Lark Hotels' SVP of Operations on Scaling a $1B Boutique Management Company
Knowing more about our guests in a non creepy way, not like I know exactly where you are physically in the building at every time, but connecting the dots between a guest preference. If the hotel knows something and the restaurant doesn't know it and they're connected, shame on us.
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:On this episode, we chat with Scott Pops, the vice president of operations at Lark Hotels. We touch on a lot of interesting topics in our conversation, including the Lark team's recent decision to move to a new property management system. We also explore the role that technology plays, management system, we also explore the role that technology plays and will play in the future. Welcome to Hotel Tech Insider. Great to be here with you, Scott.
Speaker 3:To get started, I would love for you to give an intro about yourself, about your company. If you could explain your role and what that responsibility involves.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. So Scott Hopps, I work with Lark Hotels. We are a management company that focuses on independent boutique properties on the smaller size, 125 keys or less, has been our sweet spot, often a niche that other management companies don't want to go after. And we have about 12 years now of working in this space in, you know, a lot of leisure markets, and it's been a bit of a growth trajectory as a company. I've been with Lark for going on 6 years now, and I'm the vice president of operations.
Speaker 1:And so trying to make sure all the cool things we say we do and all the promises we make to guests, that we live up to those promises on property and try and find the right people that are much better than me at doing that and make sure they're well equipped and informed and excited to bring it to life on property. We have about between 4550 properties that we manage, and I think in my role, the people on property side is tremendously important to living up to those promises to our guests, but then our customers are owners. And so we need to make sure that all of those efforts get translated to business outcomes that our owners want. So trying to live in sort of two brains of customers and business outcomes for them and our team delivering on the promises to guests is where I live in between.
Speaker 3:Could you tell me a bit more about maybe some markets that you're located in, and what would you say the differences between, property in the Lark Hotels portfolio versus competitors?
Speaker 1:Yes. So we were born in the northeast, very much a New England based company for many years. In the last 4 3 or 4 years, we have spread that footprint. So we're now in 13 different states. We've got properties in California, Florida, North Carolina, soon to be Georgia.
Speaker 1:We've operated in Louisiana, and we'll, you know, have something in development there. I said New England, but upstate New York, and we are still, I think, New England heavy, but looking at the other markets where our type of model will fit really well. And what's different about what you'll find when you come to a property that's either branded Lark, because we do have a number of brands under that we manage, and also independent properties that were just sort of the, you know, maybe white labeled. The difference, I feel very confident in saying, we allow our people to be really human with our guests. Eye to eye hospitality, we are serving you, but we're not subservient to you.
Speaker 1:We are equals, and we are really excited to welcome you into our spaces, show you around this incredible little town we may operate in, give you great ideas, understand why you're coming to Kennebunkport or Stowe or Camden or P Town and help play our part. You know, there's oftentimes where people are traveling, they're not traveling to see us, or they're not coming for our bed specifically. We play a role, and we try and understand, do you wanna sit and chat us up at breakfast, or do you want us out of your way and invisible and and striking that balance? But I think if you're interested, you'll always find somebody there who cares.
Speaker 3:Given the size of your portfolio, I'm curious, what do you consider to be the most critical piece of technology to keep everything running?
Speaker 1:I would say at different points in my career, I may have answered this differently. What I've observed, especially just having so many transactions now, so many properties, so many things going on, our accounting sort of ERP, that is that being the foundational source of truth has proven to be the most important piece. There are a number of other things that I think are very important, but don't rise to the level of this tool for operational success, for, you know, business outcomes, for communicating to owners. This has really proven to be the platform and the area where we've said, this is precious. We cannot break this.
Speaker 1:If we break this, it better be with something, like, superhumanly great. But, yeah, our accounting platform, and and it's a new tool to us in the last little over 2 years. And I think that's also helped change my perspective on how important that is and just navigating our business.
Speaker 3:And which vendor are you using for the accounting system?
Speaker 1:We use HIA, Hotel Investor Apps. It's a tool that we adopted, like I said, a little over 2 years ago. I think with many companies, I don't think I'm saying anything new, as you grow, you tend to break what worked before. And so we had a team in accounting that was hardworking, tremendously passionate, really caring, and they were using tools that worked when we were 12 properties, 13 properties. And as we kept growing and growing and growing, we outgrew that, like, almost like a teenager in sneakers that don't fit anymore, but we kept wearing them.
