By David Lund
1. You can increase the way you lead your team financially. Create an environment that has your managers working together on the “business” of running your hotel. It all starts by knowing that it is a team effort and it can’t be done properly by only the executive. Line level managers need to be included. The idea that someone produces numbers in a vacuum and gives them to a manager to hit is absurd. If you’re doing that today, stop it.
2. Know this, what we place our attention on grows. Financial leadership in your hotel is no different. Like service and colleague engagement we must invest time, resources and our efforts to train, lead and develop our team financially. Do not leave this up to the finance department. It’s a pillar of our business and that means it’s at the highest level of the organization’s responsibility to ensure financial leadership is alive and growing in the hotel.
3. Give the paper a proper respectable voice. The paper can’t talk so we need to be the voice of the paper and the reports. Every word spoken in your hotel about the finances counts and any negative use of the money talk is incredibly detrimental to your efforts. Money has power and we want to focus the power on the positive. If we use money and P&L performance to shame people, we are not being financial leaders. Headwinds in our business usually produce all kinds of negative money stories. If we have given the money a proper voice, we can learn a lot from a slowdown in business because the team and its efforts can carry the day.
4. Make agreements with your leaders and drop all the dialog around your expectations. Your team, your family, anyone walking the planet hates expectations. They are super negative and people push back against them. Instead, make agreements with your leaders. This practice is especially useful around the financial forecasting and budgeting.
5. Any Monkey could run this place when the phones are ringing…. My old boss was fond of that one. But there is a mountain of truth to it. In our business, volume and high increases in RevPAR hide a multitude of sins. When times are good do the unexpected; do a staffing review, have an expense reduction meeting, review all your prices. Don’t wait for the owner to ask for it.
6. When you are in a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants hotel and you have a good month, things are great, but you really don’t know why. When you have a bad month, the sins are obvious: missed invoices, over-forecast in payroll and revenues below forecast. Didn’t anyone see this coming? Well, actually, no—no one saw this coming because they did not have a financial communication process to ensure they were on top of the business. They were flying by the seat of their pants. The GM points fingers at the controller, the controller blames the department heads who didn’t submit their forecast on time, the department heads blame the controller because he/she created the forecast anyway! You see, it just goes around and around. No accountability, no ownership, lousy results and no financial leadership!
7. Your leaders today don’t want to be involved in the financial piece. To be successful you need to create the “want to” for your team. It’s easier than you think. Create a system for them to follow. Show them what is in it for them: their career, job satisfaction, independence, more respect and they will get in the game, they will want to. Being close to the financial boiler room is sexy.
8. We want all hands on deck. The basic rule is if Mr. or Ms. Leader consumes resources, e.g., prepares a schedule or orders supplies, you "my friend" are now the master of the forecast, the budget, the actual results and the commentary for your area. No more hiding behind “it’s the accounting department” story.
9. The monthly financial circle is our friend. It visits every month and it means we get to start over again, learn from what worked and fix what didn’t. Every month the window opens and closes in the financial world. If you worked in banquets every night, you would get very good, very fast. Financial leadership can be the same.
10. There is no one coming to save you. However, there is help and it all starts by asking for it. Smart executives know that asking for help with challenging problems like creating financial leadership is a sign of strength.
