The rookie GM who crushed a hyper-competitive talent market
Plus: No-points Loyalty by Ennismore, Building an Airbnb, and more

Josiah Mackenzie
July 26, 2023
Good morning. If you’ve struggled with hiring (as many have), you’ll appreciate our feature story today with a first-time hotel GM who grew her team from 12 to 130 in the hyper-competitive Silicon Valley market - and earned the best retention rate from those hires - by following an unconventional playbook.
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Talent Strategies for Competitive Markets
with Lauren Phelps

Lauren Phelps / Credit: Josiah Mackenzie - Hospitality Daily
Today we're learning from Lauren Phelps about hiring and retaining talented people. A few excerpts from our conversation:
Danny Meyer had it right: “If your employees are happy, everything goes from there.”
Question everything: “Do we need this position? Is there a way to combine these positions? Can we create a new position?”
Look for alignment: “Creating that sense of impact and finding people who were energetic about the things we were energetic about.”
Autonomy, mastery, and purpose: “We found that people that were excited by those things in the interview stage tended to become full-time employees and stay with us.”
Recruiting is sales: “I was a full-time salesperson. That was my job.”
If you’re looking to hire (and keep) talented people on your team, I highly recommend you listen to Lauren today.
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From our community
Hospitality Daily is a community of creators and doers. (And we just passed 3,000!) Some cool things for today:
From Chris Cano: Creating a culture of empathy and active listening can increase your chance of success by 200%.
From Zach Busekrus: How Devon Loerop built the world's most-followed Airbnb on social media all by himself.
💡 Want to be featured here? Join our community on LinkedIn, and tag Hospitality Daily in your LinkedIn post
Stories I’m reading
Trends: It’s A New Era For All-Inclusive Resorts (by Nicole Kliest for thezoereport)
Commercial: Accor’s Ennismore Reveals No-points, Paid Membership Called ‘Dis-loyalty’ (by Selene Brophy for Skift)
Tech: INDIE Cultivate Conference Round-Up: Exploring Technology Adoption and Acquisition in the Hospitality Industry (by Alan Young for hospitalitynet)
Investment: Empty spaces and hybrid places: The pandemic’s lasting impact on real estate (by multiple authors for McKinsey & Company)
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