Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

Helping nurses and doctors during the pandemic. Assisting first responders as towns recover from natural disasters. Joining the fight against human trafficking.

Red Roof’s evolution as a corporation is more than just another branding story. New president George Limbert firmly believes leaders must guide their organizations into always doing what is right: for customers, of course, but also for employees…and communities. As a new president, we plan on following George quarterly to better learn his vision, observe his evolution and growth as a leader, and study how he incorporates his principles into day-to-day operations. Join us for this first introductory episode as George discusses his history, and the steps he’s already taken in the midst of 2021’s radical viral, social, and economic changes.

Listen to George’s other episodes:

• Leading with Character: A Real-Life Red Roof Report
• Red Roof: Revisioning the Future
• Expecting the Unexpected: VUCA in Action at Red Roof

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

George Limbert is the President of Red Roof, a leader in the lodging industry. He initially joined as Red Roof’s inhouse General Counsel, and today leads an organization with over 660 properties serving millions of guests each year in the United States, Brazil, and Japan. George led a strategic transformation of the business and is working to manage interdepartmental challenges as well as demand to create operational efficiencies. He is a member of the board of directors of the American Hotel and Lodging Association, the voice representing every segment of the lodging industry in the United States.

Transcript
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Maureen 0:08
Maureen, welcome to Innovating Leadership, co-creating our future. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf. I’m the founder and CEO of the Innovative Leadership Institute. I am also a regular contributor to Forbes and the lead author on an award-winning book series focusing on evolving leadership and innovating organizations, I am a fellow with the International Leadership Association, and I am delighted today to have George Limbert, who is the new president of Red Roof. George and his team have updated their vision to reflect our post-COVID era that embraces the community and employees as well as creating an exceptional customer experience across all of the Red Roof branded properties. George is going to talk to us today about his term from joining as interim president through now and what inspired him to evolve the brand. So, George, first, welcome, and thank you. And what do you want to tell our listeners about you before we jump in?

Speaker 1 1:06
Sure, thank you, Maureen. Really honored to be here talking to you and talking about this great company, Red Roof. What I want your listeners to know that this isn’t your grandfather’s Red Roof anymore. It’s certainly changed, and it’s evolved just like a lot of other businesses through the pandemic, but even before that, Red Roof was changing,

Maureen 1:25
so you stepped in as interim when

Speaker 1 1:29
October 2020

Maureen 1:30
so mid pandemic,

Speaker 1 1:32
mid pandemic, yes,

Maureen 1:33
and you were what role prior?

Speaker 1 1:36
I started at Red Roof as their attorney, I was general counsel, I also was in charge of the crisis management team, which was leading the COVID task force at Red Roof.

Maureen 1:46
So, you understood the enterprise.

Speaker 1 1:48
I knew the business like the back of my hand.

Maureen 1:50
Okay, so fast forward to October 2020 You took the reins as interim president.

Speaker 1 1:56
Yes, yes. And so Red Roof had been through a lot of change, just like the entire travel industry, we saw unprecedented dips in our business. Fortunately, due in large part to the great folks at Red Roof and the task force that we put together, we had survived the pandemic much better than others. We weren’t immune to what was happening in our industry, folks leaving our industry, executives leaving Red Roof, those kind of things. We have a franchise advisory council. It’s made up of franchisees all across the country. We get them together periodically to talk about what their input is on what we’re doing as a business. And we had announced to them about my predecessor’s departure, and one of the franchisees said, “I got to tell you, for the first time in 20 years, I don’t know what Red Roof stands for. I don’t know what Red Roof’s vision is. What is your mission? I really took that to heart. This was a franchisee who had been with our company really for 20 years, and he had been a cheerleader from day one, and for the first time in my tenure at Red Roof, I had heard him say something to that extent, and so I was exceptionally taken aback, and knew that we, as an organization, we weren’t broken, we weren’t a startup, we weren’t starting from scratch, but we had some soul searching to do. I always say being interim president’s like half breaking up with your girlfriend, you have a lot that you can do as interim president, but you have things that that you can’t quite do until you become full go president. I think it was like three days after I was named full-time president of Red Roof that we sat down and decided we were going to reformat and reform our vision,

Maureen 3:37
and so something got you to that point. So the conversation, and I’m going to say, since I got to help with that, I had the great honor of that. I’ll talk not just as an interviewer, but a participant in the process. You put a lot of work in advance of that meeting. It wasn’t just literally,

Speaker 1 3:53
God did not bless me with many things. I’m not very tall, I’m not very athletic, but God gave me the ability to talk, and God gave me the ability to think.

Maureen 4:02
That’s a lot, by the way. I’m not

Speaker 1 4:05
complaining, I’m not complaining. Honestly, there wasn’t a day that didn’t go by from that October 2020 moment up into and through the time that we reformatted this vision that I didn’t think of that day. I constantly was thinking if given the honor to lead such an iconic brand and such an incredible organization, what am I going to do with it? And how am I going to do this? I really said to myself, as I said earlier, it’s.. it’s not a startup. We weren’t broken as an organization. In fact, we were.. we were thriving. We outperformed our competitors during Covid by 20 points, we ran initiatives, we thought outside the box, we did things that no, the travel company did at the time, and that was what really pulled us through. So, it wasn’t that we were broken, it just was that we were, we weren’t focused,

Maureen 4:56
and I think that’s a really important point to make that Laura. World changed during Covid, and businesses and nonprofits and government entities – everyone had to do business differently. So, this pivot isn’t a nod to we were not functioning, it’s a nod to really well-run businesses, the things that made them well-run before, where they were proactive about getting ahead of things, they were prepared and navigated the pandemic as well as they could, and they came out and reevaluated who they were and how they ran, because it made sense, and because there’s an opportunity to jump way ahead of the competition by being proactive at this point in time,