Speaker 1:And it was an important moment when we decided to change out that platform because what that allowed for was, you know, sort of open the door to we need new processes. We need to bring in more people with different skill sets. It also exposed a lot of the things that we needed to be doing better. And, you know, so we had sort of quick evolution, and it's never without disruption to come up to speed with the new tool that had all these new capabilities. And that changed our financial reporting where I'd say in the last someone will be angry at me no matter what I say, but call it the last 18 months.
Speaker 1:We've been on time and accurate, and it's helped our sort of year end process. It's helped tax filings, like, a lot of the unsexy stuff that go on behind the scenes, but are tremendously important. If we don't get this right and if we can't communicate it properly, timely, accurately to them, we don't get their next project. We don't get their big investment in the next 5, 6, 7 things they're doing. And this HIA got us there with, obviously, a lot of human power and brainpower invested on top of it.
Speaker 1:And they are, as a group, continuing to evolve that platform to give us more capabilities. We're getting closer to a live p and l. We're working to incorporate daily payroll metrics into that. And so I get really excited because I know how important this is for us as a group, us as a business, to be able to have the the information, have it clean, have it accurate, have it timely, but I'm, at heart, an operator. Every role I've held in hospitality has been on-site operating until just the last few years, and so I get excited about how incredibly helpful this is if I'm running a small business, if I'm the GM at a property, even if I'm the housekeeping manager, the front desk manager.
Speaker 1:The information that this can provide back to me to understand, you know, what we're aiming for for GOP targets or what I'm aiming for for my labor metrics. The information back is really, really helpful, and I get excited about how you can use it because I've grown up having to create my own spreadsheets and, you know, do everything manually. And if this information can be fed right back to an operator, if I'm a regional manager who's overseeing a portfolio of properties, how much more effective I can be if I can see 6, 8, 10 properties stacked on top of each other with their metrics, and I can find the outlier, and I know where to focus my time. It feels incredibly empowering to have the information that we have now and that I've never had as quickly, as easily, and I've worked through a number of other accounting platforms where I've had similar access, like, able to see whatever is available. What's available here is great.
Speaker 1:What's coming next is really, really gonna be exciting. And, hopefully, will they will help us be more valuable to our customers. I always try to ensure that I, like, viscerally believe the connection between why we need to do a good job running a business back to, like, what it allows us to do in what gets me passionate about hospitality. It's like take care of this person in front of me. And if they can connect those dots, and it'll come from good questions.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm my housekeeper. Why do I care about GLP? Oh, well, remember last month when we had to reduce your hours? Right? There are so many direct connections that can be made from that.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, like, if there are dashboards that they can see which were being developed and which we're gonna be utilizing and sharing with our team more and more, it really helps connect them to why does it matter how long it takes me to clean a room? Why does it matter whether or not I convert that person over the phone to a direct reservation? Why does it matter if I sign them up for our loyalty program? I mean, if you can trace that back to why it matters in the business, it's really powerful.
Speaker 3:So it sounds like a big advantage of using this accounting system is also the business intelligence portion of it, like the reporting, giving different folks in the organization access to the dashboards. Do you have a team or a person internally who builds those dashboards and is kind of the subject matter expert on the data?
Speaker 1:No. Not yet. That's a little bit of the growing pains. That would be a tremendously useful person. I mean, we have, as a group managing small properties, I think the data we have through our revenue management system and just, like, the 12 years of our revenue team aggregating information on assets that rarely report to Star.
Speaker 1:You don't have a clean comp set. That data that we have and that we we use constantly to, like, check our own assumptions, to create budgets, to understand markets. But if we had that role, that business intelligence role internally would be really empowering. We just need to still live within our means. And so a lot of times, we rely on and and right now, we're relying on a couple different groups that HIA is building out dashboards and helping us customize those so we have the the information faster and more, like, actionable.
