overcoming difficulties

We have just completed a year that has been so unprecedented. It has re-written the goalposts for so many things, especially for the hotel and other service industries where people are the main ingredient in what we offer.

In the hotel business if you want to get ahead you better be ready to move. It’s the way in which you can multiply your opportunities and increase your chance for greater personal prosperity. That’s the way it was explained to me many years ago and it has certainly been my experience.…

Almost 40 years ago now I was a busboy at a large and busy resort in the Canadian Rockies. I had transferred west a few months earlier from another hotel in the same chain where I had worked for two years. This is a story about me starting to find my way…

If you read my stuff you are probably familiar with the phrase, “Hospitality is a game of inches.” Yes, it’s true. There is the driving engine of room revenue but almost everything else we need to deal with puts a drag on performance. These things can really slow us down, to use another motorsports analogy. One thing you want…

I didn’t start out in the hotel business with a plan or even any desire to be a financial leader. I was going to be a GM one day. Well, all that changed in 1986.

The large downtown hotel was a big change from the youth-infused Rocky Mountain resort hotel where I…

I read his book, “The Shining,” while working that first winter in the bar at the Algonquin Hotel, in St. Andrews N.B., Canada which is my hometown. The book captivated my imagination about all things supernatural and the hotel. I can say that I had more than one conversation with my Lloyd on some of those lonely nights tending…