Transcript: Episode 214: High-Altitude Hunger

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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 214. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/214. 

[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. Al Lagunas was born and raised in Chicago, a first-generation Mexican American whose early view of hospitality came through his mom's work as a hotel housekeeper. In college, he started a licensed cooler line, sold the business to his university, and caught the entrepreneurship bug. He later helped scale a startup at Austin from around 50 to 1200 employees and then joined Amazon, where he translated customer and advertising data into growth strategies, fueling a lifelong love of metrics and baseball. Al Co-founded Levee, a platform that utilizes AI vision and voice to transform room inspections into actionable data, automating back-of-house workflows, accelerating onboarding, and enabling true personalization for guests.

I met Al as a result of his winning both the People's Choice and the Judges' awards at the most recent E20X at High Tech in Indianapolis this past summer. Today, we are going to talk about what it takes to win every pitch competition in the industry. 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 a burning question. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text it to me at (850) 404-9630. Today's question was submitted by Daniel, and Daniel says, “What are some differences between marketing and selling a physical product versus a digital product?” Obviously, you've got experience with both of these, so I'm curious if you have any sort of top-level thoughts on that. 

[00:02:39] Al Lagunas: Difference between a physical product and a non-physical product. Was that the question? 

[00:02:44] Susan Barry: Yeah, like a digital product. 

[00:02:46] Al Lagunas: So I think, with like anything, especially in today's day and age, is like seeing is believing. Putting your hands on it, touching it, is bleeding. So with a physical product, you know, getting those reviews from people who actually have it. On Amazon, for example, you have your pictures in reviews. And I was actually just finding, I had buy a printer the other day, and when I was looking at all these printers on Amazon, they're actually like videos of reviews that people submitted. 

[00:03:14] Susan Barry: I have people like printing stuff out. 

[00:03:16] Al Lagunas: Yeah. No, that's how I made my decision because all surprisingly, every printer on Amazon had only 4.2 stars. Usually, you used to like stuff having 4.5 and 5. But yeah, I think that's a scene as believing part with digital products. I feel like it's almost more of a game — where you can gamify your purchase processes and advertising process, so that it just makes it easy for someone to buy.

[00:03:39] Susan Barry: Huh. That's interesting. 

[00:03:41] Al Lagunas: Yeah. There's all these strategies around, especially apps, like mobile apps that the way they set up, like their paywall and the way they set up their stuff in sign-up process to kind of like prep you or trick you. It's very…

[00:03:58] Susan Barry: Entice you is probably the marketing word for that. 

[00:04:01] Al Lagunas: There you go. Yeah, you can only gamify the buying process for digital products. I think a lot more than you can with physical products. Physical products is seeing is believing, reviews are critical, and images, actual people using it. That's, I think, the big game changer. 

[00:04:21] Susan Barry: It's interesting because I have created a couple of digital products of my own, like I do lots of digital marketing, but I feel like that's a different thing. And I have just not been successful in trying to sell my digital products. So, maybe we'll have to do another episode of the show where you can teach me how to sell my digital product.

[00:04:43] Al Lagunas: I got you.

[00:04:44] Susan Barry: Well, you didn't start in hospitality, but your family did. What did you learn from watching your mom work in a hotel that you carry into Levee today?

[00:04:56] Al Lagunas: Yeah, so the big thing that I learned is I always like to make the joke that I wasn't asking my mom how to better operationalize her workflows. But what I was learning was that the person, the effects, the kind of people that work in these roles, and really, especially with my mom, what her priorities were. Her priorities weren't going to work, and making sure that everything was perfect. She wanted to do a good job, but her priorities were coming home, making sure that we were fed, closed, and ready to go to school the next day. So I think the big thing is you learn the people, you learn to understand them. And when you understand the person. It's like you can better set them up for success. You can better understand what you can give them to do a good job. So for us, it was, and I think that's the hardest part to learn. You can learn processes, you can learn the operations of the hotel to an extent, but really understanding the people that are behind it and kind of what scratches are itch, what gets them excited, what makes them go – that's really what we learned. And then growing up with my mom, that role, working as a housekeeper, just again, didn't understand how she felt after work, how she felt coming home from work, how she felt going into work. And again, what was really important to her, which was her family. 

