Sometimes last year, while
driving to work I ran into; no, not potholes, not armed robbers and not area
boys either but police road block. I was asked to identify myself and what I do
for a living. I produced my driver license and told them that Iam a hospitality
consultant. The officer without ado waved me on. The freedom was however short
lived as another officer literarily jumped in front of the car asking the first
officer if I had been searched. He bellowed back that I should be allowed to go
because ‘he be doctor’!
Hospitality has little in common
with hospitals; apart from the fact that they both care for guests and
patients. Quite seriously, hospitality industry is one service area of our
economic sector that we do not pay considerable attention to. You can exonerate
the government from the guilty party since they hardly pay attention to
anything anyway. The other stakeholders in the industry are the Owners
(Investors) and hospitality consultants. In as much as the aim of this treatise
is not to apportion blames but to expose the weakness of stakeholders in a way
that will allow parties to see the need for change of mindset in order to allow
growth in the industry.
I do not own an hotel but I have
over two decades of management and consultancy experience in the industry at
the highest level and so I will try to deliver this without bias to Owners.
Most Owners or Investors do not have practical experience or even residual
knowledge of the industry before deciding to invest in the sector. This often
account for the need for civil modifications in completed hotels as hospitality
consultants are often not involved at the conception stage. Lesson: Most Owners
build houses with lot of rooms with or most of the times without an architect
and declare it as an hotel!
When we go for inspection, we
discover that some properties do not have the semblance of hotel as provisions
are not made for staff locker rooms, account and administrative office, laundry
and so on. Generators are sometimes located quite close to rooms or bar and
restaurant location are not in sync. These structural defects often calls for
costly appraisal and modifications that otherwise could have been avoided in
the first place. Lesson: Owners would save cost by involving professional
consultants at the conception stage, enhance aesthetics and ultimately have a
purposely built hotel.
In bid to have the ‘best’ hotel,
Owners often throw economic caution into the wind while furnishing hotels. It
is ideal to have a well furnished hotel but this must be done with considerable
prudence so as not to put pressure on return on investment when eventually the
hotel takes off. A client once told me that all furniture items and operational
equipments up to tooth pick in his 30 room hotel are imported! By the time we
sat down and started charting a 2-year cashflow with a year budget, added to
the location of the hotel he began to see the inappropriateness and financial
consequences of his ambition to furnish his hotel without professional advice.
Lesson: Owners tend to furnish hotel to their taste and not to guests’
expectations.
Owners erroneously believe that
hotel can be managed by just anybody since they always hinged their argument on
the fact that hotel is just about selling space and time. Wrong. It goes beyond
that. Though a client tried proving that hotel can be managed by just anybody
by showing me his books which I must agree on a cursory look appeared healthy.
After three days of working as a mystery shopper, we were able to show him a
lot of financial leakages and food recklessness requisition in the system he
earlier passed a vote of confidence on. He was shocked at the revelation since
he was on ground 24hours. Lesson: micromanaging an hotel that appears to be doing
well does not mean all is well; books can be cooked. Remember it is an hotel.
In my respectable stint as a
consultant, I am yet to meet with an Owner who readily agrees with sales and
marketing as a process of advertisement and function of increased revenue. They
will rather keep their money than invest in intangible items like services.
Another client who called us for process management of his existing hotel told
us the hotel has been in existence for over five years and the poor sales
cannot be traced to obliviousness of the hotel. Reconnaissance of the area
reveals that the hotel is not as popularly as the Owner imagined as most people
easily recognized the owner more as an influential individual than Owner of
hotel. So, the perceived goodwill does not necessarily translate into
patronage. Lesson: there must be a conscious sales and marketing effort driven
by professional way before the hotel opens for operation.
Turnover, gestation period and
breakeven points are not economic terms that Owners are comfortable with. Hotel
industry by nature demands heavy funding and Owners expect immediate return on
investment. Hotel is however a slow starter but once it picks the revenue never
stops. The gestation period is often the trying period and this can easily extends
beyond expectation if pre-opening process is not sound and religiously
followed. Lesson: The industry is not for traders masquerading as an investor
who expects profit the next day the hotel opens; it is for investors who
appreciate long term investment.
On the other hand however, the
Owner and Consultants share a common philosophy-mistrust. The Owners believe
consultants manage hotel without any sense of pressure since they are not the
one struggling with bank debt and crippling interest rates. Owners quite
rightly believe that consultants are fair weather friends whose real interest
in the hotel is hopelessly limited to the non-equity contribution to the
investment. While all above arguments against the consultants may hold water
depending of course on which side of the divide you are, what is relative
debatable is who is a hospitality consultant.
In the absence of an enabling law
backing a charter for the profession, this my attempt to define a hospitality
consultant may draw not only ire from concerned section of the industry but
also condemnation. Iam used to both. With professions like law and accounting,
it is fairly easy. Educationally, the closet you can get to being a practitioner
is by being a graduate of catering and hotel management and I cannot readily
recount any of the serving hospitality consultants who read this relevant
course. This of course may be the primary reasons why the field is awashed with
charlatans.
We have seasoned hospitality
consultants who blazed the trail and have competed competently with established
foreign consultants. Between the Owners and Consultants the relationship has
always been edgy and dodgy. The Owners complain about insincerity of the
Consultants while the consultant constantly would rather dine with the Owner using
a long spoon. The consequence of this equation is instability in the management
of hotel. Owners would rather micro manage the hotel themselves or resort to
the services of charlatans that can be easily manipulated. Consultants will
rather charge highly knowing that the tenure of the business relationship is
always very short and unpredictable.
In the buffet of services that
the consultants provide the Owners must be able to feed on it without accusing
the consultants of food poisoning and the consultants should be paid without
reservations. That way, there will be sanity in the industry.
Patrick Adegbamigbe
Hospitality Consultant
080 57736980
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