Transcript: Episode 213: Party Ambulance

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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 213. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/213.

[00:00:13] 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. Bill Fanning is a longtime Austin-based software leader who started his career in marketing, the holy discipline, before moving into enterprise sales and sales leadership. After stints with venture-backed and public companies, he joined Compete, where he learned to scale with discipline, balancing top-line growth and EBITDA. That role unexpectedly pulled him into the glorious world of hospitality via restaurants, where he fell for the people, the entrepreneurial grit, and the way real-world venues create the OG social network. After Compete’s acquisition by Restaurant 365 and a brief PE detour, Bill returned to hospitality tech and is now leading revenue at Stay in Touch, a cloud browser-based PMS. Today, we are going to talk about hotel tech integrations and career pathways from ops into 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 and anyone else with 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 Clark, and Clark asks, “What are some small, inexpensive touches that make a hotel stay stand out to you?” I thought this would be a good question for you, Bill, because I know that you travel a lot and didn't grow up in the hotel business. So from an outsider's perspective, what are the things that really make a difference?

[00:02:20] Bill Fanning: The big one that grabs me, I don't know why this hits me, but I have actually had a LinkedIn post about this recently, was a handwritten note that was in the room that I went into, and it just said, Hey addressed me by name and said, we really hope you enjoy this day. Let us know if there's anything we can do to help, blah, blah, blah. Side with a person's name. I mean, just that little personal touch and a handwritten note just sticks with me so well. We talk about that in technology sales as well. Like those types of things really differentiate yourself. 

[00:02:50] Susan Barry: It's interesting to hear that, because as the writer of many a handwritten note in my day, I always sort of felt like, "Oh, are people just going to roll their eyes when they get this or feel like this is silly?" So I'm glad to hear that it makes a difference for sure.

[00:03:04] Bill Fanning: Well, and it's hard for folks, too, right? I'm terrible, and my handwriting is awful. If the process of doing it takes a little bit of time, but once you go through and do 2, 3, 4 of them, it gets a lot easier. It's such a simple thing.

[00:03:15] Susan Barry: Yeah. Maybe we should always plan to give a handwritten note to somebody with bad handwriting so that they will appreciate it all the much more.

[00:03:23] Bill Fanning: Yes, that's right.

[00:03:25] Susan Barry: You have worked across VC-backed public and private equity-owned software companies. What did each model teach you about building a durable business? And what, if any, habits did that bring with you into hospitality tech?

[00:03:43] Bill Fanning: Yeah. Well, there's a lot you can learn from each of those different models, and they all have different ways that they drive valuation of the business ultimately, which is what they're wanting to do. In VC situations, oftentimes, you see a lot of money poured into a company to grow really quickly, regardless of profitability. It's about let's go buy market share as quickly as we can, and let's hope that we get to some interesting exit valuation at the end. Bootstrap companies, which I've been a part of as well – It's very much what can we do with the amount of money and capital that we have and time and resources that we have available to us? It's not about raising a bunch of money; it's about building that product that you can go to market with and really starting to get real product-market fit. And then from a PE perspective, it's really more about investing in a proven asset that's working well and how do you optimize that asset to drive growth, but do it profitably. And I think that's probably the two different things that jump out at me to maybe answer this question with a finer point. Profitability matters, at least from my perspective. Understanding where your profitability points are gonna come in and how you're gonna get there, in addition to growth really, really makes for what I think of as a much more fun business to be in, that you're actually building tangible, real, solid businesses based on valuation or true business metrics, I guess I should say. 

So profitability is a really important thing, especially in a private equity-driven business. The last and the second thing I'll mention is the value of scarcity. I think this is an interesting one. You learn this when you build a company from scratch, you learn this certainly in private equity types of businesses. But this idea of having to do a lot with a little and with understanding the resources that you have and being energized by that is a really, really important thing that makes really, really great business people.

[00:05:39] Susan Barry: Well, taking a major swing from those types of businesses to restaurants and hotels. You've called those the sort of OG social media. What moment made that click for you? What makes you think that? 

