Transcript: Episode 254: Napkin Full of Jello

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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor with Susan Barry, episode 255. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/255.

[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. Nina Cleveland built her career at the intersection of hospitality, marketing, loyalty, and entrepreneurship. After starting with Starwood Hotels, she held marketing and partnership roles at American Express, earned her MBA from Wharton, and spent several years living and working in Hong Kong before returning to the US. After a stint with Wyndham, Nina pivoted to entrepreneurship. She founded Lanyard, a company that helps employers solve one of their toughest workforce challenges, finding housing for employees, particularly H-2B visa workers and other seasonal staff. Nina and I worked together on Lanyard and the other organization she founded, Female Founders in Hospitality. Today, we are going to talk about corporate housing and entrepreneurship, 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 Ella. Ella asks, "Why don't seasonal hotels just put employees in their hotel rooms? They have plenty of rooms. What is the point of finding housing?" This is such a good question. I'm sure a lot of people have the same one. What do you think, Nina? 

[00:02:07] Nina Kleaveland: First off, Susan, thank you so much for having me. It's exciting to be here. I get to talk to you on a very regular basis, but today it's being recorded and an even more fun conversation. There are a number of reasons why seasonal hotels don't house employees on-site. For one thing, they're bringing in seasonal workers during peak season, so that usually means that the hotels are full. They're pretty close to 100% occupancy. So they don't really have rooms that they can take out of inventory to house workers. On top of that, we find that, in order for workers to have a great experience, there needs to be some separation between where they work and where they're living.  And not all hotel rooms have kitchens or a place to cook, which makes them feel at home and feel like they're sort of welcome in this home away from home. And so it's really important that they have that separation and they have that place that they can go to when they're done with their shift at the end of the day.

[00:03:07] Susan Barry: As someone who has done a ton of hotel task force,  yes, a separation is sometimes very welcome. Although I always liked the part about living where I was working, that I didn't have to commute. So I could sleep, like, right up to the last minute, then jump up, get ready, and just take the elevator to work. Perfect for me. How did your original plan, which was to be an event planner or maybe a florist, eventually lead you into hospitality marketing and business strategy? 

[00:03:46] Nina Kleaveland: I went to school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and I was a biology and French major.

[00:03:53] Susan Barry: That is so weird, by the way. What a combination. Did you think you were gonna be a doctor maybe? 

[00:04:00] Nina Kleaveland: So my dad, when I was a freshman, said, "You should choose a major early to maximize the college experience." And I'd always been more of a math/science person, and so I chose biology. Meanwhile, fast-forward four or five years, I remember having this conversation with him, and he's like, "I don't even know what that means. Why would I tell you that?" But it led me to biology, and then I had taken French for so many years, and I planned to study abroad, which I did in Paris. And so anyway,  the two things came together. I was probably the only biology major that was not pre-med or pre-vet or planning to go into research. My aspirations and hopes were event planning or to be a florist. And so during college, I volunteered in the office of alumni affairs doing events. I was a coordinator for new student orientation, and I worked in Center City, Philadelphia, for a very high-end florist, setting up for weddings and charity galas on Saturdays. And I will tell you, the only thing that could get me up at 7:00 AM on a Saturday morning after being hungover and being out late the night before was arranging flowers. And I would work a 12-hour day and then go back at 1:00 AM and break down the event. And I just loved it. And so when I graduated, someone suggested that I go and work at a hotel with the idea of going into an event planning role. I didn't start there. I started in reservations, human resources, and the front desk, and kind of rotated through departments, but at the same time, had the benefit of a mentor sponsor,  Tina Edmondson. She was the GM of the hotel, and today she runs global luxury brands for Marriott, and she took an interest in me and my career. And right around the time that I realized that hotel operations was not my passion, and this is sort of not the path I wanted to pursue, she told me about a new team that was forming, doing field marketing, so digital marketing,  across the US for different portfolios of hotels. And so I took on that role. I started something new, and I immediately loved it. I love the combination of the creativity and then sort of data-driven marketing, and being able to launch a campaign and see the results coming in in real time, and that just completely changed the trajectory of my career. 

[00:06:38] Susan Barry: I know a lot about that because I was also working for Starwood at the same time that that happened. So I'm gonna skip over the substantive part of this conversation and ask a follow-up, which is, two actually. What is your favorite flower? 

[00:06:53] Nina Kleaveland: My favorite flower is anemones. 