[00:06:21] Susan Barry: I love that answer. You know, in sales training, they always talk about sell the benefits, not the features. And I mean, that just takes it to the 80 millionth degree. So, excellent work. I love that answer. You have had many, many, many different types of stops in your career, from your college business to a startup to Amazon. What skill from each one of those stops in your career shows up in how you run Levee? Maybe just a handful of them. 

[00:06:54] Al Lagunas: Yeah, I'll give you a mini one from each step. So I started my first company in college, and that was kind of like an accident. I was just trying to make some food and beer money in college, and it ended up becoming a bigger business than I thought. So, for me, that was the kind of first example of, hey, you can build something valuable and someone might buy it from you someday. Which again, you never really think of when you're 20 Years old. So that was the entrepreneurship piece. 

[00:07:24] Susan Barry: And that your university bought the business from you, right? That’s so cool.

[00:07:28] Al Lagunas:  Yeah, which was all… It was funny. I thought I was getting in trouble. I got an email from the school, they're like, Hey, we want to talk. And I was like, oh, crap. Like I'm about to graduate. Maybe not like, what's about to happen? And they were like, We love what you're doing. What are you gonna do when you graduate? Like with the business? I was like, Oh, I don't know, like let someone else run it. And they're like, Can we buy? Essentially, what they wanted was the distribution rights from the cooler company that we had licensed them from, and I was like, Oh yeah, I'll sell it to you. What are you gonna give me? And they made me an offer, and I was like, done deal. Looking back at it, I could probably negotiated or maybe I couldn't have, but…

[00:08:10] Susan Barry: You should have gotten them to pay off your student loans. 

[00:08:13] Al Lagunas: Yeah. Right. How smart. I didn't even use the money to pay off my student loan. I usually move to Austin for my job, for my next job. 

[00:08:20] Susan Barry: Makes sense. I mean, I get it. 

[00:08:22] Al Lagunas: Yeah. At that point, I was 22. Wasn't even thinking about it, but that would've been smarter. 

[00:08:29] Susan Barry: So what about in Austin? 

[00:08:31] Al Lagunas: So yeah, so in Austin, from there, I wanna go work at a startup, and the big thing that I learned there is really how to go from being a small company to eventually being a big one, and the kind of steps that you have to take to legitimize yourself at every rung of customer. When I started at the startup, there was just over 50 people, and we were selling to, for the most part, small to medium-sized businesses. And it was cool, at that point I was fresh out of college, so I didn't know the difference between selling to a huge company or a small one. But then, as the company grew, as the company gained credibility, and also as I kind of honed my skills and understanding the markets that we were selling to, the contracts got bigger, the logos got bigger. And the last account I closed here before I left this Coca-Cola. So that was my claim at the end. That was funny. I always tell a story of how that was in 2018, 2019, and that was when we were still kind of doing sales just by phone. That was like before everyone was on a Zoom call at the time. So I went to college in Missouri, spent way too much time there, developed a little southern drawl, which probably made me sound like I was 40, 50 years old. So, I would have all these sales calls, and people probably thought I was way older. And I remember walking in to meet with Coca-Cola for the first time, and they were like, Oh, where's Al? And I'm like, that's me. And they're like, you're a 25-year-old kid.

[00:09:57] Susan Barry: That's amazing.

[00:09:58] Al Lagunas: But yeah, I think that was a big piece of learning there is like, okay, how do we go from, selling to these small companies, legitimizing ourselves, running our processes, growing, and then ultimately, getting to that point where the company's mature, the business is mature. And then also like at the same time, it wasn't that we weren't trying to land the big companies early. It's just that the reality of it is that if you're a big company doing business with a company that's two years old, it can be a little risky.

[00:10:27] Susan Barry: Oh, yeah.

[00:10:28] Al Lagunas: So you kind of learn where to play, where you're gonna make sense for companies, what kind of companies are gonna wanna work with you at that stage. So that was big. And then at the Amazon piece, that was the one that kind of really, really got me going, and I think made me really launch me into launching Levee. But yeah, a lot of what I did at Amazon was, Amazon has massive amounts of data. It is the third largest search engine behind only Google and YouTube. So Amazon has all this data, and my job was to take all this consumer data that Amazon has and help people understand it. And that was a point where I was like – Okay, no one knows the story that the data is telling them; my job is to get them to understand it. And sometimes I'll get really frustrated because people wouldn't believe it, and I'd be like, No, it's literally just math.