[00:05:54] Bill Fanning: I spent a lot of years in social media technology companies and social media agencies, early on, and as social media was really starting to gain ground and gain popularity. And I think the original intent of that were these just alternative areas where you can build communities to engage consumers or engage individuals for a variety of different topics that were a really kind of altruistic nature and a genuine intent about them. I think nobody ever thinks of restaurants as a social media, but at the end of the day, restaurants and hotels are more than just serving food and providing a bed and a bathroom. It's about building community. It's about building human experiences and giving people the opportunity to go experience different areas that they don't live in currently, or experience different cultures or different food, and usually engaging with other people, whether that's directly at the table with you or engaging with them in the community, whatever that may be. So, while we've built these really interesting digital communities and ways to engage folks in different areas, I call it the OG social media because before digital had anything to do with building communities, the real communities were built on the backs of hotels and restaurants and like great, communal areas.

[00:07:07] Susan Barry: People talk a lot about the concept of the third place, which I think Howard Schultz from Starbucks is the originator of that, maybe. But it's like having a renaissance again, and restaurants and hotels are, and can be that third place where I think a lot of people's third places are on their phones right now, maybe.

[00:07:30] Bill Fanning: Yeah. And I think it's a sad reality and a bit of a scary reality, and I think having that third place be, 'cause it's not your office anymore, right? A lot of folks don't work in an office any longer, right? I miss that human connection. I miss the ability to walk across the aisle and get something completed and done immediately.

[00:07:48] Susan Barry: Walk us through that career pivot from social media platforms to hospitality technology. I know there were a lot of steps along the way, but what disillusioned you there, and what is re-energizing about where you are now? 

[00:08:04] Bill Fanning: Yeah, again, I talked to some of this about what we were doing early in social media with regards to building communities and the altruistic nature of it. And I think that original intent and purpose, and what we were building, was really, really cool. And there was, it was a significant shift in the way that individuals defined their perception, defined what brands and their relationship with companies actually were, versus the other way around. So there's a lot of really cool stuff that was happening at that time. I think I started falling out of love with that whole thing as it became much more of an advertising platform, a much more of a forum for sharing, you would see the worst in society versus the best. And I felt like I was seeing a lot more, not real things in those types of environments, than I was actually keeping up with friends, which is what I originally was intending to do. And so from that perspective, I started to move away from the medium a bit, or not take it as seriously as I did earlier on, and moving into restaurant technology, candidly, it wasn't a decision to go, jump into what I would call the OG social networks. It was an opportunity that I had to go get into my first private equity run business. And I'd come from businesses that were venture-backed and publicly traded companies, and smaller bootstrap companies. But I hadn't been in one that was run by PE, and I had a few different friends and colleagues that had said, Hey, this is an area you really should look at and get some experience and see how these groups work compared to the other ones. So this just happened to be a restaurant technology company that I fell into. It wasn't until I got into it, six or eight months, that I really understood the purpose that I was excited about there. That was much greater than just being involved in a technology company that was owned by PE. It was about what the customers that we serve actually do for our communities, as I talked about earlier. Building great restaurants and great communal spaces builds great communities in ways that digital will never be able to displace. And that really helped me fall in love with the space first and then be really excited about the idea of serving those organizations that provide that to make them, be as efficient and work as well as they possibly can.

[00:10:18] Susan Barry: Okay, so give us the true elevator pitch for Stay in Touch. Maybe what is the job that it does better than anything else? Like somebody who doesn't really understand that landscape, how would you describe it to my mom?

[00:10:34] Bill Fanning: To your mom. Okay. I would say we are a, does she work in hotels? Does she work in a hotel?

[00:10:40] Susan Barry: She does not, but she's a very faithful listener to Top Floor. 

[00:10:43] Bill Fanning: Well, fair enough. And I would probably spare things like Cloud Native and those types of terms, although she may be very well-versed in that type of stuff. But we're a hotel property management system first and foremost. That means we serve primarily independent hotels and hotels that have multiple properties under management, so they have some complexity within their hotels. We aim to streamline the operations of that hotel. We elevate guest experiences, and we drive revenue at the end of the day. Those are the primary things that we're focused on doing as a property management system. We're designed to be incredibly intuitive. So someone like your mom or my mom and dad could easily pick up the software and learn how to check somebody in and out of a hotel, really, really quickly. But also complex enough, and built to be able to handle the complexities of a modern hotel, which means doing everything from managing complex groups, so when a wedding party comes in and they've got all kinds of different needs that they've gotta go set up these rooms for the particular group, and they've gotta switch some things in and out. Or if you're managing the housekeeping and inventory of the rooms, or the reporting on the backend and finances, all of those types of things. It's a very robust platform to be able to manage that from end to end. 

