Transcript: Episode 265: Break Room Surprise

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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor with Susan Barry, episode 265. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/265.

[00:00:14] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now, your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.

[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. Damon Lawrence got his start at a hotel front desk while he was a student at Howard University, and it didn't take long before he was hooked. Watching Thompson Hotels co-founders Jason Pomeranc and Steve Bramman build a boutique hotel empire convinced him that ownership, not operations, was the real goal. In 2016, he launched Homage Hospitality with a co-founder and chased deals in Oakland and New Orleans just before the pandemic upended everything. After a reset that took him through consulting and hotel capital markets brokerage, Damon found himself buried in the brutal spreadsheet-heavy process of underwriting hotel deals, so he built himself a better tool. That tool became Underwrote, an AI underwriting platform built specifically for hospitality real estate. Today, we are going to talk about that and the future of hotel underwriting technology, but before we jump in, we need to answer the call button. 

Call button rings…

The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals who have burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at (850) 404-9630. Today's question was submitted by Rhea. Here's what Rhea has to say, Damon. "How much disclosure is required when I'm using AI in my work? Do I need to tell my clients and partners when I use AI tools to create reports for them?" I love this question. I know that you are not, like, the AI judge and jury necessarily, but this is a topic that has been so top of mind for me lately that I thought it would be fun for us to talk about it. What do you think? How much does she need to share? I'm so torn about this. 

[00:02:41] Damon Lawrence: I am very torn about this. This is a hot-button issue for me personally. Because I use AI so often, I can spot it immediately, right? I can tell the way Claude or ChatGPT speaks to you, like the verbiage that it uses. And so it's immediately apparent, and it is sometimes frustrating when you can tell someone just used a platform and didn't even check the work after the fact.

[00:03:18] Susan Barry: Or read it. That's the part that kills me is when they don't read it. 

[00:03:22] Damon Lawrence: And so I think AI is an amazing tool, but it needs to be used as a tool, and it needs to help supplement the work that you're doing and aid you, right? But not do the work for you. So I guess the question is great. The answer is to put your eyes on the work before you submit it. And because I think we're going to a space where it's gonna be impossible to not use it, right? I just heard a statistic recently that, a year ago, 6% of people were using AI to find local businesses, and then the next year it jumped to 40%, mainly because Google, you can't get around it, right? So I think that the reality is pretty soon we're not gonna be able to get around it, but just making sure that you're actually putting your voice behind the work. 

[00:04:24] Susan Barry: It's interesting to also think about, there is a certain point at which if you're not using AI, your workload is gonna be untenable because people, owners, leaders, executives are baking cost savings from AI into their business plans, right? So if there's only two-thirds of the workforce, if you don't use AI, you're screwed because you're gonna have to work until midnight every night. 

[00:04:56] Damon Lawrence: I heard somebody say, like, "You know, the babies being born." I'm a new father, so, "The babies being born now might not ever have to work." It's like, interesting, right? Who knows what's gonna happen. 

[00:05:06] Susan Barry: I'll believe that when I see it. 

[00:05:08] Damon Lawrence: I know. We'll see. We'll see. 

[00:05:11] Susan Barry: Okay. Well, I know that meeting Jason Pomeranc and Steve Branham from Thompson Hotels really convinced you that hotel ownership was your goal versus operations. I'm gonna tell you that when I was at that stage in my career, you sort of made that decision. I didn't know that hotels had owners because all of the hotels I worked at were owned and managed by the brand. I mean, it just didn't even enter into my worldview that that was an option. What was it about watching them and sort of watching the way that they were doing things that flipped that switch in you? 