[00:11:29] Susan Barry: Okay. But I think there's an important point here. I promise I'll get to it. Do you consider yourself more of a math-science person or more of a language arts, social studies history person? 

[00:11:42] Al Lagunas: The latter. 

[00:11:45] Susan Barry: Okay, but you're probably okay at math. This is my theory. This is so random. People always think that data has to do with being really good at math. But when I hear someone say the story that the data tells, that tells me that you are a good communicator, who is also decent at math, and that's the person that you want explaining your data. Not a bean counter who can't communicate.

[00:12:14] Al Lagunas: No, I agree. And that was, yeah, so that was like, I had a lot of fun doing that, but then that really got my mind racing around, you know, where else do we not have data, like where can we… Amazon has this built a huge business on the advertising side because they had all this data and they were able to do all these cool things, bring you all these cool insights, all these different tools. That's what really got us excited about where we can bring new data into a space. Where is it valuable? And to kind of tie it all together back to like, even how I grew up in my family is like, where can we tie it all together, and what users do we know the best? So we go build a product that is very data-driven. What user do we know the best that we can help arm them with this tool to help bring this data in. So, we again started looking at areas where we knew users the best. We always wanted to work with frontline workers. It's very near and dear to both my co-founder and I. We both grew up in a very, very similar way. And we're both just kind of tech data nerds. Though we started exploring opportunities and the more that we dug into the hospitality world. The more we got excited about it, the more we realized it aligned with every one of kind of our passions that we were looking for, and like a business to go after and start.

[00:13:33] Susan Barry: So you describe yourself as a data nerd, and I also know from a previous conversation that you're a baseball purist. Much to my dismay. So tell me, what is the Moneyball stat for hotel ops that you think gets overlooked the most often? 

[00:13:50] Al Lagunas: Yes. So my favorite one is time to value. So what do I mean by time to value? So, I think there's a big, big misconception in the industry that there is a labor shortage, but if there was a labor shortage, these staffing companies would solve it. Because you have the labor now, you could just throw labor at the problem; the problem would go away. But problem isn't labor. It is valuable labor. It's labor that's producing value by obviously being efficient by operating your standards, by delivering a quality product. So when we look at training in today's kind of day and age, I talk to everyone, every brand out there, every independent, and everyone looks at training as like it’s 10 to 20-day training period. And then, within a week after a housekeeper had the full board. 

[00:14:47] Susan Barry: And they look at it as 10 to 20 days that are quote wasted. Right? Because there's no value being produced while they're being trained.

[00:14:56] Al Lagunas: Right. So the question isn't, How quickly can we train someone? The question that people need to be answering is how quickly can we get someone to start providing value? Why do we shorten that time to value? So that's the one that, for me, is my favorite number to bring up when we're discussing Levee and we're showing people Levee. But the challenge on the flip side of that is a lot of this data that we bring in for that is net new data. So we don't really have, oftentimes, don't have something to benchmark against. Because the hotels aren't measuring it yet. So that's like our cool insight that we can bring. And when we started, we spent months not even putting software in people's hands, but literally just working alongside them. We were cleaning rooms. I'm surprised I didn't have my own room assignments with some of these hotels at some point. 

[00:15:48] Susan Barry: You're not on the board.

[00:15:49] Al Lagunas: Yeah. I'm at the standup, waiting for my rooms. But you know, a lot of what we did was spent. We spend a lot of time with new hires or people who have been there for months, and really understanding, okay, when a new hire starts, where are they at? When someone who's been there for 3, 6, 9 months, where are they at? And how do we go from reducing the time of a new hire? Being here day one to being as valuable as that person who's been there for six months. 

[00:16:16] Susan Barry: We should probably take a step back and explain, because the way that it sounds now, I think people might think Levee is a training tool, and it certainly facilitates training, but that is definitely not all that it does. So, for listeners who are new to Levee in the plainest English, you possibly can. What happens from the moment that a room attendant opens the app to the moment that the manager starts to understand how valuable it is? 