[00:11:56] Susan Barry: So you referred to independent hotels, but I know that you just launched a multi-property version. What are some of the headaches that removes? Like, what's the point of having a multi-property version vs. each hotel having their own thing, and I don't know, are you seeing good outcomes? Like what are owners saying or portfolio leaders saying? 

[00:12:21] Bill Fanning: Yeah. When I refer to independent hotels, what I mean by that is not a brand, not a flag. So, I mean independent brands, but they could be multiple independent brands within a particular portfolio, management portfolio, and ownership portfolio. So that's why we launched and built our multi-property functionality. In fact, some of the genesis of that was how we were gonna go stand up Cobblestone, which is a really good example. Cobblestone is a group of about 140 hotels. We launched that deal in the middle of last year. We ended up rolling out all 140 and implementing all 140 hotels within 90 days.

[00:13:00] Susan Barry: Whoa.

[00:13:01] Bill Fanning: That's a really big lift, both from a technology perspective and from a people perspective. So, to do that job effectively, we needed a means to be able to quickly stamp out templates for each of these hotels and repeat them so that we can then make the nuance changes that we needed for each of those locations. And multi-property was a big backbone of that whole piece. But it's grown well outside of just being configuration and setup. I mean, there's a lot more you can do with multi-property with regards to understanding the rates that you have across all of your locations and understanding the availabilities and reservations, those types of things. Also, being able to share guest profiles from all of your locations, if you want to do such a thing. 

[00:13:42] Susan Barry: That's huge I think. What are the hotel front desk managers saying, or what are the owners saying? 

[00:13:49] Bill Fanning: Yeah, I mean, the big primary savings, but there's a lot of them. But the one that jumps out the most is how much time or how little time it takes for them to be able, when they're standing up a new hotel, to be able to set that template up and turn it on within minutes to be able to move that over, have all the things they need in their templatized, make the tweaks in order to get it done. Versus what we take hours and sometimes days in total, because there’s only so many hours, an individual might be able to dedicate that to an individual day to get those stores set up, to get those hotels set up.

[00:14:20] Susan Barry: We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every single episode of Top Floor with some really specific tips to try either in their businesses, their hotels, or their personal lives. This one is a little convoluted, but I think you're gonna know what I mean. Hospitality is an apprenticeship business, meaning people learn on the job versus learning at school. And so it's often really difficult for hoteliers to trust somebody from outside the industry. On the other hand, software sales skills at least seem to me, from the outside looking in, to be pretty transferable across all the different industries, all the different verticals. Like, if you're good at it, you're probably gonna be good at it regardless of what business that you're selling into. So I'm just curious if you've run into this like, friction or conflict between the apprenticeship of it all and the fact that you're like, woman, I know how to sell software. Does that make sense?

[00:15:23] Bill Fanning: Yeah. No, it does. I think sales fundamentals, the basics in sales are, I think, very transferable across a lot of different industries. And what I mean by sales fundamentals are the things like written and oral communication skills, understanding how to execute a great discovery call and scoping, and really understanding what people's needs are. So the listening portion of sales which is the vast majority of it. How do you negotiate a deal appropriately so you get a win-win on both sides and be able to solve the problems that you need to be able to solve? There's a whole bunch of things in sales fundamentals that are very transferable across a lot of industries. 

I think when you're selling to a particular industry and hospitality is a unique one. Hotels and restaurants, specifically, had put in a very similar category. Having that domain expertise is a really, really important thing, especially when you're selling strategic software, like what we sell. The strategic software, I'm defining as something that is a must-have, not a nice-to-have. Property management software is something you need to go run your business, versus something else that is, you could run your business with it. It's kind of nice to have, but it's not absolutely necessary to run the business. It's also, when I say strategic, I mean that versus like a commodity type of a sell, which is just a quick turn of the crank type of a commodity sell. You don't need to have hotel experience to do that, but when you're selling strategic software, it's incredibly important for you to have some domain expertise to be able to empathize with the folks that you're talking to and relate to them on a peer level, versus just being another salesperson that's trying to come in and sell you something, right? 