Speaker 1 5:41
right. What I saw within our organization, and many others, as I was very close to other organizations, I utilized my network during Covid to really use the other organizations as a barometer for Red Roof. What I saw is those who embraced the crisis, those who looked the crisis in the eye and said we’re not going to shy away, we’re not going to sit in our office in the fetal position in the corner and rock until this thing is over. Those who did that were the most successful, and I will say that’s what we did at Red Roof. You know, Red Roof experienced all the things that everybody else experienced during Covid, we had furloughs, we had layoffs, we had all these things, and I remember a national sales executive at Red Roof, I was on the phone with her on an unrelated matter with the Vice President of Sales as well, and she said, George, I don’t care if I have to sell one room at a time, I’m doing this for my teammates who are on the sidelines, who are being furloughed right now, so you know when you talk about staring the crisis in the eye, that is the epitome of that harnessing and understanding that spirit within our organization was key to our success.

Maureen 6:57
I want to go back to the point of people in fetal position, because it’s interesting that leaders who were really effective until we hit Covid, many of them did not do well during the crisis, they were effective running well-structured, effective organizations, and they weren’t nimble in time of crisis. I think for me, looking at the work of developmental maturity and things like that, people who can navigate making a change that they planned and they they structured is very different than having a change inflicted upon you, which covert was to everyone, and yet some people did really well at stepping up and stepping out and experimenting, and yes, you’re not going to get it right, you’re going to be directionally correct, and you’re not under your desk, you’re at your desk.

Speaker 1 7:46
I don’t know why, I can’t tell you the phenomenon of why these folks withered, right? And again, like I said, I was in contact with many different organizations, and I saw it all across the board, but what I can say is that I attribute my success in this crisis to my upbringing. I came from Youngstown, Ohio. We lived in a world where crisis was all around us, unemployment was all around us. We grew up with a different type of humility, and so for me, COVID was traumatic, certainly for everybody, but it wasn’t out of my comfort zone.

Maureen 8:27
So, crisis team navigating COVID, general counsel, so that’s a big role. Yeah, stepping into president. Let’s talk a little bit about the vision, because you did a lot of work to frame the vision before we went into the meeting,

Speaker 1 8:42
Red Roof is an iconic brand and iconic company built on almost 50 years of pretty incredible things. So I really looked far, far back. I looked at what our founder, Jim Truman, what his vision was. In order to understand his vision, you got to understand a little bit about Jim Truman. Jim Truman was a visionary. It was an incredible man, incredible leader. He was traveling the country because he was a real estate guy. He was traveling the country, and he saw the need for no frills hotel chain. They just, they just weren’t out there. And so, as either you were staying in kind of a budget motel or you were staying in the Ritz-Carlton, there just wasn’t much going on in the early 70s, and so he decided that it was up to him to start Red Roof in, and he founded Red River Finn, and his vision of Red River Finn, his mission was to provide a clean, comfortable stay and charge less for it, and give outstanding customer service, that is certainly still in the DNA of Red Roof, that certainly still is meaningful to our organization, and as I looked at that, I said, boy, that really does encapsulate, but our business from 1973 to 2021 has completely evolved, and there are stake. Holders in that business that weren’t necessarily included in that vision, and so we really sat down. I mean, the Vice President of Training, myself, you, you were part of this. We really thought through it, talked through it. What does Red Roof stand for? What is it Red Roof about? And then we brought in our senior leadership team, in my opinion, the best team in the business. And we sat down with the senior leadership team, and we really thought through what should this vision be, what should it look like. I think we were successful and committed what that was.

Maureen 10:33
Tell the listeners what it is and why you’re so proud of it. The

Speaker 1 10:38
new vision of Red Roof is to provide the best experience and value in the industry for our guests, our franchise owners, our team members, our partners, and our communities. I’m going to start with the last one first. Let’s talk about communities. Red Roof provided a service during COVID to our communities, everyone, including politicians, think that hotels cater to the out of towners, to the out of staters, which is why everybody wants to tax hotels. But what we learned during Covid is that the red roof hotels were necessary to our communities, were necessary to our environments. We were housing first responders who could not go back to their homes, they were afraid. The early days of Covid, nobody knew what Covid was. Remember disinfecting your packages well,

Maureen 11:32
and not leaving your house,

Speaker 1 11:33
and not leaving your house. And for those who had to leave their house, they were staying with us because they didn’t want to go home. I remember getting a letter, the chief marketing officer, Marina McDonnell, and I received a letter during COVID that said, “Thank you so much for the first responder rate. My five year old son is immunocompromised and I could not go home as a nurse. That’s a community service. Yes, we received consideration, right, but that’s a community service. We were open when nobody else was. Truck drivers who had to continue to maintain the infrastructure of the United States, who had to continue to deliver groceries and food to our grocery stores and to all the different places in the United States, they were staying with us. Truck stops were closed because of Covid, so we came up with a rate where the truck driver could stop, shower, go to the bathroom, sleep for two, three hours, and then get back on the road. We were providing a service to our communities, so communities is of the utmost importance to our organization, and I’m very proud of that aspect. Then, of course, guests, just like Jim Truman, we want to provide an experience to our guests. We don’t trade in hotel rooms, we trade in experiences. We’re an economy hotel. We were born as an economy hotel chain. We’ve evolved a little bit, but we also want to give value as a guest in a hotel room. Your expectation, your experience is based on your value. We know that better than any other hotel chain, and so we want to provide the best experience and give great value to our guests, but also we have franchise partners, franchise owners. We know that their experience with us as a brand is on the forefront of our minds all the time. I could provide the best guest experience, but if I’m not providing a great franchise experience, I’m actually going to harm the guest experience if I’m not growing Red Roof. If franchisees don’t want to be part of my brand, then I’m going to harm the guest experience, because the existing franchisees are going to be unhappy and new franchisees aren’t going to want to come in my system to grow distribution, so our happy guests can have more hotels to stay at. So it’s symbiotic in a lot of ways, and then, of course, team members absolutely do. I want to provide the best experience, not only for the corporate office associate, but also for the housekeeper. I want to provide great experience for them and value. I want them to have a value in what they do at Red Roof. I want them to feel valued, so that is of the utmost importance, and then finally the last category, which is sort of sandwiched in between all of them, is partners at Red Roof. We don’t call our partners vendors, we don’t look at them as supplying goods, we look at them as partners in our business. Now I’m a lawyer, so not in the partner sense that forms a legal partnership that could get me legally in trouble, but no. In the sense that you’re a true partner to our business, and we want to treat you as such. We don’t want to treat you as just a vendor.

