Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / Brand Vision and Barefoot Luxury with Sean Dee of OUTRIGGER Hospitality Group

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Brand Vision and Barefoot Luxury with Sean Dee of OUTRIGGER Hospitality Group · The Inspired Stories Podcast

0:04
Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast,
0:07
where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from
0:11
their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome
0:14
adversity. As you listen today, let one
0:17
idea shape what you do next. My name is Anthony Kotaspodi and
0:20
today's guest is Sean D, Executive Vice President and
0:24
Chief Commercial Officer at Outrigger Resorts and Hotels.
0:28
Founded in 1947 in Honolulu, HI, Outrigger has grown from a
0:33
single beachfront hotel into a global portfolio of more than 30
0:38
premier beachfront resorts, hotels and condominiums across
0:42
Hawaii, the Asia Pacific and Indian Ocean.
0:46
At the heart of that growth is the Outrigger Way, a values
0:50
driven philosophy centered on caring for guest, host and
0:53
place, which is expressed through heartfelt hospitality,
0:57
respect for local culture, environmental stewardship and
1:00
authentic community connection. Sean leads the global marketing,
1:05
sales, distribution and revenue strategy, strengthening
1:08
Outriggers brand positioning while ensuring every touchpoint
1:11
reflects both commercial excellence and cultural
1:14
authenticity. Before joining Outrigger, he
1:17
served as the chief marketing officer at AEG Worldwide and
1:22
Hard Rock International. He also helped pioneer digital
1:25
campaigns for Levi Strauss. He currently chairs the Hawaii
1:29
Visitors and Convention Bureau and was named one of HSMAIS Top
1:34
25 Extraordinary Minds in Hospitality.
1:38
Sean brings a powerful blend of brand vision, commercial
1:41
discipline, and cultural stewardship.
1:44
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2:35
All right, back to our guest today, the Executive VP and
2:38
Chief Commercial Officer of Outrigger Hospitality Group,
2:41
Sean D Thanks for making the time today.
2:44
Happy to be here, Anthony. So you graduated from Stanford
2:49
with a degree in Poli sci, but somehow found your way into
2:53
marketing. How'd that progression take
2:54
place? Well, you're taking me back, so
2:59
I get a little revisionist history with it.
3:01
But yeah, I was blessed to to attend Stanford.
3:05
Awesome, awesome experience. There is a political science
3:08
major, which is pretty much a ticket to law school undergrad.
3:12
Stanford doesn't offer business programs, right?
3:15
So it's it's liberal, liberal arts school, pre Med, etcetera.
3:19
But I went down the poli sci path, which I which I quite
3:22
enjoyed. My father was an attorney.
3:24
I had two uncles that were attorneys and it sort of dawned
3:28
on me that there's a lot of attorneys in the world.
3:30
So I was not geared up for law school necessarily coming out.
3:35
But interestingly be before and during my time at Stanford, I
3:38
worked in the television industry in Los Angeles.
3:41
So my uncle Ernie Chambers, who's still with us going strong
3:45
at 97 years old. So if Ernie happens to listen to
3:47
the podcast, I've got plug for my uncle Ernie.
3:51
He was Merv Griffin's partner for many years.
3:53
And so they worked on tons of shows together and I interned on
3:57
a few of his shows over the years when I lived in Los
3:59
Angeles. So I was super intrigued with
4:02
the the broadcast space and but I love the Bay Area.
4:07
So unfortunately, back when I graduated from Stanford, there
4:11
just weren't very many broadcast opportunities.
4:13
And so I spent a summer at Stanford after I graduated in
4:17
what's called the Mass Media Institute.
4:19
It's kind of a little unknown program that's under the quad at
4:23
Stanford. So they have a full production
4:25
studio there. They train people on production
4:28
careers even though you can't get a degree in it.
4:31
And so it kind of further reinforced how much I enjoyed
4:33
that side of the business, kind of a mix, as you know, from what
4:36
you do of the creative side of of of, of life as well as the
4:40
business side, right? But again, just the pickings
4:42
were slim in the Bay Area. There's a couple production
4:45
companies at the time, a lot of local broadcast, but just
4:49
nothing of significance. And I, and ironically, I hadn't
4:52
thought of this until now. I reached out to my Uncle Ernie
4:55
and said, you know, I'd love to stick with the broadcast.