Speaker 1:Don't just show me, like, the pretty graph. Like, what can I do about this? And what should I do about this? And we have some great business intelligence that comes through our revenue management tool, Flyr, f l y r. The analytics that are captured in that, like, down to the room level detail and what it can roll up and show us as a portfolio, as a segment of our portfolio, as a market, that's been really, really helpful.
Speaker 1:And there's a couple other elements that are similar, but part of the next step is gonna be how many of these things can feed into one platform. And my ambitious goal on behalf of the HIA team, not to make this all about them, but how much can we feed into that platform that has our financial data, that has our budgets, that has, like, payroll data? Let's get it all into 1. Give me a display unlike anyone else has yet. I think that's where I'd like to see it go.
Speaker 1:The phrase that I've heard over the last couple years is invisible service, invisible service. It's like, okay. I get it. That's you wanting to run a hotel with fewer people because people cost money. And I think I said on the outset, you know, what you'll notice about us is when you show up, there's someone who cares.
Speaker 1:And I think that's an important distinction. There are plenty of things that we can leverage technology tools to reduce expense and reduce just unnecessary people standing around. But those people need access to the information so that they can be super effective in the time that they are there and be ideally not distracted when they're dealing with a guest and, like, bringing to life the core of what make people travel to our properties. If I'm a single entity, I don't want somebody sitting and just having to manually plug things into an Excel spreadsheet and then figure out the best blue and red graph that charts it. It's like, we don't need that.
Speaker 1:If we can use tools, we can leverage, you know, the AI computer learning that's baked into these tools now to do that faster and quicker. And quite honestly, I've got high expectations of our new PMS news that we're switching to. We've, at this point, launched it in 2 live properties and a couple of properties that are under renovation, but I expect the information and reporting that comes from Muse to further do that for the team on-site. And we're expecting a lot of that to still flow into HIA and leverage try and use one place to look for information would be my goal and eventually get that so owners can look in that same place for information. So that takes away the step of Joe exporting one report to an owner and Susie exporting another report to an owner.
Speaker 1:Like, if they can just see it in the same platform we're looking at it, I think this feels tremendously important. It's, like, the transparency that we're looking at these same exact numbers from the same exact source because there's always that tension of, you know, an owner, an asset manager, or owner's rep scrutinizing us. I'd love to just have the books bare, and let's look at the same thing. So there's the way we operate. We don't have that need for obscuring the data.
Speaker 1:It's just a matter of, do we have a platform that can give it to you clean, accurate, consistently? And so I think that's that's another piece, and that sort of democratizes that data even more. We're all pointing at the same thing. We're evaluating budgets. Great.
Speaker 1:That's sort of what's going on right now. We're evaluating budgets. Here's all the data we looked at. If we miss something, let us know. We'll incorporate it.
Speaker 1:And that's another empowering piece of just having all this information and having that sort of single source of truth that we can rely on, we know is clean and accurate. I will say it's only clean and accurate by function of a whole bunch of hardworking people that take the messiness that, you know, all my teams from operations inevitably create and clean it up, work back between multiple departments to make sure we understand what was spent, we understand what we earned, we understand what marketing source it came from, and that we feel really good about it being actually the truth.
Speaker 3:So you touched on the PMS migration. I'm really interested in hearing how that came to pass. Can you talk me through maybe the purchase process first or the decision process? What was the impetus to switch PMSs, which is a huge decision? And then how did you end up settling on one system?
Speaker 3:What was that kind of shopping process like?
Speaker 1:It was one of the scarier decisions to make. I mean, my whole time with Lark has been on one system, and mind you, a system that has been tremendously helpful, like, a great partner. We've been using Clock Plus, and they have been great over many, many years and still have a great development road map ahead of them. And that development road map is a little bit of what finally helped us make our decision because we felt like it was time to have a more nimble partner with more integration capabilities, like faster, quicker integration capabilities. There are implications downstream, upstream of our websites and our booking engine and our revenue management system and our customer relationship management, like, our loyalty program.
Speaker 1:There's so many pieces that are out there and that they're great platforms for. But as we were evaluating the different property management systems, figuring out which one would allow us to sort of pick and choose the components that we wanted and needed to operate our business, and we are again, they're small assets. Some have f and b, some don't. We have as small as 6 rooms, currently up to 95 rooms. They're mostly leisure driven, not a lot of big banquets and events.
