HIP E86 Emily Johnson - Wellness ROI Audit

[Music] The Hotel Investor Playbook. Your guide to building wealth and freedom through hotel and hospitality ownership. [Music] Welcome back to the Hotel Investor Playbook. I am Michael Russell, co-founder of Malama Capital and your host. On this podcast, we talk story about everything you need to know to make money investing in hotels and in hospitality assets. My guest today is Emily Johnson. She spent 20 years in hotels, sales, development and investing and now runs a consulting firm helping boutique hotel owners drive revenue through wellness strategy. Emily, welcome to the show. Thanks, Michael. I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, I want to start because when I hear wellness, I got to say there's a real divide happening right now between lagers orts which are crushing it and let's say your standard mid-market hotel, which I feel like mid-market hotels, I mean they're just getting squeezed on every side. Less demand, higher labor cost. So the question that I want answered is if I own one of these mid-market properties and I'm watching my occupancy slide, can wellness programming actually turn that into a profitable asset or is wellness just like a nice to have feature that only works if you're already winning? I think it's all about the positioning. So Michael, you and I were chatting a bit before jumping on here about I'm seeing it everywhere now too. Everyone's talking about wellness, right? That doesn't mean it's the right strategy for every single hotel. So looking at mid-market, there are some that are so well positioned for it and others that just quite frankly aren't. I talk a lot about finding the right niche. Wellness is a niche and for some it is correct. So I'll give an example without naming a name. There's a great mid-market hotel, I visited in the Berkshires that really wasn't even tapping into their surrounding. Having some of the same issues that the hotel owners and investors we talk about or having, where they are getting squeezed, there's a lot of competition there. I look right in their backyard, they backed up to a beautiful forest that they even said, "Oh yeah, there's some hiking trails back there." I would never have known that from their website. I think some of the best strategies to drive new revenue, when it comes to wellness, is really just tapping into what is already there and then deciding is there a story that can be told about that? All right, well, so I guess I want to know if listeners are hearing that and thinking, "Okay, well, does my property qualify for wellness?" Because I guess my gut says there's limitations, right, with just a regular hotel. A buti hotel on the Oregon coast, with ocean views, hiking trails, maybe it's got a pretty obvious wellness story. But what about a 50-room, suburban property, or a 50-room property in a suburban office park in Phoenix? Are there physical or location-based preconditions that determine whether wellness is even viable, or is this generally something that any operator can apply? I think hospitality is really splitting into two markets. There's a commodity-based lodging that competes on location, like you just said. You're in an office park, there's an obvious need, "Hey, I have to go do business at that office park." And they compete on price and points and then that sort of thing. And then you've got the experience-driven properties that are competing on identity, story, outcomes, that nature, that location. And I think touching on a niche before because I think you have to understand what is my property? Is my property a place people come because they have to go to that office park? They've got to come here. It's location, location, location. Or am I something where without a story, without, you know, that ocean view, people would not even be coming here. What property are you? So I think before asking, "What kind of wellness should we add? Should we become part of this wellness conversation? Where is your business coming from?" Really analyzing what is your business mix? And then what is your competitor's business mix? Is there something you're missing that you could be getting? Well, let's say a property doesn't have great bones for it. Maybe there's no outdoor space, there's no natural light, there's nothing like that. But you want to be competitive in this market and implement some wellness attributes or aspects. Like, is that still feasible even for some of these commodity-based hotels that are location-based, or convenience-based, like you described? And if so, like, maybe can you kind of give us a checklist of what you would look for when you are a value-adding? Let's say a client comes to you and says, "Hey, you know, I want to implement wellness. I want to be competitive." What are some of the things that you would walk through initially when reviewing their properties and say, "Hey, these are obvious areas where we can start implementing?" So, I actually understand why you use a checklist. I like that because I actually developed an audit. I mean, there's a self audit that I think I have for free on my website. And then there's a more comprehensive audit that a owner or GM could kind of run through. And that audit really looks like not just like you said, like maybe we are just a regular mid-market hotel, but we feel like our business travelers, we could be offering them more. And so, this checklist helps them diagnose, like, where