Key Tasks

I can’t give you a prescription for a successful organisation. Each hotel is different; you will have certain skills that you have brought to the business and you may or may not have a business background. You may have a partner, business or otherwise, or there may be three of you. All I can do is give you some considerations that you need to take into account as you organise your business for success.

Every hotel, whether it has five rooms or 100, has the same broad operational needs. The only difference is the scale and thus the time needed to carry them out. These key tasks are:

• housekeeping
• maintenance
• accounts/finance
• reservations/reception
• food and drink service
• human resources
• sales.

In a small operation it is likely that you do these all yourself, maybe with a little occasional assistance. You are able to do all the routine tasks in the morning and because you do not cook in the evening, you have time to make the requisite sales calls in the afternoon.

The difficulty starts when you have more than about ten rooms and a busy restaurant. You need to stay open all day, even if there is not much business in the afternoons. Breakfast starts at 7am and you do not finish clearing up in the restaurant until lam. You try to have one day off a week but you would like two. You still have the seven areas above to manage and that seems to take all day.

A larger and more complex operation will have specialists in many of these areas, particularly food and drink service which breaks down into restaurants, kitchen, bar and meetings. This sort of span of control is difficult to manage, so you will have to make some choices about those issues that you keep day-to-day responsibility for and those that you will hand over to others.

What you will have noticed about the seven core tasks is that six of them involve short-term operational issues and only sales is about the long term. What inevitably happens is that every short-term issue takes priority over your long-term tasks. In principle there is nothing wrong with this: if a waiter fails to turn up, it doesn’t help your customers if you don’t step in to help because you have an advertisement to write!

Unfortunately this sort of thing happens every day. Even though you have a well structured ‘to do’ list at the beginning of the week it is still the same at the end of the week. In order to be really effective you need to organise responsibilities within the hotel to allow you to focus your attention on longer-term business development opportunities.

Sales Activities

A hotel is like a car; it needs fuel to make it go! And the fuel is a steady stream of customers and guests. If in your case you just open your doors and customers walk into your restaurant and guests call up to make room reservations, all at the right times, and you go on holiday each year and make a good profit, then you are very lucky. Or deluded!

More likely, you make a lot of effort to generate more business. I can’t say how much effort you should make or what you need to do, since it depends on your own particular needs. This book sets out the options and some of the tactics that you can employ.

Your actions will be one off, such as:

• Competition analysis.
• Brochures and internet site.
• Action plan.

And regular actions such as:

• Past client analysis – why did they stop using you?
• Current clients – develop relationships and mine their hierarchy.
• Prospects – telephone to find more potential.
• Direct mail – develop local potential for restaurant.
• Update website – add new facilities/activities/packages.
• Third parties – update daily with availability and rates.
• Check competition – look at current rates and availability.
• Research – keep eyes open for new housing or corporate moves.
• Agents – send thank you notes and find out if more business is available.
• Local bookers – keep in touch with tourist offices/attractions.
• Joint ventures – look for opportunities to join with complementary services.

This is just the start of the potential. How much time should you allocate to this activity?

Well this depends on how you organise the business development activity. It doesn’t have to be done by you. But it is your responsibility to make it happen, so you need to allocate quality time to assessing what has been done and planning what has to be done. In my view, if you are doing all this yourself you should probably allocate 40 per cent of your time to looking after the future. If you have a sales executive that shares the activity then maybe 20 per cent is reasonable.

As I have said before, it is the quality of the time that is vital. Marketing of any sort is about the long-term and you need to have a clear head (and a clear desk!) in order to give it the attention it deserves.

If you find it difficult to get organised, try to allocate a quiet time each day, even if it is just an hour. If, in those five hours per week, you manage to persuade one new client to use you, you will have 50 new clients. Even if each client only gives you ten room nights a year at a rate of £ 60, then you have generated an extra £ 30,000 a year. It’s all about small steps.