[00:16:47] Al Lagunas:  Definitely, so the moment a room attendant opens the app, they clean the room, do their work. So the moment they open it, they scan the room number right away. When they scan the room number, we pull in the brand standards, the inventory checklist, whatever QA aspects that the hotel has, and we pull those in. But the way that we confirm that the work is done as we do it using vision and voice AI, so they scan the room number, we know how the room should be set up. As they scan the room in real time, we're verifying room setup according to brand standards, inventory, any potential maintenance issues that are detected. So right away, we do that for the housekeeper. For them, it's easy. They essentially get to be their own manager, self-inspect, do their work.

[00:17:32] Susan Barry: And that's just with their phone, right? 

[00:17:33] Al Lagunas: Yeah, that's just through a very simple mobile app. There's one button on the app, all by design. So all that's verified. And then I always said the magic happens after that because when they do that, the manager, whether it's a director of rooms, executive housekeeper, supervisor, whatever it might be. What they get on their end is they get that inspection report, and they get it verified, essentially saving them time from having to go to these rooms and inspect a hundred percent of the rooms themselves. Now, anything that might have been missing or that might be wrong with the room automatically flagged, automatically reported, tickets automatically done, and now as a manager. If I'm going into that room, I know that the heavy lifting of that room inspection is done for me. And all I have to do is now go in and focus on those fine details, those personal touches, rather than making sure that we have enough towels, that the bed’s set up properly, the water bottles are all there, whatever it might be.

[00:18:32] Susan Barry: If I'm the room attendant while I'm doing that, like while I'm scanning the room, if I miss something, does it prompt me to correct it before I leave? 

[00:18:41] Al Lagunas: Yes, the goal is for that room to be in great shape so that the guests get a great product and have a great time. So yeah, we help the room attendants correct it, flag it, so that they can correct any issues before they leave the room. That way, there's no doubling back; that way, they can go to the next room and keep working. 

[00:19:01] Susan Barry: Gotcha. So then what is the impact of that on training and onboarding new housekeepers? 

[00:19:09] Al Lagunas: Yeah, so the big thing, with training, onboarding, the way it's done today, you might have some videos or something that you watch, and then, for the most part, you have someone who's working with you to train you. They show you what you're to do. You clean a room with them, so I would say you’re paying for two people to clean one room, half as fast.

[00:19:29] Susan Barry: And the person just has to remember it for the most part, right? It's just like, hope for the best. 

[00:19:36] Al Lagunas: Yeah, exactly. Their only way to get feedback right now is if someone's in there with them or if someone goes after and then tells them, Hey, you forgot all this, rather than real in-the-moment feedback. So that way they can correct the issues. So for us that's where we've been able to provide a ton of value for these hotels and these new hires is when someone shows up day one, you give them kind their initial rundown on training, but now it's almost as if they have a manager in their pocket with them, an assistant that helps guide them through how these rooms should be set up. So on the training side, I talk about time to value earlier. We've been able to get. Housekeepers were brand new, performing at the same rate, at the same score as housekeepers who had been there for three plus months. We've been able to get new housekeepers to that level within four rooms. So within four rooms.

[00:20:27] Susan Barry: Whoa, not four days. Four rooms cleaned.

[00:20:28] Al Lagunas: Four rooms exactly. By their fourth room, they're scoring in that same range that people have been there for months are. So when I talk about it's not a labor issue, it's a valuable labor issue. How do we get these people to be valuable? That's the trick. We wanna coach them, we wanna help them, give them real-time feedback in that moment. And that's a big impact we've been able to have on the training onboarding side. And the most exciting part, I think, for us is that we started building this as an ops tool, focused on the efficiency gains, focused on being able to build automations off the back end of this. But we saw that people, some of our partners, were starting to use it as a training tool. It wasn't even designed that way. And now for us it's like, wow, imagine if we, like, started building more of the training modules and the training tools around it. So that's what's been really exciting.

[00:21:23] Susan Barry: You referred to this a little bit earlier, but it's such an important thing. I swear there have been no fewer than 10 million headlines about this subject, and that is personalization. It's sort of been hospitality's white whale for years and years and years. People talk about it all the time, but I swear I don't think anybody has good ideas for how to fix it. So what is it that's making it operationally feasible now? And then what do you think still gets in the way of guest personalization? 