Maureen 14:30
And I have to say, as one of your partners, I have always felt that respect through every interaction.

Speaker 1 14:36
It’s a different way of doing business. Not a lot of folks do it this way, but for us, we have been punching above our weight from day one. One of the reasons why is because of our forged partnerships with all of our different partners.

Maureen 14:50
You know, one of the things I remember in that conversation, as we were talking about employees and franchise employees, was the pride people. That is former Red Roof people, the Red Roof alumni. There are organizations where alumni flee, or people flee, and they don’t call themselves alumni. I came out of Accenture, and there’s an Accenture alumni network. It seems very deliberate how Red Roof treats their employees, and yes, people are going to move on to bigger opportunities in some cases, and others they progress within the company. Can you say a little bit about the alumni and why you’re so proud of that alumni network?

Speaker 1 15:29
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I love the best about people is I love to hear their origin story, right? To steal a comic book quote, right? I love to hear the origins of where people came from, what made them who they are today, how they got there. In fact, I think Maureen, when you and I were talking about an engagement at Red Roof, I think I asked you quite a few questions about where you came from, and frankly, that was a big driver in making our decision to partner with you. I care a lot about that, and I’ve been with Red Roof for almost nine years, and when I started at Red Roof, I really was interested in their history, and I spent a lot of time talking to the folks who had been with the company for 30 plus years, and what did they like about it, the nostalgia of the past, what was good about it, what was exciting about it, and how did they buy into this brand. The other thing I studied too was our founder again, Jim Truman. One of the things he did, what I thought was interesting, is he had a headquarters out in Hilliard, Ohio. As part of the headquarters, he had a three hole golf course, I think it was a couple of tennis courts, and an exercise room, and this was in the 1980s and he had told all of his corporate staff that you ought to take time, and I will pay you to do this. I think it was something like three or four hours a week to exercise. I don’t care what you do, go play tennis, go shoot some golf, go to the exercise room, do whatever it is, I don’t care. So think about that kind of visionary leader. And so it was no surprise to me that there was such a strong affinity and such a strong alumni network that one of the things I did is I actually engaged the alumni network, and I went out there, and I said, I want to talk to you all, I want to talk to you all, I want to find out why you guys still are speaking so highly of Red Roof, that you still feel that connection to Red Roof, and I’ve had some great conversations with some really amazing people who look fondly on the years that they spent at Red Roof, and really, how that was a catalyst for the success in the rest of their lives. I talked to a CEO of a major hotel brand who started his career in hospitality with Red Roof, and attributes much and much of his success to that. It’s incredible stories to hear. I don’t think that’s natural, and I know alumni organizations exist for many different companies. I just have never seen one where the outpouring of love to the organization was so incredibly strong, and I was so impressed by that. And to be frank with you, I’d like to harness that, capture it, put it in a bottle, and see if I can give it out, because I think it’s pretty incredible,

Maureen 18:04
you know, the buzzwords now of employee engagement, and those things. Those employees were engaged, and interestingly, as former employees, they’re still engaged.

Speaker 1 18:14
Yes,

Maureen 18:14
they’re still committed to your success, and that’s really exciting.

Speaker 1 18:18
I had a friend of mine post on the alumni page, who manages the page. I had to make a post about wanting to gather this information, and the response was just unbelievable. And they just couldn’t believe one, that you know, a new leader would want to hear about the past, but two, they just wanted to tell their story, and the stories are amazing. We have a whole program planned for next year, where we plan to really try to bring in focus group after focus group of great alumni to really understand and listen from their success and listen to what gives them that warm feeling about Red Roof, and see what we can apply to today’s Red Roof.

Maureen 18:56
As you’re talking about focus groups and listening tours, you’ve just finished a listening tour, also with your franchisees.

Speaker 1 19:03
Yes,

Maureen 19:04
staying in the hotels, yes, not going to a fancy resort.

Speaker 1 19:08
I’ve been to 79 Red Roof since June of this year. I call it my look and listen tour. I made, I think, a bold and likely very crazy statement when I first started at Red Roof in the role of president that I’d like to go to every single Red Roof in the lower 48 which is the bulk of our red roof, 670 red roofs, and I’ve been to 79 of them so far. It doesn’t feel like I’ve made a huge dent, but I’ve got to tell you, staying at those hotels, meeting the owners, meeting the folks working the front desk, meeting the housekeepers, meeting the general managers has been incredibly insightful. It’s been a lot of fun. I’m not gonna lie, I love talking to people, I love meeting people, I love meeting our owners, I love seeing their passion, I love seeing their passion about Red Roof, but it’s been exceptionally helpful in guiding my presidency so far, in giving me the ammunition, the fodder, the ability to understand real. What’s happening at the property level of Red Roof? Because my biggest fear as a leader is that I don’t want to make a decision from a White Tower that’s going to affect 670 properties. It’s just not the right way to lead.

