Through the creation of Practice Hospitality and This Assembly, Bashar Wali is on a mission to help hoteliers execute their vision while providing a direct line to owners. And he's clear about how he wants to do it — and how he doesn't.

In a recent interview with Hotel News Now, Wali, founder of This Assembly and CEO of Practice Hospitality, said he decided to bring together a team from Provenance Hotels — where Wali served as president before taking on these new ventures — to change the lifestyle hotel space.

This Assembly's team consists of Wali and four partners: Kate Buska, Leslie Lew, Zie Zie Senzaki and Klaudio Simic. The executive team at Practice Hospitality is the This Assembly team plus Holly Landry, corporate director of finance.

Wali and his team launched service provider and hotel management company Practice Hospitality last year, designed to fill a gap he identified in the space.

"The gap goes something like this: You're either an artistic, super indie cool operator who thinks no one is cool enough to stay in your hotel or you're a suit pushing people through like an assembly line," he said.

Currently, Practice Hospitality manages Hotel Colee in Atlanta, which is part of Marriott International's Autograph Collection and is owned by Woodbine Development Corporation. The company has a hotel in Dallas coming soon.

There are plenty of hotel management companies out there, but Wali said he felt Practice Hospitality was needed to help owners marry the services of both the "indie cools" and the "suits."

The goal of the company is to not be the world's largest hotel management company, but to provide a direct line to owners, he said.

"This is my sales pitch, trademarked quote: To the world you may be one person, but to one person you may be the world," he said. "Think about that when you talk to a developer. Do you want to be one of 400 at Aimbridge Hospitality and be lost in the shuffle or do you want to be my one and only?"

When hired as a manager for hotels, Wali said he will always be available.

"You will have my wife's cell number, my daughter's cell number, if you want me you will find me," he said.

Wali and his team launched This Assembly in February to serve as the umbrella over Practice Hospitality as well as the group's other endeavors, including real estate investment and innovation incubation.

On the innovation side, Wali said This Assembly serves as a broad funnel for ideas, where the group may sit down to talk about apps made for lifestyle hotels, for example.

The real estate side of the company "is focused on sourcing, structuring and executing on hotel investment opportunities," according to a news release.

The team has experience in renovating and repositioning underperforming hotel assets and will advise investors on placing capital.

According to the company's description, This Assembly "will serve as a one-stop-shop, simplifying deals by incorporating the services of Practice Hospitality as operator and providing an effective and efficient route to maximizing asset value via brand affiliation and savvy management."

Wali left Provenance Hotels in April 2020 after roughly 15 years.

"I felt I had done all I can there," he said.

He grew the company from five hotels to 14 across the country during his tenure, but eventually he said creating one-off hotels at Provenance that were so different in their own ways was a lot of work, "and it seemed like we were reinventing the wheel."

"For the last decade, the indies have had the golden age. It was so easy for us to stick a piece of art in the lobby, throw in some locally roasted coffee and boom, done," he said.

When the major hotel companies first came up with soft brands, Wali said he was the first to mock the companies "and say they could never get out of their own way or know how to do this."

Independent hotels at the time largely ignored the soft brands and "continued to thrive and take market share," he said.

"We were egotistically so self-absorbed that we didn't look to pay attention that [soft brands] were evolving and they were doing things better and better," he said.

Soft brands started incorporating the design touches that made independent hotels stand out, and by then, "all of these things that were once unique became ubiquitous," he said.

If brands now have a guide on what makes soft brands cool, it's not cool anymore, Wali said.

"Cool is authenticity, the most overused word in the history of the world," he said. "Authenticity to me means having an unapologetic point of view."

While the brands have grown outside the box exponentially in terms of flexibility for soft brands and acquiring those "cool" factors, Wali said there's room for the purely independents, the brands and the soft brands, which exist somewhere in between.

The Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis has brought diversity to the forefront across the country, but Wali said the hospitality industry "hides behind the veil of diversity" because at the lowest wages in the sector, it is a diverse industry.

"But as you climb up the ladder, it gets whiter and whiter and whiter and whiter," he said.

Women are growing in visibility at these conferences, but he said he still does not see enough Black hoteliers.

"When I talk about diversity, I'm not ashamed. I am brown myself; I am only preaching the Black, African-American cause," he said.

There are some other minorities in the industry such as Latinos and Native Americans that are underrepresented, "but I am trying to keep focus on one topic right now," he said.

Wali said he's not doing this because of Black Lives Matter or Black History Month. It's a topic that needs to be discussed every day.

He added that the topic is "near and dear to my heart," and that he's making people have uncomfortable conversations to create change.

The leadership of Practice Hospitality's Hotel Colee is predominantly Black hoteliers, a move done by design, Wali said.

"This doesn't happen accidentally. You have to work hard, and you have to make sure you give people opportunities," he said.

To focus more on Black leadership, Wali said he's questioning which leaders are on industry panels he's invited to speak on.

"If I get invited to a panel full of white men, I am going to call foul. Why are there no women? Why are there no people of color? There are a lot of smart people. If you can't find them, I will help you find them," he said.

"We have to be the change, not just talk about [diversity]," Wali said.