[00:05:50] Damon Lawrence: Yeah. I'm thankful that I had my first introduction to hospitality be a boutique brand that's really just starting. I think that was their ninth hotel, so they're fairly new at the time with Thompson. But it was their lifestyle, you know? It was the lifestyle, between New York and LA, and I think they had a property in wine country too, but that was really the extent of their footprint. So they're now going into DC, which is like their first property outside of those two markets. And, man, they were living like rock stars, you know? It felt like they would just go from property to property. They would take the largest suite in the property. They would have their friends over. And so I got to see the lifestyle component of just ownership and what that looks like. And that's what drew me to it. It was like, my name's Damon, right? If you turn that backwards, it's Nomad, and I feel like a nomad, right? I do. I feel like a nomad. And so I've lived in a bunch of different cities, and it's hard for me to just say, "This is the city that does everything," because I love New York. I love DC. I love Baltimore, where I'm at now. I love California. That's where I'm from. I went to school in Louisiana before going to Howard.  I bounced around so much that it was like, oh, what if I had a hotel in all these places? And I didn't have to choose. I didn't have to pick one place, and I could really just bounce around, and that was the component that sold me. 'Cause I also didn't see people like myself doing it and living that type of lifestyle. So it endeared me to the industry and the process of ownership. 

[00:07:46] Susan Barry: Okay. So then I feel like there was probably a flip side to that coin of, like, a rude awakening that it wasn't all presidential suites and bottle service. Tell, talk about how your search for real estate in Oakland went. 

[00:08:03] Damon Lawrence: Yeah. So, obviously having the experience at Thompson was one thing, but what I didn't realize and learned later is Jason really had that money from his parents to start his hotel brand. His family owned a bunch of real estate. 

[00:08:21] Susan Barry: What a surprise. He was a nepo baby. Oh, how shocking. 

[00:08:26] Damon Lawrence: Yeah. And I don't have that, right? Don't have the family history in real estate. Looking to grow that for my daughter, but don't have that myself. And so yeah, it was just learning the process of raising capital,  and then being in Silicon Valley around tech, where if a tech company raises a million dollars, wow, especially for a person of color, that was a big deal. For me to raise a million dollars on a real estate project, that's not even, that's a drop in the bucket for what you really need, right? And so it's just a different mindset, different set of rules.

[00:09:13] Susan Barry: I also wonder if in Northern California you were competing with all that tech money. So like not only did you need to raise more, but you were fighting a lot more competitors, no? 

[00:09:26] Damon Lawrence: Yes and no. It was an interesting time too, right? So there were a lot of tech IPOs. We're kind of going into that same cycle right now with the AI boom. There were a lot of tech IPOs, and Airbnb was ready to IPO, and Uber and Lyft, and all of that was happening. So people were now millionaires, right? Instantly, and they were thinking about what to do with their money. And so, actually, in certain respects you were competing with the tech. But then we also were bringing something a little bit different to the table, which was real estate, and real estate in your backyard that I think appealed to a lot of people in a different way as well.

[00:10:06] Susan Barry: Got it. Yeah. Well, what made you finally decide to look elsewhere? I know you ended up sort of turning your head away from Oakland and to the greatest city in the United States, New Orleans, Louisiana. 

[00:10:17] Damon Lawrence: New Orleans. Yeah. So because of that time in the Bay Area, every single property that we were going under contract on, someone else would come in with a cash offer, and we just couldn't compete at a certain point. And then we had an investor who literally just sat us down and said, "Look, I know you wanna start here. Oakland has a great story. I get it, but you're gonna have a very hard time in this market to continue on like this, so you need to find another market. Funny enough, we were already looking. I knew the area. I spent a lot of time there, and I thought that New Orleans was just such a beautiful city, has so much culture, and for the brand that we were creating, to pay homage to really Black culture in the cities, it was the epicenter of that, right? Jazz started there, right? So if jazz started there, then R&B comes from there, and then hip hop really, or everything comes from there. So yeah, that was a no-brainer for us to make that jump. 

[00:11:25] Susan Barry: And what happened? 

[00:11:27] Damon Lawrence: Man, we bought two properties. We ended up opening one on Canal Street, and it did amazing. We had sold out, like, six months of a calendar within two days of launching. We did it right at Essence Fest, which was great strategically for us. Amazing time. And so yeah, it was exciting. We moved forward along in the process, and then ultimately found ourselves coming back to Oakland, looking at other properties in New Orleans, until the pandemic hit.