[00:21:54] Al Lagunas: So the way that, just at a summit last week, and I heard the CEO of a hotel group speak, and he mentioned it himself, where he says there's a gap. In the fulfillment side, is kind of how you described it, how I described it. And what I mean by that is we can have all the guest data we want about what my preferences are, what kind of coffee I like, and all this, but all that guest data isn't useful unless you're fulfilling it and acting on it. So right now, what often happens is Susan might be staying at the Ritz in room 400, and they know that you love dark roast coffee, and they have that all in your customer profile. And right now, the trick is, how do we make sure that we are delivering dark roast coffee to room 400? We might have it in a note that goes into a housekeeping board. We might hand a note to the manager to make sure they fulfill that, whatever it might be. But there's no way to verify, and also, kind of coach the person who's setting up that room.

We can't arm them with the way to do it, and confirm that it was done. So what we're doing on our end is – and this is kind of the newest piece that we're working on – but those checklists, the way that we set up these rooms, really making those dynamic in a way that helps fulfill whatever these guest personalization steps are. Like I said, whether it's something like a certain type of coffee or a certain type of pillow, that maybe the guest is allergic to feathers. So we need non-feather pillows. Being able to verify those things and fulfill that last, what I call them, the fulfillment, the last mile piece of it. That's what we're focused on. Being able to verify and help again, deliver on that personalization stuff. 

[00:23:44] Susan Barry: That's huge. That's a game-changer. We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every single episode of Top Floor with specific tips that they can try in their businesses, their hotels, their personal lives, their travels. What do you think, what language, what incentives actually work on day one when you're implementing something new like your product, and maybe the converse, what absolutely does not work? The reason I'm asking this question is, my husband and I were talking about this on a walk this morning of how something will change. Everyone is furious about it and hates it, and then in two months, they forget that it changed, and they're like, Yeah, whatever. It's fine. So, how do you get rid of that sort of fear and hatred for change? 

[00:24:33] Al Lagunas: Yeah, so there’s a couple of ways to approach it. And it's funny, I think of like, Instagram updates!

[00:24:43] Susan Barry: Yeah. It’s a perfect example. 

[00:24:44] Al Lagunas: Yeah. Whenever the Instagram app is updated, it's like, Oh, I hate this layout for this. And then within a couple of weeks, you're like, Oh, it works. 

[00:24:51] Susan Barry: You can't even remember what it was like before. 

[00:24:54] Al Lagunas: Yeah, exactly. So, there's kind of two ways to look at it, where I think when you're implementing a new product. The first hotel we ever onboarded. One of the questions I always like to ask is, what do you wanna get out of this? And I remember in the first hotel we ever worked with, they were like, well, if this works, we think the way it can, everything should get better. And I was like, okay, I agree, but like, what's one thing? Let's really narrow our focus. And I think not only with Levee, but with any tool that you have out there, is a lot of the tools are gonna improve different areas, multiple, different points of ROI, but focusing on one key metric and having that be your North Star.

So with us, one of the first kinds of metrics we focused on was an average check-in time, as what we wanted to see was, can we get rooms ready, turned around quicker? And now, from a check-in time perspective, if you get those rooms ready quicker, everyone can check in earlier, then check-in times have come down. So that's the first piece. Focus on one core metric, and also from the staff side, from the adoption side. One of the things that we did is, this is where you stop playing so much with the tech and start playing with, I don't wanna say play with the people, but incentivize the people. One of the things that we did, we did with the very first hotel, was that we gave $20 gift cards to the. We had one team that we rolled it out to, and we gave $20 gift cards to that team to use it for the first week. And they used it that first week 'cause they wanted the gift card. We don't have Unlimited money.

So after one, we were like, Okay, no more gift cards. But they kept using it. And to this day, they are using it over 90% of the time. So early on, from a people and teams perspective, is how do you incentivize them to use it? And again, it could be something like giving them a gift card. It could be something like recognizing them with being a part of a focus group, or like a feedback group, or whatever it might be, because at the end of the day, people respond to incentives, whether positive or negative. I'm much more of a fan of positive incentives. 

[00:27:11] Susan Barry: Yes. 

