PHOENIX — Executives with Aimbridge Hospitality want to be the best of both worlds.
As the largest global hotel third-party management company, Aimbridge has often touted its scale and reach as a unique advantage in the hotel industry. But Aimbridge executives also want hotel owners to know that doesn't mean they can't give the type of one-on-one attention and care they'd expect from a smaller hotel operator.
Speaking with Hotel News Now at the 2022 Lodging Conference, Aimbridge President and CEO Michael Deitemeyer said the company has made significant progress in setting up a divisional structure with individual leadership that can "own the business to be able to serve our customers more effectively."
The company now has four domestic divisions, each with a divisional president: full service, select service, enhanced select service, and Evolution — which is the company's lifestyle group. It also has two international operating divisions, one for Latin America and the other covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Deitemeyer said the key to making this work is to empower each of those divisions and their respective leaders to operate almost as stand-alone businesses — while still leveraging the scale benefits of the larger company. At the same time, he has the task of maintaining a unifying Aimbridge culture.
"I do roundtables with our managers, and as we're going through this journey that's a question that came up: 'Mike, you talk a lot about culture, and you talk about one team and one organization,'" he said. "What I shared and how we've rolled this out was that there's a common value proposition that lives in every organization."
Deitemeyer said that's a balance Aimbridge learned how to strike between its North American and international businesses.
"Candidly, we do things differently in Europe than than we do here, but it's how they interpret the same value prop, right?" Deitemeyer said. "It's the same core values of the organization that resonates through, and that allows us to move people within divisions and within segments of the business and still understand the Aimbridge way, which is how we've now branded the employee value prop. There's a consistency throughout the company."
Much like the value proposition for owners, employees can benefit from both the attention and breadth of offerings at Aimbridge, he said.
"Part of the vision around the Aimbridge way is ... we want to invest in our talent like no others," he said. "That means someday people will occasionally leave, and when they leave, I want them to be incredibly proud of what Aimbridge meant to their career, because that comes back and pays us dividends in the future. So everything we're doing, regardless of the division, is grounded in that type of thinking."
Deitemeyer acknowledged that one of the top selling points for smaller hotel management companies to owners has become that if companies are too large, those owners won't get the type of attention they want or need. But he believes if companies like his can manage to find the right balance, scale is an advantage that's hard to beat.
"What we've realized with groups like [our European team] or Evolution where they're leaning on procurement, accounting, human resources and digital marketing resources ... is we can invest in that scale and still have a level of entrepreneurial structure and autonomy around their product categories," he said.
Revamped Leadership Team
Along with the newly focused divisional structure, Aimbridge has a new leadership team that includes President of Global Operations Mark Tamis and Chief Global Growth Officer Allison Reid.
Tamis said in his first five months at the company, he's seen the efforts to balance scale and attention bearing fruit. Specifically, the division presidents now have "entire executive committees" and operate almost as stand-alone businesses.
"They're nimble," Tamis said. "They can make decisions, whether it's a finance decision, whether it's a human resource decision, and they can actually make changes super quickly."
He said that has enabled teams, and himself, to spend a lot of time with owners.
Reid's goal, as alluded to by her title, is to make the world's largest hotel operator even larger, and she's excited that the divisional structure can help Aimbridge continue to add scale without executives taking their eye off the ball. She said it helps service the different types of hotel owners that work with Aimbridge.
"You have the really big guys like Blackstone and Starwood Capital, and they're looking to move money on a scale basis, which we can help with that," she said. "We also have mom and pops — someone who grew their family business — and they're looking to hand it over to the next generation. Both of those groups need the data and information that our scale allows us to have."
Reid said her goal is to give owners exactly the type of attention they want, no matter the size of the company.
Both Reid and Tamis said that regardless of size and structure, what hotel owners ultimately want to come back to when choosing a third-party manager is superior operations and knowing their operator is doing everything they can to drive the maximum value of their assets.
Tamis said that comes down to finding the best people, with the most common refrain from owners being "give us great general managers, great directors of sales, great directors of finance and great associates around the property."
"It's about the people and the product — which is our hotels — and deliver excellence around that," he said.