Maureen 20:12
I think that informed significantly. So we had the planning session a few months ago, first one, then all of the meetings and the look and listen tour, and now we’re going to do the next planning session. So, I think that really informs also not just how you talk about leadership, but where you invest your time.

Speaker 1 20:30
Right. Absolutely, let me tell you, it’s a labor of love. I was at 25 properties last week over the span of four days. It’s a labor of love, but it is absolutely critical to the success of this organization moving forward.

Maureen 20:44
Well, if we think about again the arc of time and events over the last few years, crisis of COVID crisis, along with informing industry changes that there is a significant opportunity going forward, and you can best harvest that by connecting to the properties.

Speaker 1 21:04
Absolutely, like I said at the beginning, we survived COVID better than our competitors. There’s a reason we did, and tapping into that understanding, that passion of our team members, the passion of our front desk folks, our general managers, our housekeepers, our franchise owners, tapping into that passion, understanding that passion, harnessing that passion, and using that passion to move this organization forward. It is imperative, and to be frank with you, anybody else sitting in my chair would probably be doing the same thing. It’s that important,

Maureen 21:40
and yet I can tell you some leaders aren’t that whole idea, where you saw the changes in our world and said, Who are we going to be different going forward? There are other people who are still trying to go back to the best of where they were, and they, in many cases, will not be well positioned six months from now.

Speaker 1 22:00
Absolutely not. And one of the things I found fascinating, I was on a panel at one of our industry conferences this year. I had an opportunity to speak with, actually, a franchisee of Red Roof, who was also on a panel. He’s a young guy, he operates several Red Roof inns, and his family has several hotels, and he said, George, what COVID did, it erased the elders, he’s of Indian descent, and his culture, you respect your elders, and that’s never going to change. He still respects his elders, but it erased that experience gap between himself and his grandfather and his father. He said it was so amazing to him that his grandfather and his father were calling him, asking him what to do during Covid. I experienced the same thing. I had CEOs of other organizations asking me, what should I do? I had leaders of Red Roof, I had leaders of our parent organization calling me, saying what should we do, and so it did. It erased the experience gap in a lot of ways, because there was no better or bigger experience than navigating through Covid, but most especially navigating successfully through Covid.

Maureen 23:06
When I talk about innovating leadership or evolving leadership, I use the example of what does a traditional leader look like, and I pull from either politics or TV, and TV’s less emotionally charged, so I think of the show NCIS and Gibbs, and he’s the boss. He tells people what to do, and that kind of leadership got our country to where it is. So, it’s not a criticism. The kind of leadership that gets us to the next level is the one that, in my view, acts more like a scientist than a commander. That none of us knew what to do, but there were those who, if we use the term under the desk or at the desk, those who were at the desk were able to say nobody knows the right answer. What we know is I can formulate a hypothesis, and it’s a well-founded hypothesis, and I’ll talk to my franchisees, I’ll talk to my physician friends, I’ll talk to the people who can best advise me, we’re going to pick a course of action. We’re going to go forward, and we’re going to learn from it. And it seems like you’re looking and listening tours are when we make changes, it’s not an adverse statement about the past,

Speaker 1 24:13
right?

Maureen 24:13
It’s a step toward the new future that you’re creating.

Speaker 1 24:17
Absolutely, that was a lesson we were all learning pre-COVID, but that was a lesson that COVID accelerated the ability to adapt, but to adapt with a mindfulness, a full understanding of what you’re adapting to the change that you were making. Again, it wasn’t an indictment from the past, providing a first responder rate, that’s something that simple, it’s a no-brainer, right, giving a discount to those who are on the front lines fighting this pandemic, but it was a risk, but it was a calculated risk, it was a scientific risk,

Maureen 24:50
it

Speaker 1 24:50
was a well-placed risk, that’s frankly why we were meeting around the clock during Covid. I remember my wife getting upset because I was not. On with my day till 1130 at night, almost every day I started at seven or eight in the morning, but it was because we were deliberating, it was because we were mediating, it was because we were trying to forge the path ahead as quickly and as accurately as we could, but most importantly, we weren’t afraid to screw up,

Maureen 25:18
and everyone was going to make mistakes, and still will,

Speaker 1 25:20
right,

Maureen 25:21
so you have a heavy focus on analytics too. Can you say a little bit about that? Because when you set a course forward, it wasn’t pulling stuff out of the air.

Speaker 1 25:31
I like football, okay? And analytics is a big part of some football teams, and at Red Roof, we’re very fortunate that we have a great mix of the new school data analytics and a great mix of sort of the old school go with your gut, and I see it as my job to be the one that brings that together, that pulls the most out of that. Analytics is going to be something that we use in everything we do at Red Roof, but we won’t forget about the practical, that’s the key.

Maureen 26:04
I taught years ago in an MBA program, decision making, and we looked at what’s the hybrid between strong intuition. Firefighters go into a building and they know when the floor is going to collapse, they’re not measuring stuff, but after years of doing it, they feel how the boards feel. You would call it intuition, but there’s also data they’ve collected over decades, at least the experienced ones. So that sense of gut versus the reports, and the idea that if the reports say something different than my intuition, it’s an opportunity to ask questions of the reports, not exactly, not throw the reports out exactly, but ask if there’s something missing in the formula, because sometimes my intuition is just wrong, especially if my intuition is based on everything before the pandemic, things have changed and my inner algorithm needs to update

Speaker 1 26:55
absolutely, and to take it back to the vision of Red Roof, it’s about experience and value, and so when you look at the data, if the data is not matching with the gut feeling well, the data is telling you, let’s talk about customer experience, right? The data is talking about customer experience, and if that’s not matching your gut, then you got to explore what’s going on, and you’ve got to take a deep, deep dive into what is happening. This look and listen tour going to 79 properties, 25 in a week. It absolutely gives me the insight to mirror and understand what the data is saying as it relates to what’s happening in our properties.

