It's great to see you Ivo. , how long has it been?

Probably 10 years or something like that. Pretty much exactly 10. Yeah.

What's the most interesting place that you've been to since I last saw you. I would probably say it was my time in London. I was actually working for RMCC in London for revenue management center. Exactly. Yes, it was really very. Good experience, but also at times a very difficult experience just because of transition from the U S to Europe, the mentalities of people are completely different and you have to take that into account.

You have to take the cultural aspect into account when you're consulting for people in terms of revenue management. So that was a very fun experience. I met a lot of good people there. I'd love to jump right into it. What is something that you've done today, in your job One of the things that you had to spend your time figuring out today. Today is actually a situation where we had a misalignment between multiple teams in terms of when we were talking about the impact of specifically group business in that case.

And we're. Sometimes, especially when you're in a leadership position, you have to, on one side, be there for your team, but on the other side, you also have to understand the root cause, ask some probing question, to ultimately get to the right solution and lead your team through it. It was that one is definitely top of mind or something that we just worked through today, and I guess you can say questions and curiosity is your friend in order to truly understand the underlying issue, even though that might not be a thing that initially is brought to your attention.

, I'm going to try to elaborate this for people that be in the, in revenue management world. I'm imagining that you're saying you and some of the folks on your revenue management team, we're having a conversation about, okay, you've got a sales team that also has, numbers to hit and you both have to figure out how do I get the right business in at the right time to make things the most.

profitable and drive the most revenue that we can. And sometimes those goals don't entirely align. Is that right? It's definitely one part of it. The other part in today's scenario, more so system related. Talking to each other, which is yeah, it was a human core job at times.

So it was more a technical piece that we had to figure out. But the example of really making sure that the business we're bringing in is the right fit for us. That's an ongoing conversation that I'm part of saying we have daily. And so like with the system side. I'm trying to visualize that in my head.

You've got 5, 000 units across, I don't know, 30, 40 properties. The multiple, individual houses that are like, multiple bedrooms and those things that are being sold on multiple platforms, right? Like they've got to make sure all of these connections are working and communicating and getting out there that it's actually available for somebody to book and use.

So not only are you trying to position it the right way at the right price, but you've got to make sure that somebody actually sees that and can book that. It's represented in the right. That sounds so complicated. I've been here for three years and I'm still learning. And what's what's something that maybe is like something, a challenge that you've been working on lately that for you has been difficult to figure out.

Yeah. I think ultimately the system infrastructure that we were just talking about in some right. I come from traditional hospitality, as where you have a pretty straightforward system between CRS interacting with your PMS and the list goes on. While when you have the plethora of inventory that we have, you have to put a lot more different systems in the mix in order to be able to, for example, to distribute to different channels that you don't necessarily think about in the traditional sense of hospitality.

Yeah. Ensuring that those systems really accurately talk to each other, I would definitely determine that to be the biggest challenge in the mix. And then at the same time, also, when you're looking at how these systems talk together is to being open to just rediscovering in terms of how could we do this differently with the same systems?

Yeah, it's there's always this. Being in the weeds part of I need to know how this works, and I'm going to figure out how all of these pieces connect together. So that I can so I can understand this at a fundamental level, but then the part of how do I rise above that and then start asking more abstract.

questions of how do I accomplish what I'm looking to accomplish with the constraints that I've got now that I better know the constraints, zooming out to look at this at a higher level to think about this in a new way. Is that how you would say that? Absolutely. It's the constant, I guess you can call it questioning of the status quo really quickly.

In some cases we're looking at with how quickly we have grown we're looking back at how can we change our approach in order. To manage at scale as we're doing at this point in time. And that really, that takes a lot of patience. And it takes a strong team. And that was really in, in full transparency.

My first year and a half, two years. It took a lot of movement in order to not just make sure you have the right people on the bus but also you have the right people in the right seat on the bus. I am happy to say I have a phenomenal team at this point in time that's really strong. It took some time to get there and it took some time for us to speak the same language.

