CEO of MEHR Consultancy on Building Cross-Platform Hotel Ops

I personally think in the world of AI, we are going to 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.

From Hotel Tech Report, it's Hotel Tech Insider, a show about the future of hotels and the technology that powers them.

Today we have Hermit Van on the podcast.

Hermit is the CEO and co-founder of Mayor Consultancy. In our conversation,

Mayor Consultancy. In our conversation, Hermit talks us through the tech stack her team uses to keep everything running smoothly. And interestingly, this tech

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.

Thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast today, Harit. I'm

really looking forward to chatting with you. To kick things off, I would love

you. To kick things off, I would love for you to introduce yourself, tell us a bit about your role and your business.

Thank you for having me here. So, my

name is Harit Man. I am the CEO and co-founder of Mayor 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.

And can you tell me a bit about the hotels that you manage? Are they branded independent? What's the average key

independent? What's the average key count and typical guest?

Yeah, so we're in the limited service select service space. We have usually like your Hamptons, your Holiday

Expresses, Courtyards to full service Holidays, Embassy, that level of hotel.

Typical key count is usually about 80 to 150, 200 keys. The type of guest, the markets that we're in are usually some primary, but mostly secondary, tertiary

market. So, we get a lot of transient

market. So, we get a lot of transient guests. We get a lot of Monday through

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.

I can imagine there are 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

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

use. If there's one system that you can't part with, what would that be?

I have two. Hotel Side, I think it would be Inflow. We partnered with them about

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 used them for time and

year. We used 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. They're able to log in and see all expenditures and see a monthly P&L. It helps us stay organized.

monthly P&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 portfoliowwide night audit report. So in

one dashboard we can see ADR occupancy and out of order rooms across our portfolio. If you tell me to get rid of

portfolio. 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. And even though it's a task

monday.com. And even though it's a task management software, we use it as our filing cabinet. We're a Google Workspace

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

in Monday. And we kind of every single hotel's a employee board where all the employees are there. All the employee files are saved there. 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

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.

I wanted to touch on monday.com for a bit. I know when we were reviewing your

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

Monday.com. Can you talk to me about how your team uses those systems in conjunction with some of the more hotel oriented systems?

Definitely. So, we use Slack for communication amongst our corporate team and with our hotels. And I think that's very important.

We want to 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. Right now, across 35 hotels, we

team. 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. 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

of operations. Every director of operations handles five or seven hotels.

So the general manager comes into their Slack channel. They have a question for

Slack channel. 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 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 and 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 kind of hacked monday.com for, and I don't know if I should probably share this, but we will. 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

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 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

through Monday. they will just input kind of the going rate 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. People are

already using them. They're logging into them. They're comfortable with them. The

them. They're comfortable with them. The

more things you can have verticals of, the better.

Can you talk to me a bit more about your business operations tech stack? Like you

use Slack, you use monday.com. What are

some other tools that you've implemented that have helped your teams run smoothly?

A corporate settingwide kind of tech stack. We have Google Workspace and Slack Monday and I would

say things like Panda Do contracts, send out our new hire paperwork across all of our hotels. We

like Panda Do 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. So now I can

variable functionality. So now I can have a general new hire packet and have blanks for hotel name, EIN, address, and that stuff is going to show up many

times throughout the packet, but I just have to fill it out once and then it plugs in. We use Hierology, which is

plugs in. We use Hierology, 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

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 manage. On the hotel side, um 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 Exce for our

standard. We use Kipsu Exce for our facilities management. So all of your

facilities management. So all of your maintenance work tickets, deep clean logs, housekeeping logs, that kind of stuff.

Is there anything on your wish list? Any

vendor you've seen on the market that looks really innovative that you're considering adding?

There's a couple. I think we just recently added XQU. they do kind of OTA reconciliation for you and I believe they also offer to do chargeback. So

that's a relatively new development.

We'll see how it goes. But that was a recent need that we wanted to address because we were doing it in our corporate team or we were having the general managers do it and things were falling through the cracks. There's a

couple not necessarily software wish lists but things I wish some of our existing softwares could do. Like for

example, we use hierology to put ads out. I wish there was a candidate

out. I wish there was a candidate management in there. So now I'm interviewing people. There is a small

interviewing people. 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 hierology and shortlisting and sending them a message to come interview with us. After that, we move to monday.com

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 candidates'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 may or not may not be related with their main bread and butter. So having things that are a

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. So if Hierology is already like an

add. So if Hierology is already like an HR candidate kind of recruiting software, having candidate management in there would be amazing.

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

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?

So I think one of the softwares I missed in the beginning when we were talking about our list of softwares is trrenual.

It's kind of become like a training manual and Wikipedia for our team in the past year. Any software overhaul that we

past year. Any software overhaul that we had, we were documenting it in tranual 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. It was like an announcement

it too. It was like an announcement training all in one. Now our trial has become like 10 chapters with like 15 20 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

team. It's a requirement that they take it. One of my kind of ongoing business

it. One of my kind of ongoing business goals is to keep improving that, keep improving our workflows and our SOPs.

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 going to get worse before it gets better, is

our accounting kind of processes and team. And about six months ago, the head

team. And 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 were 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. Well, I said, let's go into the

vendors. Well, I said, let's go into the perms and let's see if we can turn off that capability. So just sitting like

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. 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.

Shifting gears a little bit, I want to tap into your CEO and people manager experience. What would you say are one

experience. What would you say are one or two of the most important skills for hotel years today?

One thing I've shared in other spaces too is that I personally think in the world of AI we are going to have to become more people focused and people

driven cuz 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

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.

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 going to be an interesting time in society where we get to focus on the people part again if technology is going to 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 setup. we have in some of our

automation setup. we have in some of our other softwares. We will occasionally

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

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

corporate operations. But I can see how for redundant stuff, for repetitive stuff, it could be very useful.

Last question, which is always a fun one. I'm curious for your thoughts on

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?

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 hyierology 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

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. 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 train like, oh, I need to add this one thing to it so my team knows what to do. 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 it's a lot of time and money invested so everybody

wins when it works out Well, thank you so much for your time, Hermit. It was so great chatting with

Hermit. It was so great chatting with you. Really great having you on the

you. Really great having you on the podcast.

That's all for today's episode. Thanks

for listening to Hotel Tech Insider produced by Hotel Techreport.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

strategies. I encourage all of our listeners to go try at least one of these strategies or tools that you learn 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

time. So don't wait until tomorrow to try something new. 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

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