Maureen 27:36
When you make changes real time,

Speaker 1 27:38
yeah, yeah, I changed a brand standard on the spot last week. To tell you the truth, the reason was because it just made sense.

Maureen 27:46
Is that something you can share?

Speaker 1 27:48
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no. At Red Roof, we have the Red Roof Plus brand, and we have a premium room at the Red Roof Plus brand, and part of that premium room you get a snack box, which is a brilliant idea, because typically Red roofs don’t serve breakfast, some red roofs do, but the majority of them don’t. And so this is a great supplement to a breakfast, and it’s part of the room. You don’t pay extra for it, it’s just part of the room, and it’s an upgraded experience. We went into several Red Roof Pluses last week, and we saw that the box was in the refrigerator, and at one of the Red Roof pluses, we went to the box was on top of the dresser, and we asked the franchisee, “Did you put the box there? We’re not mad, it’s against the standard, but why? Just tell us why. He says, “George, our guests don’t see the box in the refrigerator, they see the box on top of the dresser. It helps me because there’s expiration dates on those items in the box, so if they come to the room and never open the refrigerator, they never see the box. If they come to the room and see the box, they’re going to open it. And some folks put the box right back into the refrigerator, and the housekeepers can’t tell whether the box has been used or not. So there was complicating things to keeping the box in the refrigerator, and I said, I think that’s a good idea. He says, do you want me to put in the refrigerator? I said no. And then the next plus property we went to, I asked the general manager, what do you think about keeping these boxes on the dresser? I would love to, it makes so much sense. I said, done, but it’s a brand standard, George. I said, tell him I told you it’s okay. So we changed the standard

Maureen 29:22
that change it on the spot seems to epitomize your leadership style. You’ve got brand standards for a reason, and you’re doing the look and listen tour for a reason. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about how those mesh, because they would sound at odds, and yet knowing enough about you, it makes perfect sense.

Speaker 1 29:40
You know, we talked about it before. I grew up in a place that was different, and it had a different type of humility to me. I try to bring that to Red Roof, and when I’m out there talking to the properties and learning from these owners, I’m ready to make change. I’m not afraid to make change and. You know, what, if it screws up, we’ll fix it. It’s a box.

Maureen 30:04
Yeah, you didn’t go build a building or tear something down. No,

Speaker 1 30:07
we’ll fix it. There’s not a lot of things that we won’t be able to overcome, but we’ll get to great places just by learning. I’m an adjunct professor at Ohio State’s law school, and I teach franchise law. One of the first things I tell my law students, you have to listen to your franchisees. A franchisee invented the Big Mac. Franchisees have innovated all types of different industries. I mean, if you’ve ever sat in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant, which I’ve only had the pleasure of doing once in my life, you see all kinds of interesting gadgets. You see a salt shaker that applies salt to the French fries evenly in five seconds, as opposed to shaking a salt shaker over the fries and taking 20 or 30 seconds. You see, innovation comes from the field. Innovation doesn’t necessarily always happen from a white tower. It comes from what’s actually happening at the properties, and frankly, I mean, moving a box is just table stakes. It’s just what you do,

Maureen 31:10
and it’s the nod to franchisees that their opinion matters.

Speaker 1 31:14
Absolutely, they’re better at running a hotel than anybody you’ll meet. They understand the business, they understand the customer. I would be an idiot to listen to them.

Maureen 31:23
We look at the concept of organizational vibrancy, and one of the facets in vibrant organizations, highly engaged organizations, is we expect innovation to come from all levels. So, your housekeepers know more about keeping house than you do, because you’re probably not cleaning rooms very often.

Speaker 1 31:43
Why? It’s a funny story about that. I think somebody’s going to take a restraining order out on me. I basically followed housekeepers, Steve Woodward, and the Vice President of Training, and I. We said, show us, take us to the room, the laundry room, where you get your chemicals and all of your cleaning supplies. Take us to that room. Show us how you fill your bucket with your water and your chemicals. Show us how you mop the floor, because we saw at the one hotel, we saw how the floors were cleaner, so we wanted to know. Show us how you do it. Another housekeeper, show us your routine. Tell us what you do. Walk us through how you clean this room. One of the things I told the senior team when I started as president of Red Roof, forget everything we’ve done. Everything we are doing, it’s on the table. Everything we’re doing is on the table. We’re going to look at everything, not because everything needs change – we didn’t change a whole bunch – but because everything needed a fresh look.

Maureen 32:40
Let’s go back to the visioning session. The second step was sending the senior team out in groups and having them imagine what it would be like five years, 10 years from now, coming back. What did you take away from that? Because I found that exercise to be really interesting.

Speaker 1 32:58
I felt like I was seeing an awakening, the minds of the senior team opening to where we can bring this organization to how we can take it to a place it’s never been to how together we can succeed and do great things. It was exceptionally inspirational to me and really amazing

Maureen 33:18
it was to me as well, and I heard things about top in the industry, and how people are going to interact as a team, which we’ve all heard those words, we’ve all said those words, and yet my sense was this team can actually get there.

Speaker 1 33:32
No question in my mind, as an interim president of an organization, you sort of try your best to keep things going and push the business forward, but you don’t necessarily have the ability to put your stamp on things, you know. You talk about great days in history. I think that was probably a great day in history for Red Roof. It was a great day for organization to really excel, and it moved our business forward in an incredible way.

Maureen 33:55
And so the next step is to look at how do we work together.

