Special RepoRt : Leadership
“ We are draWn to charisma . i think having my Wife as a sounding board to make sure that i am being practical With What i am trying to communicate has been and still is invaluable .”
– Sloan Dean distribution marketing team at IHG , where he was soon promoted to revenue manager with a dedicated portfolio of extended-stay hotels .
“ Hotel revenue management soon turned into something that my skill set aligned with well ,” he says . “ People sometimes consider revenue management as voodoo math , and it ’ s really not .”
But Dean also had a lot to learn . He admits that he didn ’ t know much about the hotel business before his first position at IHG . “ I basically had to learn everything ,” Dean says . “ Right before I first interviewed at IHG , I was looking up a bunch of key metrics and terms . I didn ’ t even know what RevPAR was . Once I was at IHG , there was a lot of on-the-job training and that is where I probably learned most of the hotel business .”
In addition to his time at IHG , Dean has held revenue management positions at Noble Investment Group and Interstate Hotels & Resorts before joining Ashford in 2013 . Despite working with many of the industry ’ s best minds , he credits his wife , an elementary school teacher by trade , as one of the biggest influences on his career success and public speaking abilities .
“ We are drawn to charisma . I think having my wife as a sounding board to make sure that I am being practical with what I am trying to communicate has been and still is invaluable ,” he says . “ People who are successful at a young age are usually very good at public speaking .”
Dean emphasizes that breaking into the revenue management field comes down to the details . A successful revenue manager must be the “ most detail-oriented person that you have ever met ,” he says . “ If you enter the wrong rate for a hotel , then a hotel may be selling something for $ 1 opposed to $ 1,000 – the implications are huge .”
Unfortunately , this extreme attention to detail may lead to the demise of a revenue management executive as he climbs up the ranks . Dean says being a leader requires moving from practitioner to strategist by trusting fellow managers to correctly compute important figures . “ I have seen a lot of my peers who aren ’ t able to let go of being in the minutiae , who either burn themselves out or their employees hated working for them because they are micro-managers .”
In a relatively short time , Dean seems to have balanced both .
44 HOTELS April 2015 www . hotelsmag . com