[00:12:07] Susan Barry: Dun, dun, dun. And so you stopped looking, or you had to stop looking? 

[00:12:15] Damon Lawrence: Well, we had to stop looking. We actually had a property under contract in Oakland, but I guess you could say got caught with our hands in the cookie jar, had deposit money lying on it, and the world kinda crumbled underneath us at the same time, so we lost out on that opportunity, and then it kinda changed. Everything changed from that point forward, right? It was like a two-year lull of trying to find new opportunities, especially in the hospitality space. 

[00:12:44] Susan Barry: What happened to the New Orleans hotel? 

[00:12:46] Damon Lawrence: We ended up selling it. Yeah, we ended up selling it. And it was interesting, right? So, for the property that we had, if someone wanted it as a single-family dwelling, if you remember, during the pandemic, people were looking for that, right? 

[00:13:04] Susan Barry: Like insane. Could I buy your house for double the asking price? Sure. 

[00:13:09] Damon Lawrence: Right. So we actually did pretty decent on the exit, but it killed the business. Yeah. 

[00:13:16] Susan Barry: And so you moved into brokerage essentially. 

[00:13:22] Damon Lawrence: Yeah, so I had a friend. I call him a friend now, but at the time he was looking to be an investor. And he had worked for a firm for a period of time and had the vision to branch off and start his own. And when he did, he wanted to bring me on. And I was kind of a free agent then. I wasn't doing anything at the time. I was doing some consulting work, but he brought me in, and I've been doing that for the last four years. 

[00:13:54] Susan Barry: And so for the last four years you've been making a lot of Excel spreadsheets. UnderWrote came out of your own frustration with having to underwrite hotel deals as a broker. So I think I understand this, but correct me if I'm wrong. You made this tool for yourself. And then at a certain point you were like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. This is something that other people need too, not just something that I can, like, use in the back office." 

[00:14:26] Damon Lawrence: Yeah. So what I was realizing, especially in hotel real estate right now, like the state of it, every single deal we were looking at had these really complex capital stacks. We needed TIF financing, tax credits, all these different layers and levers that need to be pulled. And so modeling that out each and every time was just a disaster. It was taking like two weeks at a time because of the complexities of the underwriting. And I was just like, man, by the time we got a decent model, so much had changed, you know? In the deal. And then we're starting all over again to do another one. I was like, man, AI, I'm hearing people talk about it. I was consulting a friend who was going through Techstars, and on some of the calls that I was on with her, I was just starting to hear more and more. I was like, okay, these are the types of processes that AI can do extremely well, right? The manual processes, like deterministic math, so why can't I have a platform that just does this? And I looked for it. It didn't exist. You know what they say, if it doesn't exist, I guess you gotta do it yourself. And so that's what I'm doing. 

[00:15:40] Susan Barry: Yeah. I mean, solving your own problems is a pretty good basis upon which to build a business. Well, most underwriting software that's out there, aside from Microsoft Excel, is built for commercial real estate. Class A office space, multifamily, sort of that broad category, and doesn't have all of those specifics that apply to hospitality. What makes hotels, or hotel deals rather, different enough that you can't just adapt one of those generic tools? Like you referenced certain types of financing. Can you get into the weeds on that a little bit? 

[00:16:22] Damon Lawrence: Yeah. Everything about a hotel deal is just different. It's the most complex. It really is. If you can model a hotel, you can model everything else, right? Multifamily, you're talking about on a monthly basis, you're talking rent roll, very simple. Office, very similar. But with a hotel, you've got multiple outlets. You've got an operating business that you have to model. You have to pay for your employees, housekeeping, management fees, and developer fees. You have all these different things that you have to account for, these variables that make it very complex. Even the language around it is different, right? Like RevPAR and ADR, and all these acronyms, they're drastically different from any other segment of commercial real estate. 

[00:17:15] Susan Barry: Or any other segment of business. I think it's so funny when people come to hospitality from, like, tech, like say they're now selling hospitality tech, and they try to say things like ARR or CAC to people, and everyone's like, "I'm sorry. Come again. What are you... Huh?" It's a whole different language. 