Speaker 1 33:58
Yeah, how do we collaborate? Right, that was another byproduct of that great session. Everybody on our senior team had the opportunity to kind of see into the mind of everybody else, and I think everybody also accomplished something together. The byproduct of that of that meeting was a great vision, and that sense of accomplishment, that sense of pride has really propelled the organization, it came shining through just a few weeks ago in Atlanta and Dallas. Our regional conferences, where we bring our franchisees and our operators to one of the two regionals, and we talk about Red Roof in the future and all the different things that come, and I can’t tell you the positive buzz that resulted from that. I believe it started that lonely day in, I think, was september 1, actually, but whatever that day was, it all started on that day when we put that vision together, and it culminated in the success and the excitement of the folks that attended those conferences, and the senior team.

Maureen 34:55
Most of our listeners don’t know your history at all, so it just sounds. A guy resigned, a new guy took his place, and that same team got together, but this was the result of two organizations coming together as one, new people, different people on the senior team, probably a lot of senior folks are going to say, “Yeah, but it’s never that easy, and it wasn’t that easy.

Speaker 1 35:17
No, it was one of the biggest challenges of my life, to be frank, but I think you got to go back a little bit before we kind of talk about that, about how I kind of ended up where I did. I was leading the crisis team. The last thing on earth I thought about was ever becoming the president of this organization. To be frank, I was pretty comfortable and happy in my job as general counsel, and I was actually happy to be able to dinner with my wife again and child, because Covid had calmed down to an extent that I could have dinner at a normal hour. My predecessor left, and the board of directors came to me at some point, tapped me on the shoulder, said, ‘Get in the game, kid, we’re going to put you in at president. It wasn’t something I asked for. I didn’t say ‘pick me, pick me, pick me. I just said, ‘I’ll do what I need to do to keep this thing going, and if you need me, I’m here. And so, at one point, they said, ‘We owe it to you to let you let you do this. You did an incredible job of keeping this ship going, but the fact is, it wasn’t me. It was a group of senior leaders who got together very early and said, ‘We’re either going to sink or swim. We’re going to make this work. What do we think’s broken? What do we think needs fixed? What can we fix right away. And the first thing we focused on was culture. I don’t know why, but people love to wear jeans to work. We had a longstanding rule: one point you had to donate or something to wear jeans, and then we said, ‘Ah, don’t forget about the donation, we’ll just let you wear a jean on Friday, I said, I don’t care. Does it affect your life if somebody’s wearing jeans? No. So we immediately went to dress for your day, whatever you want to wear, wear, but if you got a meeting with a partner, if you got a meeting with a team member, then dress for your day. Simple, simple things that helped really affect the culture in a very positive way. We implemented right away, watching people who made a decision that we are going to make a go of this, we’re going to give it our all, and whatever happens, happens. That type of spirit is what kept this organization together. I was just a conductor of a fine orchestra, you know, we had quite a bit of excellent musicians, it just needed someone to sort of coordinate that we were a fairly siloed organization prior to October of 2020 It took a lot of time to heal and bring the organization together. We had a lot of executive leadership leave, so we were elevating some folks, so we had some new players coming to the table, and so there was a lot of dynamic there, and just like we talked about listening to our franchisees, it was important for me to just listen to our team members. There was a lot of drama in people’s lives because of Covid, and just talking to them, asking folks, are you okay? How you doing? What do you think? What do you think we can do to make things better? What do you think we can do to effectuate the culture? How do we get it better? Just ask. We talked about a different type of humility. It’s like just ask, people will tell you. I joke when I go out to the properties on the look and listen to her. I joke with our franchisees, I ask them the question, if you were president for a day, what is the first thing you would change? And then I tell them it’s because I don’t have any good ideas, and I’m trying to steal yours. That’s why I asked the question, and you get incredible answers, and get incredible ideas. And I had a good friend of mine who was in finance here at Red Roof. He pulled me aside one day, he said, “George, this ain’t rocket science. It’s really not running this organization, it’s just about doing the right thing, that’s it.

Maureen 38:42
You know, it’s interesting, because my field of study is leadership, and to good leaders it seems like not a big deal. Unfortunately, to bad leaders it also seems like it’s not a big deal. And clearly, I think you are good, or you and I wouldn’t be speaking on air, we would be speaking someplace else. But it’s interesting, as I listen to you, there are themes that continue to come out, and I’m going to tie it back, and the reason I do this, tying things to these models, is it’s repeatable, so the idea that good ideas come from everyone, not from just your senior leaders, it’s the housekeeper, it’s the person at the front desk, it’s the person who owns the franchises. All of them have a voice, and in your head you have some algorithm that you’re calculating how much voice from each one, and that may change at different times. The dress for your day to me epitomizes, I trust my people. Yeah, I don’t need to tell you how to get dressed in the morning, because you’ve been doing that your entire life, that’s

Speaker 1 39:43
right,

Maureen 39:43
and you may need to help a few people on occasion, but you would have needed to help those people anyway.

Speaker 1 39:51
That’s right.

Maureen 39:52
I’ve seen organizations that promote, I’d say, over competition between factions. They will all but stage a cage fight. S to see who wins for resources rather than the senior team that comes together and says we’re going to make the best decision for the enterprise, and sometimes that means I don’t win.

Speaker 1 40:11
You’re exactly right. In the past, folks would they would fight for I need to add headcount, I need to add resources, and so we sat the team down and said, look, we have a limited pie, especially with Covid. We had to tighten our belts. We’ve got to do this together. We’ve got to do this as a group. I kept telling people it’s time to play for the team that’s on the front of the jersey and not the name that’s on the back. We’ve done that. We’ve successfully done that. This has been the best year in the history of Red Roof,

Maureen 40:43
and it was a pandemic,

Speaker 1 40:44
and the pandemic was still going on, and there was all these Greek alphabets hitting us from all different locations,

Maureen 40:49
and they still are,

Speaker 1 40:50
and they still are, and it was the best year we’ve ever had,

Maureen 40:54
and it was largely those decisions that you have a program that if there’s a natural disaster where your hotels support first responders like power line workers,

Speaker 1 41:05
right. Absolutely. Again, we help the infrastructure of America keep going. That’s part of our mission. Again, it’s not rocket science, but it’s outside the box thinking.