[00:06:55] Susan Barry: Oh, those are so pretty. And do you always have flowers in your house? Like, is that something that you continue to love, arranging flowers?

[00:07:05] Nina Kleaveland: Very regularly. So I live in New York City, and I frequently go to the Union Square Farmers Market and buy flowers when they have them. And then when I'm on Cape Cod, oftentimes in the summer, I have planted tons and tons of hydrangeas. And so, on my tables and deck are vases of hydrangeas in all different colors, blue, purple, everything. 

[00:07:31] Susan Barry: I can so picture it. I love those. They're so pretty. One of the most glamorous, I think, periods of your career, aside from working for the florist, was the three years you spent living and working in Hong Kong. Talk about that experience. What did it teach you that maybe still influences the way you run your business today?

[00:07:53] Nina Kleaveland: Let me first start by telling you how I got to Hong Kong. So I had interned with American Express when I was in business school, and they offered me a full-time job in New York, and I said, "You're a global company. Can you transfer that job offer to Hong Kong?" And they made it happen, which is pretty incredible.

[00:08:11] Susan Barry: How did you pick there? 

[00:08:13] Nina Kleaveland: My husband and I both wanted to live in Asia. My entire life had basically existed in like a 90-mile radius of where I grew up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, up until that point, and I traveled a decent amount in Europe, but I really wanted to experience an entirely new culture and be able to travel around Asia. And so we looked at Hong Kong and Singapore, and really fell in love with Hong Kong. 

[00:08:40] Susan Barry: That is so crazy. So anything from that time that you're still doing or still not doing? 

[00:08:48] Nina Kleaveland: Yeah. So, I started working on a team at American Express doing B2B marketing, supporting a local sales team that was selling co-branded business credit cards into companies in Hong Kong and Greater China. And everything was different. The logo was the same on the door, but everything else was different. The culture was different, the languages spoken around me were different. There was so much that was new, and it felt really daunting at first. I didn't know what I could do to be successful and how I was going to kind of ramp up, and I just listened a lot. I took my time, kind of built my track record and performance over the course of the first year, and ended up winning one of the American Express performance high achiever awards, if you will. And I think what that taught me is that I can be successful in a lot of different situations, even when I don't speak the language. I mean, and when I say, don't speak the language, there were 60-person meetings where the only reason they were speaking English was because of me. And so I think, if I translate that to today, so much of what I'm doing with Lanyard is new and uncharted, and I think that experience just taught me that I can be successful in all different circumstances.

[00:10:25] Susan Barry: That's tremendously confidence-building, I would think, just in general. Sort of, you know, every time I've done something that's like, "What in the world am I doing?" And then you live, you survive it. You're like, "Oh, okay. Nothing's really that big of a deal. Got it. All right." 

[00:10:43] Nina Kleaveland: And I'm not gonna tell you it wasn't hard. It was so hard at first. And it was hard, just three years in, it was still hard. But I realized that I can, I can thrive, and I can be successful despite all of that. The other thing was that I was supporting this local sales team, and one of the sales directors looked at me, this girl who came from the United States. I didn't speak Cantonese, I didn't speak Mandarin, I didn't understand the clients. And she was like, "How is she gonna support us?" And I don't blame her. I think she was right. And so I made it a point to listen to her feedback, to incorporate it into the marketing I was doing, and to build a relationship with her. And we had a great relationship by the time I left, and I think that one of the things from that is just you can always find common ground with people, even people who are so different from you, who don't have shared experiences, who come from different backgrounds. And I think that's a lot of what we try to do in terms of our relationships at Lanyard. They're so important to us, whether it's with partners or clients or the suppliers that we work with. We always try to build those relationships based on common ground. 

[00:12:06] Susan Barry: I'm not sure if I actually still feel this way, but one of the jobs of yours that I would love to have is when you served as sort of an internal problem-solving consultant at American Express. The reason I say it might not be the one I want is 'cause now I kinda wish that I had spent three years in Hong Kong, too. But can you talk about that internal consulting-type role? What was that? What were some of the problems that you had to solve? 