are their features already instead of spending more money to make money that are incorporated in the hotel that they could leverage. So, I'll give an example. Like, I love just giving examples of real-life examples. This isn't so mid-market, but there's a new JW in Virginia that implemented, you know, sort of sleep-ready rooms. Dark curtains, dark shades. Now, of course, there's some cat-backs involved in that. But I think they found they have a lot of business travelers who arrive late and are going to meetings in the morning and they really need that quiet, sleep type of room. They had done some research on this. Their own checklist sort of identified, this is the type of traveler coming to us. This is going to serve them and we could now charge $50 extra per night on those rooms for a traveler that wants this type of room. Lower cat-backs, there could be sensory things you can add. There could be activations you can add. I've seen a lot more corporate meetings that look at, what can we add to this corporate meeting? We have this dry meeting space. It's just beige walls. What can we do during this meeting to stretch? Get up. Maybe even just get outside and do a quick walk together while we talk. Networking, break outside. Even if it's not nature, let's just get out of this four-wall room. I think there are low-cost ways to serve the guests you're already having and attract new guests. So maybe your competition is all other box business hotels. But now you're positioning yourself as the one that, hey, we have sort of mindful, friendly meetings where we're going to be able to implement some of these things right into your meeting that the competitors aren't doing. Can you give me a more of holistic picture of what does wellness mean to you and how does it apply to operators looking to implement it? Yeah, and then what about such? I think there's a two-part question there. So the first part when you were talking about even my clientele and what I'm seeing, yes, I do think there's a lot of luxury leading this space and higher end, leading this space. However, almost on the complete opposite side, when I set out and almost formed my company nine months ago to a year ago, I really had that intention. I'm going to work with these independent boutique, etc. What I've really found is there are just a ton of fabulous, smaller properties, retreat centers specifically that are really leaning into this and as well motels. A lot of motel conversions that I've seen as a recent where they're taking something that maybe has been sitting on the market even for two years from an investment standpoint. It's been sitting there for two years. It's got older bones and maybe the destinations and okay drive destinations. But people are coming in to some of these older motels and giving it new life and making it experiential and making it like, hey, this might not be somewhere that's on Michael's radar to come visit, but because there's a story now, myself, you, others are all like, wow, like, hey, I was planning to stay in Milwaukee. Now there's wild rice retreat that I can go to. And it's a whole different thing in the woods there that I never would have intent on there before. But because there's this story and it's in nature, I want to go check that out. I'm seeing a lot of these sort of motel conversions and what I like about that is it's a way to sort of tap into wellness while keeping costs low. It doesn't require the $1,500 a night spend from a guest to tap into this wellness or from the property. They don't need to charge that amount. They don't need to pour in the cap ex to build out a full spa. So going into your second part of the question, I actually think the build out of full spa is I'm still seeing it happen. And of course in the high end luxury, people have come to expect that spa experience. That makes sense. But what I'm really seeing and I where I think there really is this opportunity is for sort of ancillary revenue that is tied directly to activations, tied directly towards bringing in local experts, bringing in just what is the area known for. So I've written a lot about really looking at your, if you're based in South Dakota, what is your town known for? What is the area known for? How do we tap into the local resources that exist here or the local goods, local providers and make that pairing? Because I think that's where it sort of becomes a win-win. You pull in the actual community. You pull in what's actually around you already. Instead of trying to build this infrastructure that doesn't even make sense. And get the community involved because that's another way a hotel can drive ancillary revenue is if I have this expert yoga retreat leader coming in, if they're not hosting a private retreat, I can invite the community and say, hey, we're having this event, this sex per year for five days this week. We're hosting them, but we can invite the community to come participate in this too. And now we've just driven ancillary revenue. Hey guys, if you're getting value out of this conversation, do me a favor and take 30 seconds right now and leave me a review on Apple podcast or Spotify. It literally takes half a minute, but it makes a huge difference in helping other hotel investors find the show. Okay, now back to the episode. Well, can you give an example when you say ancillary revenue? Can you give an example? Maybe a specific case example of one of these motels. that