Maureen 41:14
It’s certainly highly effective. You know, standing back one might see just a discount hotel chain, and yet once I’ve stepped in, it’s much more.

Speaker 1 41:25
Yeah, it’s not your grandfather’s red roof,

Maureen 41:27
and it’s foundational to the infrastructure. If you think about the trucks going across the country to deliver groceries, and you’ve said it, it’s infrastructure, it’s nurses and docs talking to one of my close friends, who’s a doc, and afraid to go home, she was afraid to walk into her house because she didn’t want to kill her family, and she didn’t want to stop serving her patients. That ability, and that your staff continued to earn an income.

Speaker 1 41:56
Yeah, it was strange time. It was a strange time, but you saw the humanity of people, you saw people like that one. Nash, I’ll never forget her. I always see her, and I tell her this story. She’s probably sick of me telling it, but I will sell one room at a time. You know, I had people crying, you know, they would call me and just cry. It was important that we provided support. It was important that people knew we were fighting for them. It was important our franchisees knew we were fighting for them. One of the best decisions we made during Covid was to keep our hotels open. Some of the folks that closed, for whatever reason, right, just was hard for them to get going again. And we told our owners, who wanted to close, some of them said, “Hey, we’ve got closed. I got no occupancy. I’ve got no employees. I’ve got this. Keep your hotel open, because it’s much harder to get it going once you’ve closed. Yeah, it was.. it was an interesting time, but it was a.. it was a good learning experience, that’s for sure.

Maureen 42:53
People calling you crying, you were the general counsel. I can imagine lawyers make people cry on occasion, that’s usually during depositions. Usually, when I think of the first call I’m going to make to somebody, it’s not my attorney, so that speaks to you as a leader.

Speaker 1 43:10
I always try to be different as a lawyer. I remember being very early on realizing that people only really wanted to talk to me when they had a problem, so it was important for me to create an environment within the walls of Red Roof where people felt like I was someone that they could come talk to, no matter what. I just try to be there again. I’ve been with the organization a long time, so people knew me. They knew me pretty well, and they knew that I was someone that they could rely on.

Maureen 43:36
Thinking about again, back to Covid, the leaders that did the best, in my view, were those who built personal relationships. If they hadn’t before, COVID was the time to let people know you cared.

Speaker 1 43:49
You had to care. You really had to try to understand where people were coming from. Where were they at? A lot of folks were working from home for the first time, myself included. For the first two months of Covid, I sat on a folding chair, and like a 1920s sewing machine was my desk, until my wife finally made me buy a chair. My back thanked her, but I mean, people were experiencing things that they had never experienced before. It was work from home, it was family members who were sick, it was fear, it was the unknown, it was when is this going to get better? What are we supposed to do? You asked earlier about why people calling me crying, I don’t really know, but I think people understood I was dialed in to everything. I think they felt like I had answers, and I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t, but I did my best.

Maureen 44:42
Well, and back to the mind of the scientist, the scientist may not know the exact answer. I worked with a researcher who focused on hearing. I loved her summation to me one day that a good researcher is as happy to prove themselves wrong as right, because you can. Can’t solve the problem of people can’t hear by sticking to what your ego says you want to prove your theory. You got to know when to stop focusing on something. What I hear from you is, yeah, I don’t know, but I can quickly formulate a point of view by talking to the right people, and we’re going to fix this.

Speaker 1 45:20
I can give you an example. Very early on in the pandemic, I spent a lot of time studying. You talk about the scientific leader. I spent a lot of time studying what was happening in China because they were experiencing what we were experiencing earlier, and so I spent a lot of time reading every article I could about how China was reacting to the pandemic, and at one point the idea of sending the sick home was not working, because Covid was so contagious, they were going home, and then they were infecting their family, so the Chinese were so strict that they were standing at your apartment complex with thermometers, and if you had a temperature, they would immediately drop what you’re doing and send you to a gymnasium, and you had to sleep on cots until they could either clear you for COVID or put you into a quarantine. The quarantines were in gymnasiums and cots, and I said to myself, this will happen in the United States, but we’re more humane, we’re not going to let our quarantine folks sleep on cots. The natural place to put them is hotels. So I had strong, strong ties with our American Hotel and Lodging Association. I’d been talking to them all through the pandemic. They were instrumental in helping hotels with the PPP loans. We were talking and they were saying, well, is Red Roof in a position to accept people who need to quarantine because they have COVID or they may have symptoms? I said absolutely, every single one of our hotels is open for business. I turned around, I went to my leaders at the time, I said, What do you guys think about using our hotels as quarantine sites? No, George, we can’t do that. We cannot do that. There’s no way you can put folks with COVID in our hotels, yada yada yada. I had already said yes. I didn’t care at that point. I didn’t care. I knew it was the right thing. I knew it was the right thing for our business. It was really funny because the guy from HLA called me up and said MSNBC wants you to do an interview with them to talk about how Red Roof hotels are open to house COVID patients. I said I don’t think I could go on MSNBC and say this because I don’t have full buy-in from my leadership, but definitely keep our hotels on the list. Our hotels went to every governor in the union saying if you need a place to quarantine folks, Red Roof Fin could be it.

Maureen 47:40
I love the example of do the right thing first, as I talk about the qualities of an innovative leader. It’s focus on doing right above being right. The example you gave is a brilliant one, because doing right is risky sometimes.

Speaker 1 47:56
Yeah, and you know, I didn’t care. It was right for the business, if it affected my job, it affected my job.

Maureen 48:03
Having the courage to do that, not everyone does. You’ve got a spouse, you’ve got a young child. If the owners took action, you could have been another Red Roof alumni.