So one of the things that I've spent a lot of time since starting in hospitality industry with restaurant software, and it's certainly the same in hotels, is helping hoteliers and folks that come from a hotel background understand the value that they have in the experience in running a complex business like a hotel. That you can't just teach. If you've got years of experience in doing that, I would much rather teach people sales fundamentals than have to have somebody who I thought was really good at sales fundamentals and figure out how to give them the experience that hoteliers already have because they worked there.

[00:17:35] Susan Barry: That's really interesting. Yes. Do you think – this is something that I used to bump up against when I was a sales leader in hotels. The idea that sellers are born, not made. Like we used to hear constantly, this made me wanna punch a wall. Oh, she has the look. She would be a great salesperson. She has the look, or he's a born salesperson. I do not believe that stuff. I think that's nonsense, but I wonder what you think.

[00:18:04] Bill Fanning: I usually, when they say that it's, it's either appearance or talking. And I don't need great talkers. I need people that understand how to articulate and clearly understand what we do and be able to communicate appropriately. But great talkers don't necessarily make great salespeople. I think there are some fundamentals that I think that people are more naturally inclined towards, which are things like the ability to get back up after no, and not be crushed by no. Or someone saying, I can't do that. There are some folks that have a very difficult time with that, and sales is gonna be a very difficult spot for them.

You've really gotta overcome those types of things. There are other folks who have a tendency, especially once they become an expert on a particular system, is they wanna tell you everything, right? And some people from the outside listen to that person. They go, well, they're a great salesperson. That's usually not the case. It's the person that knows a lot of those things, but understands when to talk quickly, but more importantly, when to ask questions so that they can get people to respond. And there are some people that are much more naturally geared towards those types of things, but I think it's absolutely a learned scale for the most part.

[00:19:10] Susan Barry: I could not agree more. I mean, the innate thing that you need to have is just be able to, like, smile and be nice to people. Hahaha!! If you're born Oscar the Grouch, maybe not sales for you, although it doesn't work for some people, hard to say. 

[00:19:26] Bill Fanning: Well, I'll say this too, is hospitality folks, I think, have a natural proclivity towards it because the hospitality mindset is you want to please the customer, you want to take care of things, you want those great positive experiences. And I think when you build great software businesses, you're taking care of customers. We grow on the backs of customer satisfaction and people that are very happy with the support and service, the technology. And when you come from hotels, that is natural in what you do. You have to do that really well in hospitality, or else you're not gonna be there very long. 

[00:19:55] Susan Barry: Right. It's like people who leave the hotel business are never sending an invoice with the sentence, Please remit. They're like, Hey, tell me all about your summer vacation? And oh, by the way, I accidentally attached an invoice. K, thanks. Bye. Right. I mean, they're hospitable about it.

[00:20:11] Bill Fanning: That's right!

[00:20:12] Susan Barry: Okay. Shifting gears, if a hotel team is staring down the barrel of a PMS swap coming soon, like it's planned for Q1 of 2026, is there a training cadence, coaching model, way of doing it that sticks when people have limited bandwidth. Especially in a hotel, they're running around like chickens with their heads cut off all the time. Like, are there particular ways that are better or worse to do it?

[00:20:42] Bill Fanning: Well, let me, I'm the sidestep, but just a little bit, and I'll come back around to it, but I think there's two things I think about when somebody is staring down this idea of a PMS change. Oftentimes, the PMS change from a technology perspective isn't the most difficult part. There are complexities in the technology change, but usually, if you've been with any kind of reputable software company for any period of time, they've got that pretty well dialed in, and they can help folks through the technology side of that. It's really the cultural change of understanding a new program or a new software platform, and the willingness to go in and lean into it to get the most outta that particular system. 

So there's two things I think that are really important to assist with in this situation. One is making sure you've got a system that's incredibly intuitive. It's really important to say, is this a system that our team can pick up really quickly? Or are they gonna spend a whole lot of time learning new hot coats, and all these different things that they've gotta be able to figure out in order to manage the system efficiently? Second, we do onsite training. It's always ideal, I think, to be face-to-face with those folks and spend a couple days, and they're working them through the system and sitting with them side by side, just to get it kicked off and building that, what we would call a center of excellence. Having some of those folks get really good at your software quickly. And then they can help continue to coach and guide folks along the way. You've gotta be able to get into topics that you can specifically go in and master quickly, and I think our system does a really nice job of that.

