HOTELS

Roger Hill

Introduction To Designs On Profitability
July 25, 2008

As my three founding partners -- Andrew J. Fay, Ariane Steinbeck, Julius van Heek -- and I first hung out our shingle in 1988, we built Gettys, a hospitality design firm that possessed some key differentiators from our competitive set. Paramount among these differences was the importance of our clients’ profitability.

Even in those earliest of days, we were always more interested in creating shareholder value than building monuments to ourselves. In the hospitality design business, beautiful and smart interiors are important, but it is the price of admission. The issues that affect the profit of a property are much broader and span from space optimization to maximizing operational savvy and, in many cases, ultimately a great resale value. After 20 years in business, we have never had a client who wasn’t interested in the finished product being profitable. And, so, that has always been the Gettys mission statement and the vision that my partners and I share -– a dedication to creating value, reducing risk, solving problems and promoting the business success of our hospitality industry clients.

In the vein of making profitability our key deliverable, Gettys has branched out over the years to offer services such as procurement and consultancy exclusively to the hospitality industry. We have even become developers of hotel properties. However, each of these steps were taken with the interest of increasing the efficiencies and creating a nature of collaboration on each project; ultimately increasing the return on investment for our partners and clients.

I am thrilled to have been invited by HOTELS magazine to be a regular contributor with my own blog on their Web site. And, I am delighted to have you as a reader.

To give you a glimpse of what we have in store for this blog, we will constantly be considering the business of the hospitality industry; profitability and the promise of long-term returns will always color the themes addressed here. We will be discussing ideas and issues that will help readers manage and maximize today’s current business climate to the benefit of their properties. Topics such as the economy, natural disasters, airline travel, development deal-making, the challenges of doing business in countries around the globe, sustainability, design technology and more will be addressed both by me and some special guest bloggers from the Gettys team, as these are the issues that affect us all.

Certainly as my 20 years of experience has been focused in hospitality design, procurement and development, these topics will often serve as filters through which we discuss larger industry-wide issues, all with the ultimate goal to, at all times, maintain our designs on profitability.

Posted by Roger Hill on July 25, 2008 | Comments (0)