Speaker 1 48:13
Instead, the owners asked me to put their hotels, non-Red Roofs, on the lists as well.

Maureen 48:17
So that speaks about the owners also.

Speaker 1 48:19
Yeah,

Maureen 48:20
and why you’re happy working here. So, as we’re wrapping up the interview, your expertise as a general counsel, your involvement politically, and your role running a hotel, but also a hotel franchise organization, and also being on the board of the American Hotel and Lodging Association qualifies you to be the go-to guy for policy, so can you tell us about the recent conversation you had with the governor? I

Speaker 1 48:48
had the great pleasure in my life as an adult to live with my maternal grandfather. He was in his 90s, I was just out of law school, he had a fall when I was studying for the bar, and my mom said it’s time you do the thing that a good Greek boy does, and you live with your grandfather for a while, and make sure he’s okay. It turns out I lived with him until I got married, which I think is funny, but it was, it was an incredible learning experience. It was incredible to have the best life mentor that anybody could ever ask for, and one of the things he always told me is life is a two-way street, and you must always open yourself to connections to people. You can’t live in a bubble that translated to my career, and from very early on in my career I was very much involved in politics, which is kind of sometimes gross to talk about, but in general it was about understanding and learning and meeting people, I never thought I’d be in a position of a thought leader for an organization, let alone an industry, but I recall during the height of Covid, Governor DeWine, the governor of the state of Ohio, was looking at putting his stay-at-home order together, and we had some problems with some other. Dates where the language was not clear about whether hotels can stay open, because they were vital, as we talked about, they were vital to the community, and so the order was given to me. I was called by the Governor’s office. Take a look at this, change whatever you need to to make sure that this is an appropriate order for hotels in the state of Ohio. I did, and as a result, hotels stayed open. You know, again, going back to my grandfather, it’s life’s a two-way street. You just don’t know when you’re gonna get a call from the governor’s office about the stay at home order, you know. It’s just a, just an interesting, interesting thing.

Maureen 50:38
Well, and that seems to epitomize how you’ve run your whole career. You’re now in a president role, but it seems like that is the man you have been starting with, living with your grandfather.

Speaker 1 50:49
That’s why I’m not surprised, and that’s why I don’t think it’s really a big deal, because it’s just me, it’s just who I’ve been, it’s just kind of what I do. I don’t really think too much about, I try not to, because again, I try to do the right thing. I think it’s that simple.

Maureen 51:07
It is, and it isn’t. Doing the right thing when you put your job at risk takes courage. Having the courage to discern what’s the right thing, also, when there was no rule or guidepost, it’s your conscience that’s saying it’s the right thing to stay open, so that we can provide safe quarantine locations, because if someone’s sent to quarantine and they’re not sick, they’re going to get sick,

Speaker 1 51:29
right?

Maureen 51:30
And so you’re literally preserving lives, and we didn’t know,

Speaker 1 51:34
but it goes back to being a scientific leader, you know, and it goes back to mindfulness, goes back to thought, you have to think there’s a lot of bad parts about being a lawyer. That’s the best part about being a lawyer, is that you are taught to think differently. You’re taught to think, that’s a skill that I rely on quite a bit. It just seems basic to me, because it’s just thinking, we can all do it

Maureen 52:00
well, and yet you’ve built the muscle, you use the muscle, so it works, and you said people come to you because they trust you.

Speaker 1 52:09
Yeah,

Maureen 52:09
thinking, caring, empathy, and the other one I want to bring back to is closing with the vision that your vision now of Red Roof and the senior leadership team and ultimately the brand’s vision looks at all of the key stakeholders and integrates them into the conversation, including the community, and I think adding the community really differentiates and moves from Truman’s brand to yours, that it’s explicit, not that he didn’t consider the community, but that you are explicitly integrating the community as one of the key stakeholders.

Speaker 1 52:46
Hotels have always been part of their communities. Red roofs have always been part of the communities, but it was really about calling it out and really keeping it top of mind, and not forgetting, you know, we have hotels that have been feeding feeding the homeless for years. We have hotels that have been doing great initiatives and drives, and we have a hotel where the general manager looks like Santa Claus, and he dresses like Santa Claus and does great charity events. So we’ve been part of our communities since the day we started, but just calling it out was so important, letting everybody know, keeping it top of mind. It’s always been part of our DNA, but making sure people knew it, that was important.

Maureen 53:28
So, you’ve been officially the president for about a quarter.

Speaker 1 53:32
Yeah,

Maureen 53:32
this is the first of our interviews. At the end of your first quarter, what’s your invitation for Red Roofers and beyond to be thinking about as a global community.

Speaker 1 53:44
I think that the future of Red Roof is exceptionally bright. I think that we have some of the best team members, best minds in our industry. I think the heights that this organization could go to, the experiences and value that we can provide will be unmatched, and if you’re a consumer out there, I would say give us a shot. If you’re a team member, I would say buckle up, it’s going to be a fun ride.

Maureen 54:14
If you’re a partner, I’d say buckle up, George. Thank you for sharing so candidly, and for being someone that I am personally proud to be associated with.

Speaker 1 54:25
Thank you. Thank you for all you’ve done for us. There’s no question that we would not have gotten this far without you.

Maureen 54:32
You’re the one leading the organization. I appreciate the opportunity, though, to contribute to our listeners. I hope that you are taking away a lot of insight from both how George leads and who George is. As we think about exceptional leaders, there is the checklist of skills, the things I do. There’s also the beingness that, without being a person that people want to follow, it’s hard to lead and. So I am hoping that people are hearing the beingness in addition to exceptional thinking, and we will be back with George in another quarter or so to hear how Red Roof is traveling this journey of innovating themselves as an organization. Thank you for listening.

Unknown Speaker 55:18
Thank