[00:22:14] Susan Barry: I wanna go back to the point about intuitive for a second. Can you say a little bit more? Obviously, I know what the word intuitive means, but when you say that, what I think is it behaves the way things in my day-to-day life behave. So rather than having to do some silly nonsense that is from 1987, you know, I press a button and it does what it does in every other app I use. Is that what you mean? 

[00:22:43] Bill Fanning: Yeah, that's right. I think it's intuitive in a way that it works the way that people generally operate, in the way that they think. It grabs your eye for the particular things that are probably gonna be the most appropriate next step, and it does it in as few clicks as possible. I think that's really important. Because there's so many platforms out there, especially bigger legacy platforms that have just been added on to year after year after year, and all these different features and functionalities have been built in, and they can do an amazing amount of things. But that means that it's incredibly complex to go through and manage how that works. And all these pop-up screens that come up at you, and all these different things that just confuse the situation, versus making your task much simpler. 

[00:23:23] Susan Barry: Some of my listeners of a certain age will remember when Starwood rolled out Isaac, which was a sales and catering booking system, and I could do the most complicated things for you really well, but simple things, not so much. It was impossible. So it sort of sounds like the same thing.

[00:23:41] Bill Fanning: Yeah.

[00:23:42] Susan Barry: Well, we have reached the fortune-telling portion of our show, so you are gonna have to predict the future, and then I will let you know if you got it right in a couple of years from now. Then you'll either have to pay me or be on your way. Okay – what is a prediction that you have about the future of hotel technology? 

[00:24:01] Bill Fanning: You can't have this conversation today without mentioning AI. And I hesitate to do that 'cause it's everything that every technologist talks about these days. But I think what AI promises to deliver is speed to market on new technologies, really quickly. So there's gonna be a lot of stuff that started getting developed really fast. Over the course of the last, let's call it, 10 years or so, when real capital's been put into the technology landscape to support hospitality, you're starting to see more and more change, and AI's gonna act exponentially, improve or increase the pace to different technologies to market to solve different types of problems. So you see a lot more things come from market much quicker and much more powerful. I think a caution to some of this AI stuff is, AI is interesting when hoteliers come to me and say, Hey, what are you guys doing with AI? And I'm happy to talk about that because there's a lot we're doing both internally and externally. But what they're being fed is a line that everybody's touting, which is, you know, you might have AI for this and that. AI is similar to the age of big data. And I don't remember if you know that term or not, but big data 10, 15 years ago, AI is that plus a whole lot more. 

AI is the promise of answers, but you have to have, understand the questions that you're trying to get. One of the near-term temptations for AI is going to be the idea of AI bots taking the place of all your customer support. And I think it's a really interesting temptation for especially VC-backed, software companies because it lowers the cost of their support really, really quickly, right? and makes it a more attractive business overall. But we're still in a period of time where those experiences largely are; there's enough friction in that, it's a difficult thing to go just turn that engine on and say, oh, this is your customer support model. It's one that we're intentionally not leaning into right now. We will ultimately, at some point, I'm sure, use it to augment that experience. But I want you, when you pick up the phone or when you send an email in, I want you to know you're getting a response from a human quickly and having a conversation with somebody that can really understand the situation and find a solution really quickly.

[00:26:17] Susan Barry: I mean, Offshoring was a great solution for customer support, and no one ever really liked it. No one's ever been like, God, I had the best experience with someone who had no idea what I was talking about. 

[00:26:29] Bill Fanning: Yep. That's right.

[00:26:30] Susan Barry: It'll be interesting. I sometimes feel like I put myself in the role of a hater, and I don't mean to, because I use AI every day and I'm fascinated by it and super interested, but I also am a little bit too old to be like, Oh yes. Everything's changing immediately right now. Like every time somebody says that, it really doesn't play out that way.

[00:26:53] Bill Fanning: Yeah. Skeptical, Yeah.

[00:26:54] Susan Barry: For example, there are no hotels in the metaverse. That doesn't exist. Okay. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about selling to the hotel industry, aside from it happening in the metaverse, what would that be?

[00:27:11] Bill Fanning: There's been a resistance to change in this particular industry, and that's changing quite a bit now. But you know, as you get companies that have been around for quite a while that changing a primary PMS system is a very daunting thing to think about, right? Especially if you've got a group of folks that have been there a long time. So I think one of the things I would love to see is more tech-forward types of hotels that are out there. We're seeing certainly a lot more of them now. I don't mean that they don't exist. We still run into a lot of conversations where people are just not comfortable with the idea of making the change that they need to make to improve that business.