Speaker 1:We don't have an amusement park. There's only one time we got into animal husbandry, and that didn't last that long. So, the needs we have, you know, we do want to drive that loyalty program. We do wanna make that both a benefit to our properties, but also a selling point to potential new new owners for us. And so we knew what we were we knew what Clock had for us, and we knew their sort of development timeline for when different things could plug in that we had talked to them about.
Speaker 1:We evaluated a few other operas, sort of the big behemoth and used that and, you know, sort of used its predecessor. I go back to Fidaglio days and that conversion many, many years ago, and we looked at Stay in Touch. We looked at Cloudbeds. We looked at Muse. I'm sure there were a few others, and we sort of got it down to 2 that, ultimately, we would compare back to the one that we knew and the one we had been working with.
Speaker 1:And the decision really came down to the other one we were evaluating that we didn't decide on. They had a very exciting and, arguably, like, some revolutionary things on their road map, but it felt more of, like, their road map that was going to be the driving factor in it. And if we had one property or, like, a small portfolio of similar assets, that may have been the right choice, but we felt like we needed more flexibility and potentially more, like, to constantly evaluate the best in class technology for the supporting pieces. We expect Muse as the platform will be what we work off of for a while because, you know, we can change out different components that feed into it. We can use their native guest messaging platform.
Speaker 1:We can plug 1 in. We can use their native booking engine. We can plug 1 in. And so we can pick and choose based off of what we're observing in the market, what works best for our assets, and that was the ultimate selling point or at least the piece that we felt really good about as we I mean, this was a months long process, a lot of checking under the hood. There was I don't know.
Speaker 1:At High-tech, I felt like I had brought two dates to the prom because I was, like, shopping 2 PMSs, and I was the only one from our company there this year. So I was like, am I allowed to be seen over there, over there? And it was a great process, and there's a lot of great products out there. And even after we made the decision, one of our owners that I respect a ton said, Oh, yeah. I don't know about that.
Speaker 1:I would have chosen this other one. And I'm like, Great. Lovely. Appreciate that. And I said back to him, I was like, I'll let you know.
Speaker 1:We haven't started yet, and this was, you know, this summer. And I was like, but I I have great confidence in why we made this decision and the component decisions that we made around it. But if something's not working for us in 6 months or if we see somebody, like, wildly innovating in a certain area in 6 months, we have that opportunity to figure out that timeline that's independent of what Muse may be developing internally or with partners. Like, we can plug and play in most circumstances, and that in an integrated way that guests don't feel a clunky process. I'd say what we left, we had cobbled together in the best way possible, what we are leaving, guest messaging, keyless entry, and online check-in.
Speaker 1:And it's, like, some stuff that's standard right now felt very tenuous. Like, it you know, it could break at any time. And that also goes back to if it's gonna break at any time, we need the human resources to fix it, the attention, the time it takes, the downtime that we wanna avoid. And so I'll be honest, I have not gone through all the Muse University courses I'm supposed to, but standing at the front desk last week of the first property that was going live, I'm like, oh, I could check somebody in. I could figure out, find their profile.
Speaker 1:I can, like, it's intuitive, and that is gonna be great for training new people, onboarding new team members, getting the housekeeping team to use the system. If it's very intuitive, translates into multiple languages, I can use my the device we give you and be checking off rooms are inspected so you're not getting 17 radio calls of house 217, is it there? So that was still a daunting process. Now that we've made the decision, then the planning to turn it on in 45, 50 places was the next really scary task ahead of us. How do we do that so that we don't break?
Speaker 1:And in all honesty, I mean, a lot of work, a lot of preparation on their end, like, great project management on their end, like, guiding us along. And the first one that we went live on, there were 2 or 3 holes that were, like, very noticeable holes in our process. We knew we'd find something, but we were up. We were running the same day. Great.