[00:12:32] Nina Kleaveland: When I was an intern at Amex, I worked for a team called Loyalty Edge, and I ended up working for them again when I moved back to the States for a little less than a year. Loyalty Edge was essentially packaging up the expertise of running a loyalty program that Amex had with Membership Rewards and selling it to companies that weren't their core product, but they knew they needed to offer a loyalty program. And so it was essentially, in a way, a startup, building a loyalty program and all the services and features and products that go along with it. And my job was business development, not in the sales sense, but in what new features and products should we offer? And so I was given a problem statement, and then had to come up with a plan of the go-to-market strategy, the pricing, what vendor would we use, how would we integrate the technology,  how would we pitch it to existing clients, how would we market it? All of those components. And I worked on two different projects that were sort of memorable. One was a fraud solution. Loyalty fraud was picking up, and so they were looking for something to counteract that. And then pay with points for travel. At the time, it was relatively new. There weren't a ton of solutions out there, specifically looking at solving for cruises and some of the other categories that are a little harder to pay online with points. So I went through this exercise, sort of wash, rinse, repeat, with different problem statements, and it set me up so well to then take on and lead global strategy at Wyndham, and then to start Lanyard, because I had that muscle memory of finding a gap and looking at it from all angles, and coming up with a product or a solution.

[00:14:17] Susan Barry: I wonder if there are people listening who are like, "Wait, what? You can do that?" I mean, that just sounds like so fun to me. Fix it, figure this out. Okay. I mean, was it fun or am I overestimating how exciting that would be? 

[00:14:34] Nina Kleaveland: It was really fun, and what made it even better is that the Loyalty Edge team was awesome. Such great people. And so I just loved the time that I had there, and I keep in touch with some of them still today. 

[00:14:50] Susan Barry: That's cool. Lanyard, your company now originally started as a hostel concept rather than a corporate housing company. Can you talk about that pivot? How did you figure out that workforce housing was the bigger or better opportunity for you?

[00:15:11] Nina Kleaveland: I started Lanyard as a hostel brand with the idea of going into seasonal destinations to give younger travelers an entry point into a market that gets very expensive during peak season. So they could basically buy a bed instead of a whole room. And got couple years into a few different real estate deals in ski towns in New England, and this was post-COVID, sort of 2021, '22. And construction costs in the time between when I started and this sort of point had tripled. Investors were in and out. Banks were skittish about hospitality to begin with, and then the shared rooms, especially after COVID, made them even more skittish. 

[00:15:57] Susan Barry: Oh, I didn't think about that. 

[00:15:58] Nina Kleaveland: Yeah. And so the writing was kind of on the wall. And at the time, we were talking to a number of different business in these ski towns about housing seasonal workers in shared rooms. And it made me realize that there was a real opportunity there because it was HR that was hiring the workers, onboarding them, training, and looking for housing, and the burden just seemed enormous, and also they didn't have the skill set. This was just an additional responsibility that was added on their plate. And so I realized that there was a big opportunity there to help seasonal employers. What I didn't anticipate with that original thesis was that the same type of housing, not in seasonal destinations, is needed by the manufacturing industry, and agriculture, and landscaping, and food production, and all of these other industries, and that corporate housing, traditional corporate housing solutions, were not meeting the needs of those industries in the markets where they needed the housing. 

[00:17:11] Susan Barry: Right. Because when you hear corporate housing, at least for me, I'm thinking about, like, you know, the sort of Monday to Thursday consultant or relocation for C-suite executives. Where does Lanyard fit within the broader corporate housing landscape? Like, what makes your approach different from the traditional providers that people probably have come to mind?

[00:17:37] Nina Kleaveland: We focus on the affordable end of the spectrum. So what I just described, we service the needs of employers in industries like manufacturing, agriculture, landscaping, hospitality, interns, and we do that across the country. The things that make us different. So that is largely, that space of the industry is largely a white space. There are not many players, if any, operating in that space. And what makes us different is a couple of things. First off, we act as a digital matchmaker. We don't own inventory. We don't manage inventory. We connect employers with suppliers and manage the process. What that means is that when employers come to us, they're not limited by the inventory that we own and manage. We're not trying to force them into an existing solution. All of our housing solutions and strategies are created based on the needs of the employer. It also means that we can service markets where there isn't a traditional corporate housing solution. And the way that we do that is through our unique housing partner database. We have everything from college and university dorms and student housing to extended-stay hotels, unfurnished apartments, and vacation rentals. We've even presented a boat to a client once, which they did not take, but we did present it. 

[00:19:05] Susan Barry: I love that. I kind of wish they would've taken it, only because you probably would've had a lot of exercising of your problem-solving muscle of what to do when people fell off the boat. In some ways, you're solving an HR problem more than a housing problem. How does that play out? 