A, because I had to learn. a completely new business from what it seems like. But at the same time I asked a lot of challenging questions and I push a lot because I have a very high level of expectation and I want to make sure we're optimizing anything we're doing on a daily basis for efficiency and effectivity.

So it took some time to really get those our heads in the same direction. So we can optimize business together and it's really fun. Know that we are in that spot. Yeah, that's, I love that. Yeah, I'd love to change gears a little bit and just think about for you. What. What pulled you into getting in hospitality in the first place?

What's your what's your first memory of hospitality that you've experienced? And what what got you in this business? It's a great question, Josh. And in, in all honesty, I think I've told this story a couple of times. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact I told that story when I interviewed for the role when I worked at RMCC Dallas.

When I was in college, not knowing what I was going to do, I started working as an input server. And at that time the lead of that was, we were setting up for a wedding, the lead for that wedding had a family emergency, had to step out and ask me to to take over. And I remember specifically when the bride and groom walked in before all the guests arrived, the bride came up to me and gave me a huge hug.

Because she was just so happy with how everything looked and how we made her a special day, even more special. And in all honesty, that's what hooked me to hospitality because that kind of feeling to be part of someone's experience is better than any paycheck you can ever get which makes it all the more interesting that I ended up in revenue management, but I've learned over time in my time between sales front office, different operational roles.

I've learned that, for example, revenue management. actually sets the operators of the property, the people onsite that create that memory for the guests, it sets them up for success. With what we're distributing into the marketplace, with what we're communicating to our guests in the marketplace before they're even coming to the hotel, we're setting expectations.

So we have to be really clear and really good at that communication because otherwise we're setting false expectation and we're actually setting our counterparts on property up for for failure. You're helping set things up so that they get a hug.

And you're going after the hug still in a way of the service that you're providing to all of your properties and the people that you support that you're doing it in such a way that I would guess like there, then So grateful and like you've taken a load off of their shoulders.

You've made their life better, easier, all of those sorts of things. Yeah. And ultimately they were helping each other, right? Yes. The strategic portion of what we do you can't do it without that collaboration with operators. And not just from a guest experience perspective, but also from a perspective of.

Thinking of strategies that complement our operational ability to execute against them. We can think of three million strategies that may be genius, but if they don't match to a given property that we have, once again, we're setting ourselves up for failure. So that mutual communication and respect and knowledge sharing is absolutely essential, while at the same time also being open to sometimes asking some questions that are not always easy.

And just taking ourselves out of it and just consider it from a business perspective, right? . Can you give me an example of that? What are some of the questions that are not so easy that you ask? I'll give you an example of a question I was asked, or more so a direction I was pushed on, which relates to length of stay.

Opposed to hotels where you're fluctuating length of stay left and center in order to maximize your impact with a given demand level. When you're in vacation rentals, there is another variable in it, which is if you have a six bedroom house that is on its own you have to think about housekeepers that you transport to that house.

You have to think about the amount of time it takes those housekeepers to clean that house prior to being able to sell it. So if you have a checkout at 11 and a check in at 3, there's no way those housekeepers are going to have that clean in a matter of four hours. So selling a house like that for one night, Is not necessarily always the right strategy, and that's a prime example of something I was pushed on, especially when I first came to my current role with Vail Resorts with vacation rentals, where I was very heavily pushing on, hey let's get rid of some of these barriers of blocking our length of stay in order to be more competitive in the marketplace, but we had to find that balance, and that's once again where communication comes into play, right?

Yeah. Did you come up with some new metrics that we'll use to measure our effectiveness there? Yeah. We're working really close with our finance department in terms of truly understanding the cost per occupied rooms that we carry by. We're measuring closely how many hours our operators need in order to turn a unit.

And we're consistently adjusting our strategy in order to help them optimize the amount of time needed. To convert units so wouldn't necessarily say that I came up with that as a matter of fact, I didn't, but we're working really closely with the different matrix teams in order to really fine tune that. And so I would assume also like you're probably If you've got a better understanding of a cost per occupied room, you're building in the cost of what you're saying, cost of transport and time. And that, it's not just, the time that was there, but it's the total time involved. Some cases, .