we're missing this component and then they implemented it. What were some of the changes that they saw in either ADR, total revenue, occupancy? What are some of the top line metrics that you saw improve? So I worked with a boutique property in Thailand that was based right on the water, beautiful property, the kind of property we would look at and be like, how is this property not killing it? Right? Well, you guys see a lot of that. But the reality is that's a pretty saturated market. It's a market where there are a lot of beautiful boutique properties on the beach. You can get some of them for probably $30 a night, right? Like, so I think it just sort of did become a little bit of a commodity, even though they were an independent property on the beach. We kind of worked together for a strategy of bringing in specifically activations, different experts, sound healers, mental health healers, medicinal wellness, herbalists, really kind of built out sort of the schedule of different activations they were going to have promote, promote via great marketing. As you said, sometimes the pictures are worth a thousand words. So really making sure they were getting the story out about, hey, here's what we're doing. If you come stay with us this week, this is sort of what's going on. And all of a sudden, they had this immediate uptick actually in bookings. I think one of the first promotions that we did for the following month, they had a 5% occupancy lift. Ultimately, I think in the quarter that we ran the promotions of having these different folks come in, they had, I think it was a 15% occupancy lift, and a $40 ADR lift for that quarter, the following quarter of us during this promotion. And I have some really great stats to share on this case study actually for Thailand because again, like it didn't cost them much to bring in these folks. They hosted them. They hosted these folks, but they really promoted it using their social media, using their storytelling, writing articles about it. So that someone looking and saying, well, I want to go have a beach escape, but this property is doing something a little bit different. And I want to be able to, oh my gosh, that sound dealer looks amazing. I want to be a part of that. And really just you sort of drove the excitement level of the guests to be like, this is different from the other five properties. I've looked at that are maybe purporting wellness, but like I would get there and maybe I can go get a massage. Well, you can go get a massage anywhere in Thailand, really. So like what, you know, kind of creating that the experiential differentiated story was was the whole thing. Okay. Well, you said 5% increase in occupancy. Hey, that's pretty healthy and a $40 increase in ADR. What were they charging before they implemented the amenities? I think they were at like $90 and I, again, this is Thailand where there's a lot of this. They were close to 90 and I, and again, I think a lot of owners are looking for that. They're looking for what can we do immediately? I do think a lot of this does go back to marketing because the reality is I see a lot of, we should do this in wellness and we should do that in wellness. But if you don't tell that story, it's you're doing things nobody knows. Well, look, a $40 increase doesn't seem like much, but relatively it's a 40% increase. Yeah, whether it's Thailand or if it's Milwaukee, if you can go and take a $100 or a night hotel room and increase it by 40%. Operationally speaking, you don't completely blow out your operating cost. If you can improve your NLI by implementing these, then yes, you can value add value engine here. You can really raise an increase. But a 40% increase in ADR that's tremendous. $40 increase in ADR, but here's the big thing too. I'll say, especially since obviously we're speaking to investors here. What you just mentioned about NLI is so important because so many things that increase ADR also come with this, oh my goodness, I had this increased labor percentage. Now I'm paying extra money to bring in XYZ. So even though I just drove $40 near ADR, I had $30 of new expense. Was it really worth it? I think what's so cool about a program like this and why the story is so worth telling is by bringing in sort of these experts, there really was no increase in the expense line. All they were doing is bringing in experts. Sometimes they come to room for these experts. There wasn't this huge expense line. I think that's the thing that we often see with driving ancillary revenue is okay, we've improved the top line, but now we've cut down the margin on the bottom. We don't want that. We want to be able to have that top line increase flow right down to NO. Yeah, now that's a really important point that you're saying. Your suggestion is okay, go find local experts that can implement some sort of whether it's like healthy eating, yoga, exercise, something of that nature, right? And you're suggesting that the cost is not really increased that much because you can calm them nights or something is that correct? Or you can work with them as a local partner. So local is the best, right? Like, again, think about this. So like, and I get that not all these cities have infrastructure. I've wrote about this before too. Like, you know, if you're in a place like Sedona, let's use Sedona as a awesome example. The amount of different modalities of wellness that exists in a place like Sedona go beyond probably