[00:27:45] Susan Barry: You know, I feel like I have to throw in a little bit of a nugget of history here because I was talking to someone from another hospitality tech company recently who came completely from outside the industry, and I told him this, and he was like, I'm sorry, what? Come again? And it is this: what most people, I would say, even on your side, you probably know this, but I bet a lot of your team doesn't know, is that when email and the internet began to be a thing in hotels, it was assigned to the financial controller. The accounting department was responsible for setting up email addresses, giving or not giving internet access. Can you imagine that? I was a salesperson with no email and no internet access. How? But I did have plenty of carbon paper, let me tell you. So that, plus the ownership model of our industry, where you have a brand, a real estate owner, and an operator, and those are three separate people, is like the perfect storm for anti-innovation. You have the person who is responsible for spending as little money as possible in charge of making innovation decisions. Hmm, maybe that's not the way to go. I don't know, and I mean, I think that's still true. I think there's certainly lots of, now homegrown IT leaders and stuff like that, but there's still a lot of people who started in accounts payable and ended up making computer decisions for their entire company, which is wild to me. 

[00:29:34] Bill Fanning: I did not know that history, by the way. I appreciate that.

[00:29:37] Susan Barry: Well, now, you know, and now you can go forth with a different perspective of realizing why this stuff is the way it is.

[00:29:45] Bill Fanning: Thank You.

[00:29:46]Susan Barry: Before we tell Bill goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock, where all of the best stories get told.

Going down…

Bill, what is the story you would only tell on the loading dock? 

[00:30:03] Bill Fanning: Again, I was struggling with trying to figure out what, but that would be again, because I didn't come from hotels, I didn't work in hotels, so I can, there's a couple quick stories. I'll make them very fast. One is a story about hotels, specifically, the other one is more about hotels in general. One of the lessons I learned early on were doing an event at a hotel at one of the big shows, and we were doing a happy hour there, and thought we had done everything we needed to do to help set the stage for what we needed from the folks that were working the bar staff and work in the room and everything else. And, I realized we failed that pretty miserably because we just didn't set the right expectation. We overwhelmed them, with what we thought was gonna be a hundred to 150 people, and next thing you know, we've got 200, 250 people in there.

[00:30:52] Susan Barry: Oh my gosh.

[00:30:52] Bill Fanning: It's a different thing. It's the lesson I learned from that was, we gotta have somebody at the door that's counting every single one of these folks and making sure that we're holding people back and not completely overwhelming the staff that was doing a wonderful job supporting what we said was the amount of people that we were gonna have in there. And we went way over the top.

[00:31:11] Susan Barry: Yeah! I mean, that's a good problem to have, though. Plus, parties are more fun when they're overcrowded. 

[00:31:16] Bill Fanning: This particular party ended up with an ambulance, which was always interesting. Everybody was fine.

[00:31:20] Susan Barry: Fantastic.

[00:31:20] Bill Fanning: Nobody was, no big deal. But when you have an ambulance show up at your party, I don't know if you're doing something right or something really wrong, but we learned a lot of lessons.

[00:31:27] Susan Barry: I think it's a good sign, I think it's a good sign.

[00:31:30] Bill Fanning: I think the other thing I'll mention really quickly, and I just touched on this earlier, but I think it's important, especially given your audience is, the amount of times that I've had conversations with folks from restaurants and from hotels, and I think I alluded to this earlier – about helping them understand their value and what they've been able to learn in managing those complex businesses and how transferable that really is to outside of that industry is whether it be software sales or whether it be other industries that serve hospitality, like there's so much you can do with that experience the value of that experience is, is really, really incredible. And I don't think people who have that domain expertise and have spent their career in hotels or in restaurants really understand what they're sitting on there.

[00:32:15] Susan Barry: That's such good news and good advice. I'm really happy for our listeners to hear that. Bill Fanning, thank you so much for being here. I learned a lot in this conversation, and I really appreciate you riding with us to the top floor. 

[00:32:29] Bill Fanning: Thanks for having me. It's fun. 

[00:32:32] Susan Barry: Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/213. 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.

[00:33:08]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.