[00:27:13] Al Lagunas: So I think that's the other part is making sure that you get your team aligned and incentivize them in a way that they're like, okay, I get why Al wants to do this, but also I like this kinda little incentive that I'm getting now. So let's give it a shot. And, at the end of a couple of weeks. If your solution is delivering that value, then you don't have to worry about the incentives anymore, cause now they're kind of baked into the product. They're baked into the outcomes that they're getting. 

[00:27:39] Susan Barry: That's totally true. If someone's thinking, okay, I'm sold. I wanna do this. I think this is a great product. Are there any Pitfalls or hidden costs, and I don't just mean financial, but sort of things that people might not think about that they need to prepare for? 

[00:27:59] Al Lagunas: Yeah. I'll tell you kind of one of the fun challenges that we ran into early on. So we brought on a hotel group that had eight hotels and the ownership group. Thought that all the hotels did things the same and they were all supposed to have the same brand standards. And on our end, all our AI tools we built is, it's either right or it's wrong. You tell us what it should be, and that's what it is. Well, it turned out that these eight different properties, which they thought were all operating the same, were all operating a little differently. So when they would use our tools. They would get reports back saying, Hey, this room's only 30% accurate. And they'd be like, oh, this isn't working. I'm like, no, it's working exactly how it should. Your properties are all just operating differently.

[00:28:49] Susan Barry: Interesting.

[00:28:50] Al Lagunas: So yeah, at that point, they kinda had to go back to a drawing board and say, okay, now do we want to revamp our properties that we can actually get them to operate the way we think we are, or we want to let them operate their own way. And then on our end, we kinda have to make some adjustments. 'cause now instead of eight properties that operate all the same, we have to adjust all our AI models…

[00:29:14] Susan Barry: Right. It's like eight different tools. 

[00:29:17] Al Lagunas: Exactly. 

[00:29:18] Susan Barry: So what they end up doing.

[00:29:20] Al Lagunas: So they ended up all kind of adopting the same standards and, took a while, but they were happier on the outcome of what the biggest kind of win that they had was that all these hotels were in the same region and they were all probably like 20 to 30 miles away from each other. But what they were able to do now is that their staff became much more interoperable. 

[00:29:39] Susan Barry: Oh, right!

[00:29:40] Al Lagunas: What I mean by that is instead of this hotel might've been a hundred percent booked, and this one was 50%, so they go, okay. You all go from this hotel to this hotel now and work here today. Now they were able to do that because now that hotel was operating the same, but before they couldn't do it because they weren't, quote unquote, trained on that hotel, but you would think that they were all the same. They should be able to plug in place. So, that was what they ended up doing. And it was to the cost perspective on your end, it did require a little effort on their end, to kind of revamp in those processes, but in the long run, they ended up coming out ahead because now their Rooms, their properties were all standardized and yet consistent. And also from a staff perspective, they were able to be more flexible with their staff and kind of move them around based off need and demand.

[00:30:31] Susan Barry: And I mean, give those folks more flexibility to work closer to their house or whatever the case may be. All right. Well, we've reached the fortune-telling portion of the show, so you have to predict the future. And then we will see if you got it right. What is a prediction you have about the future of back-of-house automation and AI in hotels?

[00:30:55] Al Lagunas: So this will be, now, if we predict the future correctly here, Levee will be tremendously successful.

[00:31:00] Susan Barry: Okay, it has to be right?

[00:31:04] Al Lagunas: Yeah. It's the future we're trying to build, and the way that we see it is. We think of the workforce, the back of house workforce right now, we think of people is people. Our workforce is people, but in the very near future that we're trying to build is one where your workforce is not only people, but also these AI agents that can complete some of the work for those people. So, in our case, like the basic example that we rolled out with our wedge product was a room inspection piece. So now your workforce is a person, that is, your room inspector, your supervisor, but they also have this agent that's part of the workforce that's now helping them complete part of that work. So I think. When we look at back-of-house automation, AI is. How do we redefine our workforce? How we think of our workforce as not just human labor, but also this machine labor that we know we can now roll out. And as that continues to build, you start looking at, there's a lot of cool companies out there doing robotics, the robot vacuums. So that's another part of, you know, the workforce. But I think when we look at the workforce of the future for these hotels, and not only hotels, for just any really business in general, is how do we diversify our workforce now by bringing in AI agents, robotics that can help, build, like you said, those automations automate some of that work. Now your core team, your human team, can run leaner more accurately, faster, and more efficiently. And now you have these robotics, these AI agents that work alongside them, also kind of complete that work.