things that I've even heard of. You know, we talk about sound healing, music healing, light healing. There's all different experts and what's really neat is by partnering with the local expert. We're not comping the lights anymore. A lot of times maybe they'll take a cut of the percentage that is made on these programs, but they're also building up their community now. Now they're building up a new following of people they've not been able to reach before and maybe bringing in community to your properties. So I also like to talk a lot about empty space, right? Lots of hotels have these meeting rooms that sit empty three, four days a week. If we bring in that local expert and say, hey, we're going to give you a space. We're going to comp you the space. You bring in the community. You're going to take a piece. We're going to take a piece and it's a win-win for everybody. They now have a space to be a practitioner. They can bring in community members who will never been to your hotel. Now they stick around for dinner. They're buying food at the hotel. They're buying a drink at the hotel, etc. They're telling their friends come say at this hotel. These are things that didn't exist before. They just reached out to that local community person. Local partnerships are huge. They don't cost anything except for really a reach out. Yeah. Now, I do want to circle back to one thing that triggered me earlier in your explanation about Thailand. You kind of had this disclaimer that, oh, look, there's a lot of saturation. Everyone's got wellness in Thailand. And that to me is a little bit of a trigger because wellness seems like such a buzzword these days. And so I have a pushback a little bit and ask you, like right now it's trending, but is wellness really something that is sustainable? Because if everyone starts doing wellness, it stops really being a different differentiator. It just becomes table stakes. Like, how long does the market get so saturated that premium just goes away? Well, and it goes back to what we talked about in the beginning. Is it sustainable for everybody? No. There are going to be folks who try to jump in on this trend by throwing a word wellness on their website. I'm seeing it. I'm seeing different programs out there. They're, oh, I'm a wellness list of wellness that no, it's not going to work for everybody because guests can tell very quickly about what's real and what's fake. If I walk into a property that is purporting wellness and the staff just seems depleted and are it, you know, a gym and a spa, but that's it. I'm very quickly going to be like, this is just this was an afterthought they added this in and they called it wellness, right? Guests can tell very quickly what's real, what's fake and they will write about it. They're going to post about it. And so there are properties already that I think have positioned themselves as wellness and people aren't buying it, right? I think folks can tell very quickly, this is really an experience where I walked away and I feel better versus I walked away and felt like no one was there to support me whatsoever. How is this a wellness hotel? It's not. And we're going to see a lot of that. We're going to see a lot of folks trying to jump in on this trend just like we saw in sustainability at one point. We've seen this over and over in hospitality trends that come and go and there are folks that are still genuinely sustainable hotels and that's never going to change and then there are folks that kind of drop that really quick. It's going to be the same thing with wellness. I've heard you talk about doing a wellness ROI audit before recommending anything. Can you walk me through? What is that? What does it cost? What do you uncover for an owner when you go through this process? Yeah, no, thank you Michael. That's a great question. I want to understand the current state before making any recommendations. And I think for any type of consultant that's giving recommendations who doesn't understand the current status of what's going on at the property, those recommendations could be nothing. Without naming names, there's a gorgeous property here in New Jersey. One of the first sort of projects I tried to, I was looking to take on and I'll tell you exactly what happened and this is sort of how the wellness audit was built. Gorgeous property here in New Jersey. I went to visit, they have one of the most stunning spots in New Jersey period. I walked to the front desk and I said, this is great. What else are you guys doing? And he sort of was like, oh, we do yoga like sometimes. Once a week or so, we do yoga. And they sat on like acres and acres of forest. There was just so much going on around them. I quickly realized that they just didn't have the right staff to implement these programs. So there'd be no purpose for me to say to them, here's some great programs you can do. Here's XYZ, ancillary revenue you could do. Here's an upsell. There was no reason for me to do that because the staff wasn't trained to even speak about what they currently had. So staff training is a big one. I talk a lot about, there's no wellness hotel without well staff, without staff that are trained, supported, taken care of themselves. You're not going to have a wellness hotel. And I think that one was a perfect example of that. So going to the audit, the reason why the audit is so important is there's really no recommendation I can make Michael for your