Speaker 1:Figured out, okay, which things do we need to go back and fix? Took a lot of brain pain, but we learned don't forget to, you know, tick this box or or run the report the right way. And now knowing that, the next one's gonna be cleaner. We're gonna discover something that we screwed up there, right, or all good intention, but we're gonna discover something we missed. We'll clean that up, and then I feel like each subsequent onboarding, as we overlay, like, the same structure, will will be cleaner and cleaner.
Speaker 1:Our team's really excited about it. So far so good. The experience as a a guest on the website already, like, it's like, oh, yeah. So a lot of good pieces that are dovetailing together right now.
Speaker 3:You mentioned also the focus in your organization on that human interaction, the human connection between your staff and guests. What does the role of technology look like in the guest experience?
Speaker 1:The one getting away like, the transactional moments. Let that be tech driven. The simple where do I park and AI pumps out the directions because it has your GPS location and can tell you sort of Google Maps style how to get there, the check-in, the standard I show up to the front desk and have to give you my license, a lot of those things that get in the way of human interactions, these, like, transactions, if tech can wipe all that out, great. What I guess I want to protect our industry from doing is thinking that it can replace somebody that recognizes the difference between someone showing up because I'm traveling for a funeral, someone showing up because I'm traveling for my son's birthday, somebody showing up because I'm just on an adventure, need to get away, like, looking for some and allowing me to react differently based on that energy that they bring that I don't know that you could digest and feedback the right response in AI. But behind the scenes, like, all the things that don't bring anything extra from a human connection standpoint to either the person working there or the person showing up, Tech plays a great role there.
Speaker 1:Right? I never lose my key again if I can, you know, if it's on my phone. If my phone dies, oh, there's a keypad, and I know the last four of my phone number. It's like these things that create friction. I mean, I think the other piece that this is not necessarily aspirational, maybe this goes a little bit to what's in my wish list.
Speaker 1:Knowing more about our guest in a non creepy way, not like I know exactly where you are physically in the building at every time, but connecting the dots between a guest preference. If the hotel knows something and the restaurant doesn't know it and they're connected, shame on us. And it can't be running with a sticky note to go give it to the host stand. That level of integration where I know about the preferences. I mean, it's what we all experience.
Speaker 1:It's why we think our phones are listening to us. It's what the ads that come to us. It's an attempt to push the things that resonate with us in front of us. And so if I'm the server, and I know that you love Sauvignon Blanc from New Zealand because that's what we put in your hotel room as an amenity every time you come stay every 2 weeks because you travel for business, wow, I wouldn't it be great if I could just offer you that glass of wine, show up with it at the table, ask how your meetings went today, and then take your order? I think that allowing us, like empowering the team to know about you in the appropriate professional way.
Speaker 1:Like you'd know about your friend. Like you would know if your friend came over, you know what he drinks. You know he prefers an IPA versus, Corona. Like, you'd know that about your friend, and if you can empower us to create that same warmth and that same connection through information, I think there's the opportunity. I know it exists in many ways, and our loyalty programs work to create that, and, you know, feedback that we ask for works to create that.
Speaker 1:But where does that go? You know, we can aggregate that, and we have guest responses on every online platform, but how does that world of information surrounding a guest and his or her preferences, how does that make it back to me making your experience better next time?
Speaker 3:One last question before we wrap up. I am curious to hear from you if there's one thing that you believe about technology in the hospitality space that you think competitors or peers might disagree with.
Speaker 1:That it could all go away tomorrow, and that'd be just as good. We wouldn't be able to scale it the same way, but we come across a lot of owner operators that have, like, passed on property from generation to generation. And when you hear the questions they ask about any version of technology, but then when you see the way that people resonate with that, the guests resonate with their property even though they didn't have you know, they've got an old school key, and they always forget to give it back, and they have to mail it back, and they make their reservation before they leave. Like, we can get as complex and as techy as we want, but I don't know that that replaces how someone feels. You can still create that amazing feeling without any of it.
Speaker 1:Now can I scale it? Can I do it over 50 properties? Would I have a job if that was the only way of doing it? Probably not. And, you know, here I am talking about tech and being the one that thinks the humans are still the important piece.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks so much for the time. Great chatting with you. Thank you for sharing all of the exciting things that are happening in your world.
Speaker 1:Thanks, Adrianne.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Scott. Take care.
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. I 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.