[00:32:47] Susan Barry: It always gives me pause when we talk about lower barrier to entry jobs being replaced because, what happens to those people? What do they do then? 

[00:32:58] Al Lagunas: I think there's a couple of ways to look at it, where there's a reality is that there's jobs that are created when new technology comes into play. There's, like, for example, being a podcast host. Yeah.

[00:33:18] Susan Barry: But it's not low barrier to entry. I had to have a 30-year career before I could host a podcast. 

[00:33:25] Al Lagunas: Right. And you have the skills, right? So it was like, but. 30 years ago, the idea of having a podcast was. I was like, What's a podcast? What are we even talking about? So a lot of these jobs are gonna change, and a lot of new jobs are gonna be created. One of the interesting ones that not related to our world, but we talked about these, autonomous vehicles, and, with the autonomous vehicles, how does roadside support evolve? What of roadside support do autonomous vehicles have? You have a flat tire and an autonomous vehicle, and you don't know how to drive, or you don't ever do that. Like, does autonomous roadside support is that a business that someone can build now? 

[00:34:09] Susan Barry: Oh, that's interesting.

[00:34:10] Al Lagunas: Right? And then how does that look like? Is that, are those the new mechanics? Are those again, blue-collar, low-bar entry jobs? It's like, okay, so what does that mean? Is that the new blue-collar job? I think a lot of these jobs are redefined as we go. And we kind of fear the future. We are gonna get caught with our pants down. But as we start, building the future is, okay, what new jobs are created? What industries that didn't exist before now exist, and I think that's what kind of gotta have that optimistic point of view. Not only this world, but not only hospitality, but I think in every industry, 

[00:34:53] Susan Barry: If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about how hotels operationalize personalization, that is a very difficult phrase to say. What would it be? Operationalize a personalization. 

[00:35:09] Al Lagunas: It's almost like an oxymoron in a way, right? It’s like, how do you standardize? I think I'm like trying not to talk in a circle here, but I think yeah, you wanna standardize is the process, not necessarily the outcome. Right? So how do we make it easy for someone to deliver that personalization? Because the personal touch is gonna all be a little different. I think of, I don't know why this just popped in my head, but I think of Subway. Where everyone's subway sandwich, subway order is different, but the process that you go through is very standardized and operationalized. So in a way, it's like, how do we create these outcomes that are, again, personal, but you build the framework, the kind of infrastructure around it to do that. And on Levee, on our end, that's more or less what we're trying to do is to go back to the dark roast coffee example, is like we're not really focused on getting everyone dark roast coffee. We're focused on how we make it easy to get everyone that one thing, that is their dark roast coffee. So for us, it is understanding the hotel, understanding where that information is stored. Sharing it, getting it to the hands of the people who are delivering on it, which is the housekeepers in our case, and making it easy, giving them the tools and processes to be able to deliver on it. And then the personal relation piece, that's the kind of piece that you change out. Everything else, the process to execute on it, that's what's standardized.

[00:36:44] Susan Barry: That makes a lot of sense, and I think for operators to begin to think about it that way probably helps to break down some of the chaos and confusion when it comes to multiple requests that need to be managed at the same time, either way. 

[00:37:01] Al Lagunas: Yeah, thinking of each, like personalization in a vacuum, it's so overwhelming. Like, Oh, we need a billion different things and a billion different steps to be able to personalize for all these different people. But it's like, how do we make everything easy, so that way the only thing to change is that the dark roast coffee, the extra pillow, whatever it might be. So, yeah. 

[00:37:23] Susan Barry: Okay, folks, before we tell Al goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock, where all of the best stories get told.

Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”

[00:37:36] Susan Barry: Al, what's a story you would only tell me on the loading dock? 

[00:37:40] Al Lagunas: So, this is a funny story. Before I started Levee back when I had more free time. I always go on vacation about twice a year, and I always had do like my relaxing vacation and then my adventure. So back in 2022, I think it was, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

[00:37:59] Susan Barry: Holy mackerel.