4:57
I really enjoyed working with you.
4:59
I love the the business. It's not working out here
5:02
geographically for me to stay. And he said, hey, have you ever
5:05
considered working in advertising?
5:07
I said, not really. I said, I don't really know that
5:09
industry very well. And it turns out he had started
5:12
as a writer in New York early in his career.
5:14
He wrote for a show for The Smothers Brothers.
5:16
He wrote for a bunch of the early broadcast variety shows,
5:20
which ended up taking him to Los Angeles, which ended up taking
5:23
him through his career. And so I always enjoyed spending
5:26
time with my with my Uncle Ernie.
5:28
And so I applied to probably 5 or 6 of the biggest agencies
5:32
that I could find without basically a total cold call.
5:34
I didn't know, didn't know these people.
5:36
At all. In at all other than, you know,
5:39
a degree from Stanford and political science and a
5:41
certificate for the Mass Media Institute.
5:44
And I got 2 responses of the the five or six back and one of them
5:50
said, well, we have nothing in the, in our production
5:53
department. So most ad agencies back in the
5:55
day were very TV driven, right? So broadcast TV production was a
5:59
big part of how they made money. Their margins were really tied
6:01
to big TV spots and the the production associated with it.
6:06
And then to now we got nothing really.
6:08
Production jobs are slim, but we do have a media department,
6:11
which I didn't know much about. And the media department always
6:14
had openings, high churn, basically the entry level way
6:17
into agencies at the time. And so lo and behold, I accepted
6:21
a position at Foote Conan Building San Francisco, which
6:24
was the largest agency in San Francisco at an entry level
6:28
assistant media planner, making a whopping 17,000 dollar $17,500
6:36
a year at the time to join the. Right year with this.
6:38
FCB 1989 March of 89. Now ironically, I had worked my
6:44
way through college as a chef and so another uncle of mine had
6:49
started a bunch of restaurants in Southern California and I
6:52
kind of, for lack of a better term, apprentice under him.
6:55
And I love cooking and it was just something fun to do.
6:57
And then at Stanford at nights, I'd love to work at this
7:00
restaurant, Pearls Oyster Bar, which is no longer with us, but
7:03
it was a super neat, fun, kind of funky boutique restaurant and
7:07
an oyster bar. You can kind of get a sense of
7:09
what it's all about. Two person kitchen, open air
7:11
kitchen, back when open air kitchens weren't even didn't
7:13
even have a term called if it's just the way our kitchen was set
7:16
up right. And big glass kitchen, etcetera,
7:19
fresh seafood every day and super popular place.
7:22
I made more money working at that restaurant than I did my
7:26
first 2-2 years in advertising. And so I continued working at
7:29
the restaurant. So I had two jobs basically, but
7:31
my, my career started in advertising.
7:33
And again, the desire it's, it's a, it's a lesson I tell people.
7:37
As you think about your career, you know, think about the
7:40
bullseye, like what's the perfect place for you?
7:43
Where do you want to be? Location, type of job, type of
7:46
industry, type of company, all that right?
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But it's very rare that you're going to get that coming, coming
7:51
out of the gate. You may never get that.
7:53
But as you build a series of concentric circles out, what are
7:56
you willing to sacrifice? Is it location?
7:59
Is it comp right compensation? Is it the type of industry,
8:03
right, etcetera. And those open the doors, right?
8:06
And so that's effectively what what happened to me.
8:08
You know, I wanted to get a broadcast production job in LA.
8:11
I ended up in advertising and media in San Francisco, right?
8:14
Location trumped everything else at the time, right?
8:17
And so it's kind of the the rest is history.
8:19
So a proud advertising background.
8:21
I mean, that industry's been decimated and obviously
8:23
consolidated over the years. But back in 1989, it was, it
8:27
was, it was a good start to my career.
8:29
And as you're moving along through your career, it's not
8:31
like you're settling at these different stages.
8:34
It's oh, I'm exploring something new.
8:37
Am I understanding your mindset right?
8:39
I think so. I mean, I, people ask me a lot
8:42
about wow, you've had such success over the years at you
8:45
know, and I'm, and I'm proud of that.