Post Keeper traveling 30 minutes one way, especially how you have things like that. Yeah, it can become quite challenging. It's absolutely a big aspect. And so you build into that. And then I would assume. You're also looking at a gross operating profit per available unit or something like that by month larger kind of time views to, to better get a better grasp on, are we improving together, like the profitability of these things instead of just going after, you could, sometimes you could improve revenue, but you may not actually improve profitability.

Yeah. Yeah, and that's where the length of stay example was a prime example that came into play because, just because the top line revenue all of a sudden shows, for example, growth year on year, or growth, or we're surpassing the budget, doesn't necessarily mean that impact flows through to the bottom line in the same manner.

Yeah, not only think about us, but we also need to very conscientiously make those decisions in order to bring in the right guests for our owners. Because most of these units are individually owned and in a lot of cases, the owner's livelihood.

, I think it's so interesting how in the hotel space, you can go from to your point, did banquet server to director of revenue of Vale resorts. There are significant opportunities available if you build the right skills along the way and continue to stack those skills, I think in a meaningful way, and all of those continue to make you more valuable and also in the way that you're providing value to your guests and your company. And so, , what are some of the skills that you can build and develop? over time. One that I thought of that I think it's important is just the skill of critical thinking.

And when I thought about critical thinking, you came to mind for me like, Oh, there's a lot of complicated stuff going on in ivo's world. There's so many decision points, so many variables And it's all changing every day. , when you think about critical thinking, how do you approach that?

How have you thought about that? I would love to understand from your perspective just thinking about that one skill how you go about, getting better at that. I thought about this a lot,

ultimately, where I landed is a natural sense of curiosity. And what I mean by that is not reading a book in hopes to get the answers. Sometimes you have to dig a little bit. You have to ask the question, why? As a matter of fact we've recently added some really strong team members to our team that had limited revenue management experience.

However, we knew they were the right candidates because of exactly what she said. They had the right level of thinking. They had their head in the right space. And the very first thing I said to them when we first had introductory calls and started their training is, don't ever stop asking why.

Just like the toddler game with my kids. They're in the age right now where they're asking why? Why? Why? And they don't stop asking. But that's the same thing that we should be doing. Because by constantly asking questions, we may be uncovering processes or actions that we may be doing that, that are solely from a place of habit that are actually not the right thing for the business anymore.

And by asking that question, literally until you're in a place where you can't ask that question, any questions anymore, whether it's why or what or how or more so why or how than what You're actually digging deeper and deeper into a problem. You're developing your own understanding in place of looking for an answer somewhere in a book or in a video or so on and so forth.

You're gathering information in order to build your own picture. And that's absolutely crucial in my perspective, especially in hospitality. Think about the front desk agent that stands at a front desk and they have a guest coming to them with any type of concern. You can read 3 million books.

You will never get the answer out of books in terms of how to communicate with that guest and take care of that guest. You have to think on your feet and you have to ask questions in order to show that guest you truly want to solve the root cause. cause of that problem. So I would say that the biggest skill is being willing to ask questions, the right questions, and sometimes also being willing to ask the difficult question, regardless of who you're talking to, whether you're talking to your peer or whether you're talking to a superior you have to be willing to approach topics that at times are sensitive.

In order for you as a team to be able to move forward and continue to grow. I think you're spot on. There's talking about asking the difficult questions. , one that I often realize is the difficult question is a lot of times one that may make me feel foolish, right?

Like it's not always the difficult question that makes me feel foolish. Somebody else uncomfortable. It probably is going to make me feel uncomfortable, especially when you're in a manager position. I found this specifically in the last three years, you have to be willing to be vulnerable because if you're not willing to be vulnerable, how can you expect your team to be authentic?

And that's something I had to learn the hard way. In many instances, as a matter of fact, I have a colleague now. That I joke with because I admitted to her, I'm like, you know what my biggest struggle is asking for help. And she jokes with me about that every single day, and it's absolutely right, but only by being willing to show that vulnerability while you're asking questions to better understand something.