[00:19:24] Nina Kleaveland: So the burden to hire and onboard and train, in addition to housing temporary or seasonal employees, typically falls on human resources. And the amount of time it takes to source options when you don't know where to look, to manage the process, to apply if there's a lease involved, sign agreements, furnish, move in, pay invoices, maintenance requests, it's a full-time job that oftentimes is not staffed, it's not budgeted for. It just gets added on top of the plate of an existing human resources team. And so yes, it's a human resources problem because they have to figure out how to manage this in addition to everything else, and weren't necessarily trained to do it. And it's also a problem for them because housing can impact the ability to attract workers and retain them. If the workers are not in comfortable, safe accommodations while they're doing the work, there's a greater chance that they're gonna leave early, they're gonna show up late, there's gonna be performance issues. And so, it really becomes an issue if they're not well taken care of and if they don't have comfortable accommodations when they're working.

[00:20:44] Susan Barry: We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every episode of Top Floor with a couple of practical and tangible things they can try either in their businesses or maybe in their personal lives. You have experienced both successful pivots and ideas that didn't ultimately work. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs about knowing the difference between when to keep pushing and when it's time to pivot? This is a million-dollar question, so everybody take notes. 

[00:21:21] Nina Kleaveland: So if I get it right, do I get a million dollars? 

[00:21:22] Susan Barry: I mean, perhaps. 

[00:21:26] Nina Kleaveland: The hard part is there is no right answer. As an entrepreneur, I feel like we're always pivoting. It could be a small pivot. It could be a big pivot. I mean, we started as a hostel concept and then pivoted to B2C workforce housing for a brief period of time, and then to B2B corporate housing. And actually, our pricing model changed. There are so many different things that have changed over time. I think more often than not, if I'm honest with myself, I know when things are not working. What is the hardest part is figuring out what to change because there's no playbook. So what do you change? What do you test? What do you try differently? And then just making that happen when you're trying to steer the ship in a different direction. And so I think there isn't, like, a hard and fast rule. I think you have to be open to pivoting at any given point in time, but at the same time, not get distracted by noise, and there's a lot of it when you're a founder.

[00:22:36] Susan Barry:  It almost seems to me that it is more enticing to pivot too often than not often enough. I think that's whole shiny object syndrome.  Entrepreneurs are multi-passionate, and it is very easy to have your head turned, for sure. 

[00:22:55] Nina Kleaveland: Early on, after the first pivot to corporate housing, or I guess the second pivot to corporate housing, someone told me, "Do one thing well with a paying customer." And that has stuck with me to this day because at the time, we were getting bombarded with, "Do you wanna develop real estate?" And, "What about these ancillary services?" And just a million other ideas and things, paths that we could have gone down and things we could have done and products we could have added. And I just think if you don't get the core right, then it's hard to do all the other stuff. So I wanted to just focus on the core product. But I do think sometimes people come up with solutions, and they're so wedded to a solution that's not addressing the problem that also is not good. That can tank the company.  

[00:23:57] Susan Barry: It took me a really, really long time in the evolution of hype marketing to realize that, to your point, doing one thing well for one paying customer wouldn't preclude me from doing other stuff that was interesting. I was so afraid that if I put my head down and focused, all that other stuff would disappear and go away, and that could not be further from the truth.

[00:24:29] Nina Kleaveland: I think if anything, it helps you refine and hone your core product, but then at the same time, you can be more focused and thoughtful about the additional opportunities and additional product lines, ancillary services, things like that. And that's, that's the approach we've taken. 

[00:24:47] Susan Barry: Totally. We are alike in many, many ways. So it is very surprising to me that you have had two or maybe it's three co-founders. I, as longtime listeners will know, am not what you would call a big team player. I'm not a big believer in business partnerships. I would never have a co-founder. I'm too crazy. So would you work with a co-founder again? What worked? What didn't work? Why did you do that to yourself? 

[00:25:22] Nina Kleaveland: We are alike in many ways, but one of the things I know about myself is that I am best when I work with other people who can be a sounding board, I can bounce ideas off of. They can poke holes in my ideas and tell me I'm wrong. I need that. That's one of the reasons why we have such an incredible group with female founders in hospitality because we have this steering committee that holds each other accountable and does exactly that. So I sought that out with Lanyard as well. I've had three co-founders, and each one served a very specific purpose and need. They all had complementary skill sets to me. The first one came from a hotel operations background back when Lanyard was a hostel. The second one came from a real estate background back when we were trying to actually buy and convert properties into hostel locations. And then the third one, when I pivoted, had zero-to-one startup experience and was really helpful in getting the technology going and kind of proving out that initial business model. That being said, I think it is very hard for someone to come in midstream and have the same conviction that I do about this idea. And they can be passionate about it, they can feel strongly about it, but I think it's really hard to kind of come in as a co-founder at this point in the game. And so at this point I'm not planning to add a new co-founder. 