[00:17:34] Damon Lawrence: It's a different language. And you really need a tool specific for hospitality. One of the things that sticks out to me is even on reassessment of taxes, right? So when you buy a hotel, even the reassessment is different because you're not valuing the furniture, fixtures, and equipment, or the FF&E. You have to extract that from the value, and you don't do that in multifamily, right? You're not worried about FF&E, and you don't do that in office. Yeah, come with their own. Exactly. So it's just that everything about it's different, so you really need a specialized tool 

[00:18:13] Susan Barry: Well, I know that I have heard this from the horse's mouth. Owners, I think, are somewhat nervous about their financial data ending up training an AI platform or somehow being insecure or unsafe. How do you think about protecting that data? Actually, before I ask you this question, I have to say this. I think people are overly afraid about this because I really don't think that there are a lot of folks out there, like, trying to do corporate espionage on a hotel deal, but that's neither here nor there. People have this fear, and so how do you think about protecting the data while still making the tool smart enough to actually work and have it improve over time? 

[00:19:01] Damon Lawrence: Yeah, that's a great question. Number one, I have no need for other people's data. Now, let me be candid about that. It would be nice because everybody's seeing different insurance premiums. You don't know what construction cost is across the country, so it would be nice to have that data. But I made it a point to not do that because really when you're underwriting, your assumptions are yours, right? And you might have a deal specifically with a contractor. You might be the contractor yourself. You might be vertically integrated, and so your costs are just inherently different. And I wanted to make sure that, on our platform specifically, that we're not training that on that data, and honestly, I don't have time to do that. That's a whole other business in itself. And I do agree with you. I think the fear around that specifically is a little bit overblown because honestly, all of our data is out there. Even on a personal level, it's all out there. 

[00:20:07] Susan Barry: I mean, it's not even so much that to me as like, to your point about, you know how you were saying you would get a model, right, and then everything would change? Like, there's no set point in time where this data is useful from a competitive perspective, and people I find in our industry… This is just a random tangent. So freaking paranoid about this stuff. Like, I've had clients say, "Well, we don't wanna list our general managers because then people will steal them." Brother, they will steal them no matter what. Like, these are not pieces of property. What are you talking about? 

[00:20:47] Damon Lawrence: Yeah. I think we have this problem of coveting information that really does not need to be coveted. No one cares. 

[00:20:57] Susan Barry: Exactly. It's like it makes no difference. Yes. Perfect way to say it. 100% true. Well, besides acting crazy and paranoid, what do you think is the most common mistake people are making when they're underwriting hotel deals? 

[00:21:13] Damon Lawrence: There's a number of mistakes. I see it all the time. I think the one around reassessment on property taxes is a huge one. That's a huge mistake that I see a lot.

[00:21:25] Susan Barry: And can I just ask a clarifying question about that? When you say that's a mistake, you mean people aren't considering that their taxes are going to change based on the sale price of the hotel. Is that right? 

[00:21:37] Damon Lawrence: Exactly. Exactly. 

[00:21:39] Susan Barry: Okay. Exactly. Got it. So they're just putting in the flat rate of what they paid last year, not thinking, "Oh, wait, we sold it for $25 million more," or whatever.

[00:21:47] Damon Lawrence: It's gonna get reassessed. Every county reassesses differently, right? And so you need to know what the millage rate in that county is. And so what I've built in the platform has already done that work for you. So just about every single county in the country is covered, and we researched what other transactions were hotels that were bought and sold. And what did it jump up to, and then use that as a basis for understanding roundabout where your property taxes will end up, 'cause I think that's a huge mistake that people miss, and that could be a very big line item that's missed. 

[00:22:29] Susan Barry: Well, there's no variability there. You can't be like, "All right, we're gonna run lean on taxes for a quarter." Mm, no, you can't. 