That's how you move forward, because if you act like you understand something just because you have a title that's not going to solve the underlying problem. , one part of that is if you're willing to be vulnerable and appear foolish at times by asking questions that maybe you think you should know the answer to, you're also giving that example to everyone else in the room.

Of the importance of thinking independently, which I think is about what this, critical thinking skill is right is how do we formulate our own opinions? Um, and not just assume what everyone else already says or thinks or does. And so you're creating this environment where people feel safe enough to then ask questions that may be in an, in a less safe environment.

They would get shot down or insulted or, where they would feel a sense of rejection, but if you build the right culture where people are curious and, I always like to say, Oh, that's interesting, right? Oh, I didn't know that was gonna happen. It's, how do I have fun with the fact that I don't have the answers, but I love that you're thinking about how to build the culture of, Critical thinking through cultivating curiosity with everyone. And that's where, especially when I first, this was whether it's a bail or with my previous team that I worked with in both cases, when I look back, I realized in the first couple of months that I was there, I had a lot of friction and that friction came from once again, because I was asking difficult questions, I will openly say is.

You have to consider the human aspect because not everybody is in the same place, right? And not everybody receives questions and or information in that same manner. So you have to be tactical in terms of how you ask those questions or how you bring up an area of concern. And I think that's something that ultimately more people can and should concentrate on including myself.

Ultimately, society really goes against the concept I was just talking to, because what does society teach us? Society teaches us, we have to go to school, we have to learn what's in these books, we have to get a certain grade, and we have to get that piece of paper in order to work somewhere.

When the reality of it is I'll openly admit, when I was in school as a young boy in Germany, I had a what translates into a D in mathematics. And now I calculate on a daily basis. But that's because There's sense behind the numbers. So it's not about memorizing, it's about understanding. And the only way to understand is to dig deeper.

Yeah. I remember Chris Silcock, who, is president Hilton before he was in that role. At one point I asked him what are the interview questions that you like to ask somebody, when you're interviewing them for a role? And he took a minute and thought about it. And he said, it doesn't really matter what question you ask, as long as you then follow up and dig deeper.

He was saying, I want to know if somebody really understands what they're saying or not or if it's something that they just know at the surface. And he was so good at that. If you tell him something he was able to move from, I think he started as a banquet server to the president of the company by, you're continuing to increase your influence.

He takes on revenue management, gets to understand that, takes on all of marketing, takes on all of the brand, right? And he never had those jobs. He was never in marketing, but he's able to get to the underlying concepts. underneath that and understand what you're trying to achieve to then help identify, the blockage there and push you to figure out how to solve it.

I think like when I think about critical thinking and how he would, how he even approached that. Question about interviews that is a great example of, how to go about that. I would add on to that, Josh. I think that can go both ways. How many times have you been in interviews?

I know I have been in interviews where you open the table for questions from the person that you're interviewing or where you yourself are the person interviewing for a position and being asked, allowed to ask questions. And. With the questions that you are being asked, you can tell a lot about the person that's sitting in front of you, or with the questions you ask, the person in front of you can tell a lot, but also vice versa.

If I were to interview for a new position, I can tailor my questions in a way to understand what the culture is like, A, from that leader that I'm speaking to, but also B, in the company that I'm looking to work for. In order to make sure that it's a right fit for me, not just as a professional, but also as a human.

And that goes back to critical thinking is independent thinking. Independent thinking is having an, I would say an internal locus of control, right? Of I am making my own decisions, I'm responsible for my own decisions. And because of that I want to ask the questions that matter to me, right?

And I spend time. Thinking, talking about this is like how important it is that you identify what you as an individual really value. Because that matters. And then that starts to then guide and direct like how do your work, right? Yeah. And if it is a good fit to work for that company or not.

Right? And if you think about it, you do it from in your private life, at least in my experience, you do it automatically. You're not going to live in a community that you don't identify with. You're not going to follow a hobby that you don't enjoy doing. So why not apply that same logic to work?

