6 Habits of a Successful Hospitality Business Leader
Hospitality business leaders are under much pressure during these competitive and economically uncertain times. You must generate results or be left in the dust.
Here are our top tips for maintaining a leading position in the hospitality industry.
1. Know Your Numbers
Of course, the hospitality industry is all about delivering superior guest experiences. It’s your job one. However, it’s also about the hard-nosed reality of running a business and generating strategic results.
Passion, commitment, and skill are essential but must be connected to sound business management. You must be familiar with important performance indicators and rely on numbers to understand your business relative to those indicators to know what is happening across your organization at any particular time. It’s the only way you can run things at an optimum level. If leaders, managers, and employees don’t currently know what is happening across every department, aren’t analyzing performance and responding appropriately — your business can’t be efficient and effective and compete with data-driven organizations.
Knowing your numbers means having data about each essential element that contributes to the revenue, profit, and efficiency of your business. A solution like Alpha Connect can help link together all your systems and solutions, pulling all your data into a single place.
2. Encourage Repeat Visits and Guest Advocacy
Intent to return and the willingness to recommend are the most important criteria for a guest hospitality experience. Advocates are guests who love your hospitality properties and the experiences they have in them. They are willing to go out and tell others about it. They are your most powerful form of marketing.
To build advocacy, you need to understand precisely what your guests want, deliver it to them, and also exceed their expectations if possible — each and every single day. Of course, that’s simple to say and much harder to execute on an on-going basis without your complete team’s focus.
Understanding your guests is fundamental to building advocacy. Internet sites providing customer reviews such as TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google as well as loyalty programs can help you better understand your guests’ habits so you can gain insights to deliver tailored, personalized service and experiences that make them feel special and keep them coming back. Surveys can also help you find people who enjoyed their stays.
When you identify guests who are loyal to — and love — your hotels or restaurants, provide them with simple ways to leave ratings and reviews on popular hotel sites, social media, or Google. It’s the best and easiest way to encourage others to visit your properties.
3. Streamline Your Processes
It’s never right to do things like you always have, or because it’s how a competitor does it. It’s essential to deconstruct your processes and procedures and identify ways to remove friction, double handling, and inefficiency. Regularly ask yourself questions like:
What can we do to better anticipate our customer’s needs and exceed their expectations?
How can we improve our management meetings?
How long does it take to access and review the management team plans we currently have in place?
How can we improve our employee training and development programs?
Can guests be incentivized to check in through their phones, bypassing a more extended in-person check-in process without negatively impacting the experience?
The only way you can streamline your workflows is to step back, take them apart, and use your experience and creativity to rebuild them better.
4. Ensure you Have Access to Real-Time Information
If you have significant staff absences on Tuesday, there is no point in knowing about it on Friday. Or even Tuesday afternoon.
Having access to real-time performance information allows you to take immediate action, such as calling in replacements or reprioritizing work. It’s the only way to ensure guests are not negatively impacted when something unexpected occurs.
5. Focus On Growth and Scalability
Your hospitality company may only have a few locations now, but if you get things right, your business could grow. What are the important ingredients and components of your business success? What is holding back your growth? While you never want to have to throw everything out and start again or redevelop processes and systems when expanding a business, you want to change out things that are holding back your business expansion. It is critically important to plan for growth and scalability every single day so your systems, processes, and procedures can be used at more — and larger — properties.
6. Leverage the Right Technology
The tech you use should fit your business, not the other way around. Technology is crucial for helping to deliver all the critical strategies in this guide. A solution like Alpha Connect can integrate most of the essential elements of your business, including your communication and management solutions, providing easier access to the real-time data and insights that will allow you to be the leader of the growing business you want to be.
Hospitality is undoubtedly a challenging industry, and it’s also potentially a very rewarding one. It takes work, commitment, and not a little skill to build and maintain a successful organization. However, understanding and following the six habits explained here will undoubtedly help you on your way. Also, feel free to connect with an Alpha Inn Management representative to get fresh insights on how to run your business more effectively.