vendors are created. Like, they'll create a vendor, fill out the information, and then sometimes other people like a general manager or somebody else will go in and create new vendors.
Speaker 1:Well, I said, let's go into the perms and let's see if we can turn off that capability. So, just sitting like department by department, kind of meeting with them, figuring out their inefficiencies, figuring out mistakes we're making as a company, and then using softwares including like task management dashboards and like recurring reminders, any of that stuff to make sure we're never late on another insurance payment or never late on a tax filing. As soon as we make one mistake, I use it as an opportunity to optimize and fix it for the future and not repeat that mistake. So that's kind of where my mind's at, what our business goals are right now. It's just sustainable growth.
Speaker 1:How do we keep improving so that we can keep up with our growth and retain our growth? At the end of the day, we have to keep our hotels, hotel owners happy and we need to be organized to do that.
Speaker 3:Shifting gears a little bit, I wanna tap into your CEO and people manager experience. What would you say are one or two of the most important skills for hoteliers today?
Speaker 1:One thing I've shared in other spaces too is that I personally think in the world of AI, we're gonna have to become more people focused and people driven because that's one thing AI can't do for a while if ever, is provide that human touch and that human response. So, one thing I think hotel owners and leadership teams need to work on is, using AI tools to free up their team to do more of the people work. Whether that is their general manager is focusing on the hotel team, general manager is focusing on the hotel guest to provide that experience and that care and that individual response. And I think it's interesting because hospitality is one of those industries that people do come in because they like people and they want to be in an interactive space and they want to, in a way, serve others. But it is also a business and it does have to be profitable because that's ultimately one of the priorities.
Speaker 1:Sometimes what happens is people get caught up on the profitability and you have to, you have to be profitable. But I think now it's gonna be an interesting time in society where we get to focus on the people part again if technology is gonna do some of the heavy lifting for us. I know softwares are implementing it. We don't use it necessarily very heavily. We have like automation set up.
Speaker 1:We have in some of our other softwares. We will occasionally use AI type of kind of services out there to do a little bit of the work for us. Other than that, I don't see a need right now or a solution for how we would be using AI for our hotel operations or corporate operations. But I can see how for redundant stuff, for repetitive stuff, it could be very useful.
Speaker 3:Last question, which is always a fun one. I'm curious for your thoughts on something you believe about technology in the hotel space that your peers or competitors might disagree with. So what's your hot take?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I don't know what other people would disagree with, but one of my hot takes about technology is for now, technology is used by people. So you still need the people. So I can have Inflow or Kipsu Exceed or Hirology and I can have all these expensive softwares but if I have nobody uploading the invoice and if I have nobody putting in the work ticket or responding to the work ticket, then the software is rendered useless. So, as much focus as people have on their tech stack, they need to have on their training, their implementation, the support they provide to the team afterwards and kind of how they incentivize the team to use these systems.
Speaker 1:And I think that's also important for technology companies to learn too is their software is only as successful as their implementation and their ongoing support is. So, I don't know if that's a hot take. I don't think people would disagree with it, but I don't know if a lot of people are thinking about it. Like my entire day is spent thinking about trainees. Like, oh, I need to add this one thing to it so my team knows what to do.
Speaker 1:So that's just kind of where my mind is regarding technology. And it's so important not to reinvent the wheel in anything we do. So in our tech stack too, it's important to see as your needs change, how can that solution work. And ultimately, if you've explored that and it doesn't work, then yes, you you look for other things. But demoing softwares, implementing them, training your teams on it, it's a heavy lifting.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of time and money invested. So everybody wins when it works out.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for your time, Harmeet. It was so great chatting with you. Really great having you on the podcast.
Speaker 2:That's all for today's episode. Thanks for listening to Hotel Tech Insider produced by hoteltechreport.com. Our goal with this podcast is to show you how the best in the business are leveraging technology to grow their properties and outperform the concept by using innovative digital tools and strategies. Encourage all of our listeners to go try at least one of these strategies or tools that you learned from today's episode. Successful digital transformation is all about consistent small experiments over a long period of time, so don't wait until tomorrow to try something new.
Speaker 2:Do you know a hotelier who would be great to feature on this show, or do you think that your story would bring a lot of value to our audience? Reach out to me directly on LinkedIn by searching for Jordan Hollander. For more episodes like this, follow Hotel Tech Insider on all major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.