properties or somebody else's property without genuinely knowing like what do you currently have? What's going on with the staff? What's going on with current occupancy? And doing a full 360 audit on every touch guess touch point. I book a room. What happens to someone reach out to me? Do I just show up? Do I know? In this past year, let's say I've stayed at 50 hotels, maybe one or two of them have reached out to me ahead of the stay. Do you even let me know what they have on site? What's going on? What I could partake in? Totally miss revenue upsell pre-arrival. That's a big one I'm seeing constantly. Every time I do an audit or every time I look at a hotel, pre-arrival, education, forget revenue, pre-arrival, educating the guests on what is even possible when they come to stay is a huge miss right now. Or maybe I receive one generic email that's like, "Hey, excited to have you at X Hotel. Click here for what's on site." Not what's on site this week. What could pertain to me? Not here are some things you could add on that would make your stay special. So for me going through this audit is doing everything from looking at what's going on in the market, looking what the current online reputation is, pre-arrival, what happens for the guests, they arrive, what happens for the guests, how is the staff interacting with the guests to support them the best that they can, what happens in room, what happens in dining, what happens in fitness. If I go to one of the activations, what actually, I've gone to activations where nobody shows up. I've had things in app that say, "Hey, we're having a sound bath today. I show up there like, "Oh, yeah, we're not doing that today." And I think without really going on site and having that experience and that draws from my past mystery shopping background because I've talked to owner operators. We're like, "Oh, yeah, we do sound baths. So yeah, we do fitness classes." Then I go on site and I realize, "Oh, no, they actually are not offering that." And they don't even communicate that to the guests that they're not offering it. Well, what you're describing makes total sense. There's a business side, which is operations like we've been talking about. And then there's the investing side, which is in real estate, right? If I add XYZ, what kind of margin am I going to see? And I'm just, I'm really looking for a specific example. You've talked a little about where people might have missed. They failed. They didn't realize this. Do you have any other examples besides the Thailand property? We're so really nailed it. We're like, they had very specific positioning. And they went executed well. But most importantly, from my mindset as an investor, how did this show up in bottom line profit? Yeah. I go through this exercise. I expo all this bandwidth to go and provide more value for my guest. I want an example of how I'm going to make more money as an owner and investor. Can you provide that? There is a property that I'm working with right now. I don't want to name the exact name, but super experiential, unique in the mountains. There's nothing around it. Again, I think it was just a traditional property. Okay? That's it. It was doing what it was doing. Nigger earnings. Let's call it like a $200,000, $300,000 NOI each month. Right? So fine. They realized what would they have around them and they built. They did put in a big investment to build sort of these cabins that were full glass ceilings. You could see the night sky. There's nothing around. They put in a large investment on that. So to your point, yes, there was a big, there was a cost on it up front. But the cost was modeled out that we're going to be able to charge. They charge about a thousand dollars a night for those. Right? So now we're going back through the high end. This was basically a motel space. Now they're able to charge a thousand dollars a night and are sold out pretty much through 2020 through the middle of 2027. I've seen their books, right? Like they are legit like turning down business and almost asking like should we have been charging 12,000, 1300? That's almost one of the hardest challenges when you have something so experiential is putting it at the right rate that you don't feel like we're losing money. I think the thousand was right. They started at 750. They moved it to a thousand. Now they're like booked up, but not not like at a point where it's like we could have done more. It's now sort of the right fit and the change to know why when you're charging a thousand dollars a night for the nine units that they have like this is super incremental. We're talking about, let's see. So I'm and that will do math like let's do math together. If they have nine of these at a thousand dollars a night times 30, 30 days and a month and like a lot of that is just flowing straight to the bottom line because they were already in operating entity. They already had the labor. They already had the onsite access and now they've built these and again, like there is the cost upfront that they have to put into building these, but now as they've been open and operating for a while, there's a direct flow right into the bottom line. Okay. Well, we would have to know exactly like, okay, what did they start with? What was their incremental increase? I love that for a podcast like this because I will tell you, I want to tell you a different story with that. I had a different person who was looking at building. She's