[00:26:57] Susan Barry: You're about to celebrate six years in the fall? 

[00:27:00] Nina Kleaveland: Yes. 

[00:27:00] Susan Barry: Wow. That's so awesome. One of the biggest competitive advantages I know you have is technology that you have built behind the scenes to sort of improve your team's efficiency and the efficiency of the services that you offer. Hospitality is so full right now of companies that are trying to apply AI directly to customers. How are you doing that? How are you using AI automation internally without losing the sort of human touch that I know this business requires? 

[00:27:38] Nina Kleaveland: We pride ourselves on the relationships that we build with potential clients and clients and partners, and even our housing partners and suppliers. And so we never wanna lose that. It's super important to what we do. In fact, we had a potential client reach out to us recently who said that they wanted to make a switch because they couldn't get in touch with a human at the company that they were currently working with. So what we've done is we focused the technology on other areas of the business, operations being the most critical. And we started by launching AI that helps streamline communications from the housing partners to the clients to the employers and the residents. It basically takes all of the notifications that are coming from the properties and makes sure that the employers are getting the most relevant ones in a timely fashion, and stripping out all of the things that aren't relevant necessarily.

[00:28:49] Susan Barry: Like, so the HR manager isn't getting 10 invitations to the ice cream social or whatever. 

[00:28:54] Nina Kleaveland: Isn't getting bombarded with 21 emails about food trucks in the parking lot on Tuesday afternoon. Exactly. We're also using AI for Sara, our voice agent, and now email agent. We've rolled that out as well. And Sara helps make our sourcing process faster, more efficient, and more targeted. And so we use Sara to essentially call a target list of properties to get availability, rates, and terms, and then follow up via email and populate the proprietary tool that we've built that houses all the rates and partners in our database. And so that has been sort of a great example of ways that AI and technology can make things more efficient and faster without impacting the human touch of the client experience. We also have been using it to completely re-platform our website, add new features and functionality, and there is so much more ahead in our pipeline that I'm really excited about.

[00:30:02] Susan Barry: Oh, me too. I wanna make the point that maybe people listening wouldn't realize, which is Sara started as a voice agent because even though you would expect it to be available on a website, you are often working in markets where phone calls are the only way for you to get the information that you need. Is that pretty accurate? 

[00:30:28] Nina Kleaveland: That's very accurate. So one would think that rates, availability, terms, all of those things would be available on a website, whether it's a multifamily apartment or a vacation rental or a corporate rental. But so often, because the requests that we're getting are for groups, they're long-term, they require a corporate lease, there are nuances and factors that make it such that we need to get in touch with a human and place a call, or the information on the website is just not up to date. That happens quite frequently. And so as a result of that, we started with Sara as a voice agent, and then added on the email component so we could do follow-ups and have everything in writing, and so that everything could then be populated in our proprietary tool. The next iteration of this is around maintenance requests, where once again, you can submit a maintenance request on a tenant portal, but the follow-up happens by phone and email. And there are a lot of reasons why that has to happen. I won't go into the details, but it's well-documented, and that's another opportunity to improve our efficiency and reduce kind of the manual process when we don't really need it. We just need the follow-up. We need to know the status of a work order or maintenance request.

[00:31:56] Susan Barry: Well, you are already living in the future, but we have reached the fortune-telling portion of our show, so you have to predict more of the future, and then we will see if you got it right. What is a prediction you have about the future of corporate housing? 

[00:32:12] Nina Kleaveland: It's definitely ripe for change. Our digital matchmaker model works. The customer should definitely not be limited to what traditional corporate housing is available. The housing really should meet the customers' needs, not the other way around. And we think that our unique approach is achievable on a broader scale. We can turn anything into corporate housing. A five-bedroom unfurnished house that we furnish to a college dorm, or even a boat, as I mentioned. All these things can be turned into corporate housing. In markets as small as Eldon, Missouri, I did have to Google that one when the housing request came in, 'cause I did not know where it was from New York City. Any of these markets can have corporate housing. It doesn't have to just be limited to tier one, tier two cities with one- and two-bedroom furnished apartments. The other thing I would say is technology. So much is still happening on PDFs and emails and phone calls, and I think that a lot of the operational issues associated with sourcing potential housing options can be fixed with technology, with AI, without losing the human touch. And as I just talked about, that's exactly what we're focused on.

