Before considering the customers you can attract and the channels to reach them, it is vital to articulate your vision of what sort of accommodation business you are trying to be.
What Is Your Vision For The Future?
Can you recall why you came into the accommodation business in the first place and what you expected to achieve? If you ever thought that it was an easy way to make a lot of money for very little work you have probably found out the hard way already that it’s not. It is a business where service is delivered to people by people, whether you call them staff and customers or team members and guests. As Rick Stein says, ‘We’re in this business to entertain people, not make our own lives easy.’
When I talk about vision I do not mean ‘Do you have a mission statement?’ These tend to be very bland and generic statements
that could apply to any hotel including your competition. They are so short as to be meaningless and set down by management as a guide to behaviour. Often they cause more amusement than commitment, especially if they talk about work/life balance in an organisation where managers have to work over 60 hours a week! You cannot graft a mission statement on to an organisation that has been set up just to make a profit and then sit back and think that your team will be happy and contented as you exploit them. Many of us have worked for companies that talk about ‘people being our greatest asset’ while the chairman swans off to the Caribbean in his yacht for two months but won’t pay double time at Christmas!
A vision is much more than a mission statement. It is the glue that keeps the organisation together, it is the reason that you do what you do and it is what drives you to get up in the morning.
The best businesses to work in are developed by individuals who have the ability to imagine what others cannot see and the tenacity to deliver what they believe is possible: you need to be able to articulate your vision so that everyone can buy into it. Visions, just like problems, are much better if they are shared!
Companies such as Sony, Nike, and Caterpillar have great brands and are good examples of consistency, but these are corporate entities that have travelled a long way from their
founders’ original vision. There are a few examples of large corporations that have still managed to be identified with a personality and a vision, such as Virgin with Richard Branson and Body Shop with Anita Roddick. In the hotel sector you cannot help but be impressed by the vision of Ken McCulloch and his Malmaison, Columbus and Dakota Hotels.
Virgin
Richard Branson started his entrepreneurial career while still at school. Academic studies were not his strong point and his mail order record business soon became a shop. Virgin Records was formed in 1972, named for the fact that this was his first venture. Branson’s vision is to challenge the way things are traditionally done. He finds areas of business that are done badly or where the customer has been ripped off and goes into that business with the express idea of shaking it up (let’s hope that his experiment with trains has a happy outcome).
His vision is to challenge the status quo and at the same time he has a view about how people work best. He knows he is not always the expert, so he sets up joint ventures and he develops independent companies (40 at the last count) where the scale of the operation does not dwarf the enterprise. His values permeate the whole Virgin group:
- Value for money – not necessarily the cheapest but simple, honest and transparent pricing.
- Good quality – always deliver on promises with great attention to detail.
- Brilliant customer service – professional but uncorporate, friendly, human and relaxed.
- Innovative – challenging conventional service ideas and using stylish design.
- Competitively challenging – fighting the big boys by gaining public sympathy for the ‘underdog’.
- Fun – always trying to give customers entertainment and making Virgin a fun place to work.
In essence he has a very simple business philosophy. If you recruit the right people, treat them well and trust them you will have happy customers and consequently profits. Maybe it is as simple as this?