like, I want to build onsite. I want to build sort of. I don't know if you've seen there's sort of like also glass cabins, like the glass reflective. They kind of fit right into the nature. I think it's not clobo. There's a there's a name brand that does these and she was looking at putting these onsite at her property and we did do an exercise where we ran through the cost of putting those in versus who's coming to the market. Is this the right market for it? And I think it would have cost like 2.5 to get these things set up and we really looked at what was coming to that market. You were not going to get the $1,000 person coming to this market and we pretty quickly realized like this is not going to make sense for you to invest that kind of money. You're not going to get that investment back. So I do want to share that story too because even for me as a consultant, I wouldn't be, oh yeah, just add these cool things until a cool story. Not if you're not in the right market for it. Not if you're going to lose money on it at the end of the day. Only if it's like you're in that spot where again, the first story was somebody again in the planes in the mountains where there were tourists coming who were spending a lot of money, he had the property, he had the land to do it and it made sense. Yeah, that's an important point. I think that this industry is sometimes guilty of people falling in love with having a trophy asset and they invest and they spend on things that don't necessarily provide a return that justifies the expense. I see it all the time. And I led this conversation with kind of positioning of these mid market properties, right? So Emily, like hit it me straight here. Is wellness not really applicable to these lower strata properties, like these motels and such? Is this really only applied to folks going luxury? I still think again, because the retreat space to me isn't necessarily the luxury space. And I'm not saying they're necessarily lower end either, but you definitely mid-scale. I probably put them squarely in mid-scale and I think lower end too. So sharing personal story here, I think I said to you that I participated in a program called She Has A Deal A Few Years ago and I've always been passionate about wellness. The property that I was looking to acquire, which didn't pan out, the owner still owns it, actually, I did a program six years ago. I think they have a number on it that is just, they still own it six years later, so I think that tells you that. But it was actually a holiday in in Cape Cod and I might have kept it as a holiday in or changed it to a holiday and express. What kept me interested was, again, they had land around them right by the beach. There's so many little activations we could have done with that land. They also had a giant parking lot that perhaps could have been cut down a little bit and used for outdoor activities, outdoor activations. We were talking about camping, like we were talking about setting up a little camping site around it. There was a lot of little fun things I felt like could be done and I bring up a holiday in because again, this wasn't a high end thing. It would have been a differentiator. That's the way I see it is. Okay, if I'm a lower end property and there's four other lower end properties, all of us charge $100, right? Maybe in that case, maybe I'm going to be able to charge 105, which for them still is a large increase. And maybe some of the guests that would have otherwise gone to the other hundred dollar hotels are now coming to mind because they're like, wow, like her staff are really trained in helping us feel comfortable. Wow, like they have blackout curtains so that I could really support my sleep. They actually include some very light touches on room with therapy in the rooms, very light kind of things that maybe still I am $100 or $105 hotel, but I'm doing things differently to my competitors and I'm providing a better product. And that is how I think the lower end hotel is to jump on this. They shouldn't see this. We're rebranding as a wellness hotel, but we're still lower end. There's actually another property in Cape Cod right now that I'm hopefully going to get a chance to work with it on exactly this type of project. They were a motel who was recently bought and he's like, wow, we've got this great space around us. We're going to tap into that. They're not going to become a $900 or $900 hotel. That's not happening for them. But will they be able to maybe drive a little bit more rate and ultimately take share from the other properties in the market? I think absolutely. For a listener, maybe who has a property and who maybe they're doing some self-diagnosis, like am I a good candidate to implement wellness repositioning? What are two or three questions they should ask themselves to know if their property is a good candidate for this? I would look at what is your guest mix. So now my sales background comes into play. I spent many years in hotel sales as a DOS. I know how to walk the walk of the real hotel person. I'd be looking starting with what is your mix of guests. Is this a leisure heavy market? Is this a corporate heavy market? And either answer could still lead to how you position the wellness. What makes sense? If you're super corporate heavy and every week you're getting blocked up because everyone's coming into visit the local pharmaceutical companies, happens here in New Jersey, where