[00:33:33] Susan Barry: This may be too much in the weeds, but I'm so curious how you handle it when you rent an unfurnished place. Like, you guys aren't flying out and putting together furniture. What's the tactical on-the-ground? What do you do? 

[00:33:48] Nina Kleaveland: We do both, rental furniture, where we work with companies like Cort or American Furniture Rentals, and then we also drop-ship Wayfair and Amazon furniture, sometimes working with local moving and storage companies that receive, unbox, set up, and move the furniture in on behalf of our clients.

[00:34:11] Susan Barry: I mean, just that piece alone, imagining that you're an HRD sitting in a hotel somewhere, and you have 400 other things on your to-do list, and then all of a sudden you have to furnish a house, that's craziness. Like, you would take two weeks off to furnish your own house, not lay it on top of your other job. Well, if you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about starting a company, what would that be? 

[00:34:42] Nina Kleaveland: That there were more females doing it alongside me, who were getting funded, being recognized for their brilliant ideas, and feeling supported. 

[00:34:53] Susan Barry: Well, you are working hard on that in Female Founders in Hospitality, which is enough for an entire other episode of Top Floor. So before we tell you goodbye, Nina, we are going to head down to the loading dock, where all of the best stories get told. 

Elevator voice announces, “Going down.

[00:35:15] Susan Barry: Nina, what is a story you would only tell me on the loading dock? 

[00:35:19] Nina Kleaveland: Okay, I'm gonna go back to Hong Kong. And I don't think of myself as a picky eater per se. I eat a lot of different things, but I don't eat gelatinous foods, like Jell-O, pudding, things like that. 

[00:35:33] Susan Barry: Have you always been that way or did that develop over time?

[00:35:37] Nina Kleaveland: It developed over time, but it's been a long time since I've eaten gelatinous foods. 

[00:35:44] Susan Barry: Even the word gelatinous just makes it sound so gross. 

[00:35:48] Nina Kleaveland: Yeah. There isn't another good descriptor, I guess. Anyway, when I moved there, one of the cultural differences is that every day for lunch, the team goes out together and sits down and has a hot meal. And as the new person on the team, I was always invited to come along, of course, and one person or two people would order for the table. The food would come, and then someone, because I was new, they would put food into my bowl before they served themselves or on my plate. And so as a result of that, I ended up with things like chicken feet and tripe and tofu pudding and amaranth jelly. On my plate.

[00:36:36] Susan Barry: Wait, what is that? What is amaranth jelly? 

[00:36:38] Nina Kleaveland: It's like Jell-O. It kind of jiggles, and then it has, like, little amaranth berries in it. All these different things would end up in my bowl or on my plate, and then eventually end up either in my napkin or under the bowl or under the plate or on the floor. Because I didn't eat them, and I didn't wanna try. And I was just trying to fit in, just trying to not point out how different I was and how unusual it was to have chicken feet at lunch, at least for me. And then, over time, it got better, and I eventually told them I don't eat tofu, and it was fine. But I, at least for a while there, I was like a six-year-old. Like, it reminds me of my daughter hiding food in a napkin or, like, accidentally throwing it on the floor. 

[00:37:28] Susan Barry: Oh, my gosh. Did you ever taste a chicken foot? 

[00:37:33] Nina Kleaveland: I did not. 

[00:37:34] Susan Barry: I am a very adventurous eater, but that might be a step too far for me.

[00:37:42] Nina Kleaveland: I agree. One of the things that I learned from living there is that Americans like to separate the animal from the food, and that is not the case in many other countries. So for example, we don't see whole fish often, right? It's a fish filet. We don't see the chicken feet, right? It's a chicken breast or tenderloin or whatever. And so it was very interesting to be exposed to lots of different parts of animals that I had never seen before. 

[00:38:14] Susan Barry: Nina Cleveland, thank you so much for being here. I know that our listeners learned a lot about corporate housing, and I really appreciate you riding with us to the top floor.

[00:38:25] Nina Kleaveland: Thank you so much for having me, Susan. This was fun. Not that I'm surprised. It's always fun with you. 

[00:38:32] Susan Barry: Thanks so much for listening. Thank you for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/255. 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.

[00:39:08] 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.