[00:22:36] Damon Lawrence: Right. And on taxes too, there's, once you know that number, then there's other incentives that you can then use to not have to pay that number, right? To think through. So that's an important one. I also see people not think through. I'm trying to think of the easiest way to put it. But you have expense ratios across different departments within the hotel, and some things make sense to be in those expense ratios and scale as the property does better, like, as occupancy goes up, and then other things don't. 

[00:23:16] Susan Barry: So let's give an example. So towels. Two towels per guest. The more guests you have, the more towels you need. That's probably gonna always be true. Right. So what's one of those that wouldn't be always be true? 

[00:23:31] Damon Lawrence: I've seen people, on labor. Not labor costs, but say, for example, the GM salary, and then over the years it'll scale up with occupancy. But that doesn't make any sense because the GM is gonna make what the GM's gonna make. Maybe it's 3% for inflation, but it's not gonna scale up as the property ramps, right? That's one example. Maybe it should. Maybe it should, right? And that's something that you would have to figure out. But then if you're looking at everyone's labor, are you scaling everyone's labor up with occupancy, right? And so stuff like that. I think, even, like, your tech shouldn't scale up with occupancy 'cause it doesn't matter. You're gonna pay the same price for your tech regardless of whether you have two people in the hotel or if you're sold out. Doesn't make a difference, right? And so just separating the difference between what scales and ramps and what stays constant. I see that mistake a lot. 

[00:24:40] Susan Barry: We like to make sure that everybody comes away from each episode of Top Floor with some really specific things they can try, either in their businesses, in their day-to-day lives. You've already given some good examples, but I'm curious, if someone is underwriting their very first hotel deal, what is something they have to have nailed down before they even open a spreadsheet? 

[00:25:05] Damon Lawrence: Yeah. There's, like, a glossary of terms that you have to understand, and you need to understand them really, really well. I usually tell people who are first-time hoteliers in the space that the language and the terminology is what gate the process, right? And that you have to learn, even in conversations, because people will test you even in conversations to see if you know what you're talking about, and they'll throw these acronyms across your face. And if you don't catch on, it's internal, being against what you have to offer. And so we mentioned some of them already, ADR, RevPAR, IRR, and not using tech terminology for hospitality. Not using the wrong acronym for basically the same term, but just a different acronym for it, I think that's super important.

[00:26:09] Susan Barry: I haven't thought about it this way before, but one of the things I talk about a lot on this show is the idea that hotels specifically are an apprenticeship business. And so no matter how much education you have, we don't trust outsiders. You've gotta work your way up, and that's another good example of that. Like, if you don't know the lingo, it doesn't matter how much... Well, it does matter how much money you're bringing to a deal. But it doesn't matter how many commercial real estate deals you've done in the past. You can't get anywhere in hotels without knowing the words.

[00:26:45] Damon Lawrence: It's very important. That is the tip. Learn the language. 

[00:26:56] Susan Barry: What about stuff like historic tax credits? I know that's a big one that I hear people talk about a lot, or other kind of, like, incentives from a municipality. Are there misconceptions about how those affect the deal's numbers? Like, can historic tax credits really make that big of a difference? Oh, yeah. It seems like a lot of work. 

[00:27:16] Damon Lawrence: It is a lot of work, but there's a huge return. I mean, historic tax credits are a necessity for some of these older properties because the work that needs to be done to get it done, if you had to do it in a conventional way, it wouldn't make sense. It wouldn't underwrite. And so you do need these tax incentives. And honestly, today, with most deals, especially creative. If you're looking for a limited-service Marriott or Hilton, maybe not so much, it's probably just debt and equity. Anything else, you need these incentives to get the deal over the finish line. And I think the one thing I've learned specifically around historic tax credits, because I have a couple of clients that are doing HTC deals right now. I didn't know. A developer friend of mine. Actually, can I say his name? I would love to say his name. Zach Matt Cooperman in New Orleans. Okay? So St. Vincent Hotel. He has a couple of other hotels. Good friend of mine. He put me onto the fact that you can also include your soft costs as part of your historic tax credit package. So any architectural fees related to the work, all of that stuff could be included on top of the fact that you can include a developer fee. So now when you think about that, and you're not just thinking about the construction cost, but you're thinking about the total cost, it's huge. It's huge. So yeah. Every deal now that I'm working on has some kind of tax incentive, whether it's tax incremental financing, TIF, or a PILOT, or new market tax credits, historic tax credits, or maybe a combination thereof. They all have it. 