I'm based, I'm not saying it's not a right fit, but does it make sense to invest in that? Maybe again, it makes sense to provide some sort of corporate wellness package, but probably not to be like, hey, we're the leader in vegan food. Maybe not. Maybe that's not what your guests want. So question one, who is your guest? You've got to know who your guest is. Question two, what are some unique attributes at your hotel that we can tap into? Before we add anything, I don't want to add. I don't like huge cap expense because I've been on this investor's side. What unique attributes does your property already have? Well, we've got a meeting space that sits empty five days a week. Great, let's talk about it. Well, we've got this parking lot. We don't need all this parking. Let's talk about it. We back up to a great walking trail. There's a hotel in Edison, New Jersey that is in nothing hotel that backs up to a fantastic walking trail. Let's talk about what you already have. So question two is, what do you already have? And then question three, because I have to be this sort of contrarian on the the investor side is like, what's the current status of the employees? Are they happy? Do we have great employees? Because great employees are going to provide great guest experience. If they're not great, why is that? Do they need further training? Do they need more support from ownership? What's happening? Are they just not the right fit? That sometimes happens. Sometimes we just don't have the right fit. I think I would be asking that more of ownership is like, even if we implement this awesome program, are your employees going to be prepared to talk about it and be about it? Yeah, that's all great stuff. So you're a consultant. You help owners implement all of this. Who's your ideal client, property size, stage of ownership situation? Yeah, absolutely. I really like working with independent owner operators. Again, sometimes it's an independent owner and they have a GM. If it's a bigger property, my favorite though really are the owner operators because they can quickly understand where should you invest your money that should lead to returns. Is there a minimum threshold in terms of revenue that an operator needs to generate to where your services make sense? I don't think so because at the base level, one of the things that I'm really doing is factional sales support. So I mentioned my sales background. I really offer sort of the wellness audit and true wellness consulting. But the second part, and this really came naturally because most of the owners I was working with, I realized like, I see what the big problem is. You have no sales structure in place. And so for that, like, there's been some programs I've done truly on commission based. That's not my favorite thing because then I'm almost tapping into the travel advisor world which I am also a travel advisor, but it's not my main source of business as a hospitality strategist. I'm really looking at this through the lens of higher me fractionally to lead sales for you. A lot of these folks don't have sales people. We have a lot of motel retreat centers that again, the owner operators trying to do it to all themselves. And I quickly diagnosed by seeing you're not working with travel advisors. You're not actually in the wellness space. You don't know facilitators. They're posting on Facebook, they're posting on Instagram, but they don't actually have any relationships with these with real advisors, with real travel networks. There was a property in Italy I talked to Michael. He's like a castle. He's like a little castle, a ten room castle. When I went on his website to book, it took me to booking.com to book him. I had to help explain to him, so you're giving away 25% because you don't have an actual booking engine on your website whatsoever. I mean, not slow hanging fruit though. That's like, come on. But this exists. I'm talking about it because I've seen this repeatedly. You and I see this as low hanging fruit because we're in this industry. But you have a lot of owner operators out there who do not come from our industry and don't realize that why would you direct somebody from your website to book.com? Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. All right. Well, cool. We'll listen. Emily, I've really enjoyed this conversation and I think that if anyone needs help with designing or programming or evaluating whether or not wellness should play a part in their hospitality business, then they should reach out to you. How can our listeners stay in touch with you or follow what you're building or work with you if this has resonated? Awesome. LinkedIn is great. I've been using that primarily as a great networking tool. You could find me on LinkedIn. So my maiden name, Emily Guretsky-Johnson is how you'd find me on LinkedIn. Elevate hospitality collective. I run a sub-stack now where I'm talking a lot about these things and diving into some of the case studies, some of the areas where you can really tap into those resources. So find me on sub-stack. Excellent. Well, it's great. It's been great having you on the show. For everyone listening, if this episode gave you something useful, share it with someone who could benefit from listening to this episode or any of the others. Thank you for tuning in this week to the Hotel Investor Playbook. I am Michael Russell. Again, she is Emily Johnson and we will catch you again next week. Aloha.