[00:38:01] Al Lagunas: Yeah, it was fun. Awesome. And I'm not an outdoorsy person. In my head, I think I am until I'm actually outdoors, and I'm like, wait, this kind of sucks. Get me to a nice hotel room. But yeah, I remember I was dating this girl at the time, and she gave me a book, it was called Into Thin Air. And I'll come back to the book in a sec, but yeah, she gave me the book. She's like, Oh, you're gonna go climb Kilimanjaro. You could read this book on your flight. So leave for the airport. Completely forgot the book. We left the book at home. I climbed the mountain. As I'm going up it, one of the things that I didn't realize, and it's like, no, duh, looking back at it — is altitude sickness. I didn't realize the effects of it. I remember I was like, we're climbing a mountain. Day or two in, eating, going through it didn't feel too terrible. Then I get to day three or four, so it was a six-day trip, like day three or four, I remember like being like, oh, I'm like not really getting hungry anymore. I think I'm feeling great, like I should be doing okay. 

[00:39:04] Susan Barry: It was like you were turning into Superman.

[00:39:07] Al Lagunas: I'm like, Oh, the body had just quit. And then by the time we reached the summit, I was gone. Like, I remember my head was killing me. We got up there, and when we got up there, we got there at the sunrise, and they were like, Oh, do you wanna wait for the sunrise? And I was like, Nope. Like, get me back down. Tapped the big sign up top, it says like, this is the summit. Took a picture, came back down. Again, feeling terrible. So ended up coming back home. About a week goes by to recover. I start reading the book, and I'm reading this book, and the book Into Thin Air is about how a bunch of people died climbing Everest.

[00:39:43] Susan Barry: Stop it. 

[00:39:44] Al Lagunas: And mind you, she gave me this book, we're not dating anymore.

[00:39:49] Susan Barry: I was gonna say, there's a reason that you're not together anymore, obviously. Was she trying to tell you something?

[00:39:54] Al Lagunas: And I remember like reading this book, and I'm like, holy crap. I didn't even think of that as an outcome when I go find this, and as I'm reading it, and they talk about the telltale signs of altitude sickness, and what to be alert for. And one of them was loss of appetite, and all these different things. And I was like, holy crap. I was going through it, and I had no freaking idea. And yeah, ended up reading the book. Like I said, these people died on. They're looking back at it. I'm like, alright, I'm really glad I didn't read that like before I got there.

[00:40:27] Susan Barry: Me too. That would've totally psyched you out. I'm surprised that your guides weren't like, Hey, everyone, how you feeling? Anybody hungry? You know? 

[00:40:36] Al Lagunas: Well, they kept telling us, I remember they kept telling us, like, oh, you have to eat. You have to eat. And I was like, Oh, I'm not really hungry. And they're like, No, you have to eat. And I thought, they were just kind of saying it just to say it. They think of like, oh, you're not eating. It's because you have altitude sickness. Once you kind of stay up there for an extended period of time, you can die from it. That was one where again, looking back at it, I'm like very glad I didn't read it. But I will say, once you climb it, like I would recommend to everyone, climb it. It's physically taxing, but it's not something that you have to be like a super athlete or anything to do. But I think once you climb it, I remember I got back and I read the book, and then even after that I was like, okay, I wanna go climb another mountain. What's the next closest mountain? So there's like, Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain in Africa, and then in North America, I believe it's Denali, and South America, it's like at Aconcagua. So all these mountains are called the Seven Summits.

[00:41:43] Susan Barry: Oh, so is that your list now? 

[00:41:44] Al Lagunas: Yeah, that's my thing. And my whole thing is like, Everest, I think, takes like three months to climb. It's like a month just to get to the mountain, and like two months to go up. That's my last one that I want to climb when I'm like, Levee changed hospitality revolution. Someone else came in to run it. I retired. Now go do this three-month sabbatical and climb this mountain. Altitude sickness is a thing. When you lose your appetite, that is like your number one thing that you should be like, oh, I should be hungry now.

[00:42:20] Susan Barry: Alarm bells! Al Laguna, thank you so much for being here. I know that our listeners got a lot out of your explanation of Levee, and I really appreciate you riding with us to the top floor.

[00:42:33] Al Lagunas: I appreciate you having me on. This was awesome. 

[00:42:36] Susan Barry: Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/214. 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.

[00:43:12] 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.