[00:29:17] Susan Barry: Okay. So then that makes me forced to ask this question. If a hotel deal can't get done without special circumstances, should it get done? Like, do we have too many hotels? Yes. Should we just put a brake? 

[00:29:31] Damon Lawrence: The answer to the question is yes. I think this is a bigger question about commercial real estate. I think values are just off across the board. And there's gonna have to be a value reset. I think we're probably seeing it start to happen now, 'cause yeah, the pricing doesn't make sense. Operational costs are going up, right? It's not like the ADRs are matching the cost increase that owners are incurring.

[00:29:58] Susan Barry: But at the same time, ADR is wild if you're just a regular degular traveler trying to go on a trip. Whoa. 

[00:30:07] Damon Lawrence: Right. It is crazy. Like, room rates are crazy right now. But I still think the value's just off across the board. And so we're gonna have to see a reset, and we're gonna see one, and we are in specific markets, we are over hotel.

[00:30:25] Susan Barry: I couldn't agree more. I mean, I feel like people have been saying that since the Holiday Inn guy started his company, so it's no brilliant insight on my part, but there are too many boring, dumb hotels. There should be cooler, more exciting hotels. I can say that. You can't say that, but I can say it.

[00:30:46] Damon Lawrence: No, I can definitely say that too. I think you're 100% spot on. And I wanted to say too, I have a client I'm helping out right now. He has this really amazing hotel in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and I think it's interesting. That's the reason why I wanna bring it up. He took an old Quality Inn and converted it to a boutique hotel, and it's amazing. It's beautiful. It's called the Amaya Hotel in Fort Wayne. And I think that there are other opportunities to do that across the country, where you have these old Quality Inns or Comfort Inns that were built in the '80s. They have some interesting architecture. 

[00:31:28] Susan Barry: Yeah, they're probably well-built, they're not horrible pieces of construction. 

[00:31:32] Damon Lawrence: Exactly. And then just, like, a PIP is not gonna save it, right? A Quality Inn PIP is not the answer. It's really reimagining what that hotel becomes, and I think that there are opportunities to take existing properties and then turn them into something amazing versus building from the ground up.

[00:31:53] Susan Barry: Plus, that's such a better story. Like, from a sales, marketing, revenue strategy perspective, so much more interesting to talk about that than it is, like, "Well, we dug a hole, and then we put some buildings here, and that's the end of that." You know what I mean? Yes. It's, like, kind of boring. 

[00:32:09] Damon Lawrence: Not to mention, new development is ugly. It all looks the same. It's just a box. Because you have to develop at a cheaper level, and yeah, it's just ugly. That's all I can say. 

[00:32:22] Susan Barry: Agree. Well, we have reached the fortune-telling portion of the show, so you are gonna predict the future, which I think we already have a little bit of, and then I will come back and tell you if you got it right. So what's a big-picture prediction that you have about the future of hotel underwriting? 

[00:32:39] Damon Lawrence: I predict. So right now, technically, Underroom.ai is the only platform that I am aware of currently in this space. There are a couple ones. I'm hearing some more. The Destination AI Conference was just a couple of days ago. I'm hearing that maybe there might be a couple others, but as of right now, that have launched, this is it. I expect competition here in the next couple of years, for sure. I think that there will be another player, and I think competition is good, right? It validates what we're working on and that there's a market for it. But I believe in the next coming years there will be some other competitors, and maybe some of the big guys will take it on themselves, right? Yeah. 

[00:33:23] Susan Barry: Or maybe one of them will just acquire you, and you can go back to opening hotels across the land. Well, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about how hotel deals get financed, what would that be?

[00:33:38] Damon Lawrence: Oh, it would be the values. 