Because at the end of the day, we spend more time at work and a lot of time, in a lot of cases, than we spend with our own family, right? Yeah. Okay yeah, I'd love to hear, are there other things that came to mind for you as you thought about critical thinking? And like either examples or things you found interesting as you dug into this to think about your own life and how you apply it, honesty, I had a bit of an aha moment which was really interesting because as I was thinking about this topic and was thinking about everything we just talked about, we talked about the difference between book smart and street smart, right?

We're talking about being able to Memorize versus being able to understand and when I think back in terms of why did I get into hospitality in the first place outside of the customer service piece, if you think about specifically operations in my experience, a lot of the people that work in hospitality have those skills because they have to have those skills and a lot of the people that have worked in hospitality and chose to turn away.

I'm not saying don't necessarily have those but they may be struggling with it. Because once again, the example of standing at a front desk and having someone come to you with a problem when you have a lobby full of guests, you have to think on your feet. And that's where it was an aha moment for me of why I'm so passionate about hospitality is because Maybe it's a German in me, but I naturally question constantly.

I think the feedback loop is tight, right? In this space, even if you're at the front desk, you have to deal with what's coming at you right when it's happening. You don't get to say, can you give me a moment to go? Figure this out. Like you have to figure it out. And it's same though, like even in your world of revenue management is this is the time to make the decision because if I wait, it's gone.

There was cases throughout my career so far where I remember in particular with my previous company, when I first joined. We were talking through all the different strategies and all the different promotions and so on and so forth. All the things that you do throughout the year because I was trying to understand the full school.

And then certain strategies came up where the people I was talking to automatically said that didn't work. And I stopped them. I'm like, hold on. Explain to me why it didn't work. Help me understand. It's it didn't work. We don't need to waste our time on it. And I'm like what part of it didn't work?

Because just because the result wasn't what you had intended, there may be one minor little screw that you needed to turn in order to get to those results. And by truly digging in and understanding which screw to turn could have actually made that strategy a huge success. So what was actually the underlying cause of why this strategy didn't work?

And that, that's where I've found when you dig in like that, And at the same time, you're not sensitive with how you're asking those questions. It can be a very difficult conversation to be in. And that's another example since you were asking for examples of as I was reflecting on critical thinking that came to mind because that's something no matter what culture you're in, no matter what company you're in, you will run into those situations where someone might be really proud of someone, something that achieved and you come and question it.

It's human nature to react defensive about it and we have to work with that in order to still. To a degree influence the outcome in terms of which direction we want to take this. , the first part you talked about, I would say is Socratic method of asking the underlying whys, right?

And better grasping what's going on and being curious about that. And then, you've got the scientific method that you're also saying is part of critical thinking, which is develop a hypothesis. Test it, measure it like, and then change what based on the results, make a change to the hypothesis, right?

And test it again, which is basically revenue management, right? But a lot of times we're not actually keeping a list of the hypotheses, right? And maybe we're testing too many variables at once or, and we throw the whole thing out when we have it actually. it yet. And I think that's a very interesting point about you think about like scientific community and it's almost like you, you get excited about being wrong,

It's not something you take personally and it's not something that you're. Ego is attached to. It's Oh, that didn't work. Let's , do another. Let's do it again. Let's find another way. And it's the continuation of coming to accept the failures as learnings and keep evolving.

But we like, sometimes we'll take it personally and act Oh, this is my fault. I'm a bad person. I should never try anything new. You go down a protective hole, And we all do it. It's human, right? It's human nature. I was gonna add one thing to that. And that may seem unusual, but I think patience is a huge part of critical thinking.

If we take the example of trying out a strategy, you can't try out an not in all cases can you try out a strategy and expect all the results you dreamed off within one day. Prime example, in your private life, you start a new sport, you're not gonna play at pro level the first day you play it. You need some time and you need to force yourself to have the patience and to go through that cycle of ramp up, optimization, and so on and so forth.

And that's where I'll be vulnerable with you. I'm not the most patient person in the world and that's something I have to keep reminding myself of is. You have to be patient. You have to give it some time. We introduced this strategy. We know the strategy. We expected the strategy to have a ramp up period of 30 60 90 days.

Let's give it those six months and then in depth analyzing throughout that time period in depth analyze what's happening. So we're understanding the full scope before we make an altering decision or before we make a decision to turn away from that strategy.

Is there someone that either works for you or that you've worked with closely that comes to mind when you think about critical thinking? Because I, I know you and we can have this conversation, but I'd like to, as we've talked about critical thinking, reach out to someone else that you think is great at critical thinking.

And I'm curious if somebody comes to mind.

I have somebody that comes to mind which is actually my current manager. Because when it comes to patient and when it comes to looking at all the angles and try at times also trying to zoom out to understand the greater impact and not live so far in the detail at all times, he's been extremely valuable to me to develop myself and think about things from different perspectives.

So he's absolutely somebody that, in this context, I would call on. Okay. I would love that this has been amazing, Ivo.

, thank you for sharing all of this with us and opening up. , I'm so grateful that you would do this with me. Yeah, I appreciate you, you thinking of me and allowing me time and space for us to talk about this. I'm passionate about it. This part and just, like I said earlier, preparing for it and asking myself why, actually allowed me to think back and reflect on a lot of things that I didn't actively think about at the time in terms of why they turned out that way.

And that brings me to, I've brought it up a few times, but I think it's absolutely valuable to consider that part as you're applying critical thinking and as you're pushing yourself to ask those questions. You absolutely need to understand who's sitting in front of you. And something that, I think the first time I did it was actually with Hilton, and my current company does it as well.

Lots of companies will do personality tests that help you understand the values of your colleagues will help you understand the communication style of colleagues. And I would absolutely encourage anybody who's interested in this topic to consider that portion. Because the reason you're asking questions is because ultimately you have a certain purpose.

You're looking for a certain result. Now, if you're asking these questions in a wrong way and you start going down a defensive road, you're not going to get to that result. So in order to be successful with critical thinking, you absolutely have to consider the human. Aspect of that conversation.

Yeah. Yeah. That's so good. It's, I think about it is like every one of those conversations is a bit like a negotiation, right? And the negotiation is that people think it's about how do you get the most, but it's really about how can we both. Look at the thing together, let's sit beside each other on the same side of the table and look at this problem together to come up with how we want to move forward and you're spot on.

It's understanding your own perspective and limitations. and what you care about. And then the other is how do I get to understand the other person's perspective and limitations and what they care about. And we both have blindsides, we both have, preferences. And the more that we can find commonality on how do we both get what we're looking for.

It makes a world of difference when you're trying to take action on something that involves more than one person. . And you have to be open within a conversation like that for those pages to turn also. . I remember most recently when I hired one of the leaders on my team, when I told that person in the interview process, I said, Look, I don't want a yaysayer because I don't know everything.

I need somebody that when I get try to lead us in a direction that you don't agree with, that speaks up because I made two mistakes also. And ultimately we can make the best decision as a team. One person can never make the best decision. So it's really important to open that door both ways for that team member, for your colleague or whoever you're talking to to understand that.

They're, that not only they're open to ask those questions, but that it's also your expectation off of them. Yeah. If that communi, if that conversation doesn't happen, and I can think of numerous examples of where I failed in having that conversation to start off with. If that conversation doesn't happen, the A, the relationship will suffer and B, you will struggle to get to the results that you're intending to get to.

I love that. . The people on your team are so lucky to have you as a manager. I love that you're thinking that way and how you're so thoughtful and intentional about cultivating that with them. I have to be honest there, Josh. They helped me. Understand that in any way.

Once again that's a perfect example of where they helped me become a better.

📍 That's awesome. Thanks for your time, Ivo. this has been so good and I can't wait for us to talk again. This was, this has been great. Sounds great. Thanks. Thanks for your time, Josh.