[00:33:41] Susan Barry: That they're too overvalued right now. 

[00:33:43] Damon Lawrence: They're too high. Prices are just way too high on everything. 

[00:33:46] Susan Barry: The rent is too damn high, friends. 

[00:33:50] Damon Lawrence: Exactly. Everything costs too much. It costs too much to build. It costs too much to buy. Everything's out of whack, and that's across the board. Groceries are too high. Everything is too expensive. 

[00:34:03] Susan Barry: Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's horrible. Okay, folks, before we tell Damon goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told. 

Elevator voice announces, “Going down.

[00:34:23] Susan Barry: Damon, what is a story you would only tell me on the loading dock? I really just did this whole interview so that we could get to this part, because I'm very excited to hear what you might have to say on the loading dock. 

[00:34:36] Damon Lawrence: Yeah, I know. I've thought about this. So one story that sticks out to me was when I worked at a luxury hotel in DC where I was a front office manager. We had an ambassador from Iraq stay with us. So I came in early. This was like the height of, like, war. It was, like, a lot going on. It was a time, okay? 

[00:35:16] Susan Barry: Unlike now, when everything's just boring and calm. 

[00:35:19] Damon Lawrence: Right. Right. Right, right. It's very similar now, but it was, it was crazy. And so security was a big deal. Secret Service presence was heavy. So I came in early. Secret Service comes, they get the keys. They do a full sweep of the hotel, full sweep of the room. Give the keys to him. Motorcade comes, and I'm talking about a motorcade where they're outside the car with the AK-47s. Like, hanging on, with one arm and then the gun in the other, with the flag, the whole thing. They pull up to the porte cochere. They come in. He goes up to the room, drops off his bags. He's off to dinner. I have his itinerary, so I know what's happening, that he's coming up, and he's going to dinner. I even know where he's going to dinner. As soon as he's gone, oof, we're good.  A sigh of relief. It all worked out. I could finally take my lunch break. Me and one of my front desk agents, we go on our break, and CNN stays on in the break room, right? Like, nonstop. They never change the channel. I don't care what's happening, CNN's on. I go, we go down. Literally as soon as we get there, breaking news, assassination attempt on the person who we just had check into the hotel. In Georgetown, at Cafe Milano in Georgetown, right? It literally pops up. I'm like, "This is crazy." I couldn't believe it. 

[00:37:06] Susan Barry: What? How? What? What? 

[00:37:09] Damon Lawrence: Someone had explosives in, like, a U-Haul truck, and they were, like, planning to just ram this thing, and they got intercepted. I mean, you could Google it. It, it was like a, it was like a real thing. So, in that time of taking the lunch break and then coming back from the lunch break, and quite honestly, I work in the front office. I know who's staying in the hotel and who's not. I don't think many of the other people in the hotel, except for managers, even know. So we're in the break room with 20 other employees. I don't think they realize. And then my agent and I were like, "What the heck?" We come back, the Secret Service is coming back, getting his stuff, and he's going to the airport. 

[00:37:57] Susan Barry: Are you serious? No more diplomacy today. We are out. 

[00:38:06] Damon Lawrence: That's crazy. One of the many crazy hotel stories, but that was a wild one for sure. 

[00:38:12] Susan Barry: That is a wild story. Oh my gosh. 

[00:38:17] Damon Lawrence: What makes it wilder is I used to think, because we used to have so many high-ranking officials and dignitaries, like, the hotel could end up being a target for something like that. Which then it was like, "Oh, snap." I don't know if I need to be at this property specifically. 

[00:38:39] Susan Barry: Time to go to Oakland, where it's safe. Damon Lawrence, thank you so, so much for being here. I feel like this is an episode that is many years overdue, and I really appreciate you riding with us to the top floor. 

[00:38:57] Damon Lawrence: Thank you. Thank you, Susan. I appreciate it. Pleasure to be here. 

[00:39:02] Susan Barry: Thanks so much for listening. Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/264. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all-around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to Top Floor on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like.

[00:39:37] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question? Reach us at 850-404-9630 to be featured in a future episode.