8:47
I'm proud of the, the places I've been and the
8:49
accomplishments that, that that have transpired kind of along
8:52
along along the ride. And I, and I think the
8:55
consistent formula for me has been do your job great, right?
9:00
Nail the job description they, they expect you to do and then
9:04
take on additional assignments and not always within the
9:08
company. They can be in the community,
9:09
they can be, you know, in government, they can be in
9:11
foundations and volunteer work that you do.
9:14
But nail the core role that you're being, that you're, that
9:16
you're, you're focused on that they're paying you for, But see
9:19
if you can find other things of interest to you that you can
9:23
also commit time and effort to. And so early in my career, you
9:26
know, I was always just intrigued because I had a
9:28
broadcast production background. I just would bug the heck out of
9:31
the producers. So I my job would end at
9:34
whatever, 5/6, 7:00 at night and I'd go upstairs and typically
9:38
the creative department, I was on the 3rd floor, was on the 4th
9:40
floor and these people would work till 2:00 in the morning.
9:43
A lot of them didn't come to work till noon.
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I said the creative department kind of had its own cadence, as
9:48
you would imagine, but I just like to see what they're doing,
9:51
how they're doing it, who they were we're working with.
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Because to be that was the the energy, if you will, of an ad
9:57
agency. It's the creativity, the art
9:59
directors, the copywriters, the producers, they're effectively
10:02
creating new content for brands every day.
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The IP that ultimately my role was to place that right to find
10:10
whether it was on outdoor billboards, radio, print
10:12
broadcasts obviously played a big role.
10:14
So my department put that out into the into the ether, I put
10:19
it out into distribution. But the content, sort of the
10:21
magic, the, the brand meeting, the storytelling was being
10:25
produced on the 4th floor. And so I always had an interest
10:28
of what's happening on the 4th floor.
10:29
And you'd be amazed how many people let you into your office,
10:32
let you into meetings, even if you're technically not in their
10:34
department. They're like, all right, the
10:36
guy's good. He's going to keep bugging us.
10:38
We might as well let him in. So this wasn't about like, oh,
10:41
I'm going to earn some overtime here and get some extra pay.
10:43
This was more about how do I get more exposure to more things,
10:48
broaden the experience and skill sets that I have, and meet more
10:51
people that, you know, could help me sort of evolve my
10:55
career. Yeah.
10:57
No, there's definitely was no, no incremental compensation
11:00
associated with it. But I can tell you from that
11:03
early days, I mean, this is going back 30 years, I still
11:07
have friends from those impromptu meetings on the 4th
11:11
floor of the creative department of Foote Cone, more so probably
11:14
than I do from the media department that I actually
11:16
started it right. And so those became friendships
11:19
and relationships. And in fact, I'm heading down to
11:21
Southern California in about a week and a half to spend some
11:24
time with two of those people. They both now own agencies.
11:27
They own advertising agencies, one in San Francisco, the other
11:30
just north of San Francisco. And so we've stayed connected
11:33
all these years later through those, through those
11:35
relationships. So before we get to what you're
11:38
doing current day at Outrigger, let's pick maybe one or two of
11:42
the really cool stops that you had along the way.
11:44
Tell us about some of the work that you were doing at Levi
11:46
Strauss. Maybe pick one particularly
11:49
interesting project. So great question.
11:54
It's interesting because despite my desire to get into the
11:58
production space, I never ended up being a producer.
12:02
So after a number of years in the media department, think
12:05
about two 2 1/2 the, the next transition, if you're not going
12:09
to get into production, which is tough to break into, is the
12:12
account management side. So the account management side
12:15
for your listeners who may or may not know about it really is
12:18
kind of the business side of the agency, right?
12:20
So you're connected to the client, the client, you know,
12:23
at, at, at the time is the one making the decisions on
12:26
marketing allocations, making decisions on creative processes,
12:30
media buys, whatever, whatever it may be.
12:32
You're making recommendations as the agency partner, but the,
12:35
the, the account side plays that key role.
12:38
And think of the account person as sort of the, the, the
12:41
conductor of the agency. You're working with the creative
12:44
team, the production team, the media department, the research
12:47
departments, whatever, whatever it may be.
12:49
And so your job's to synthesize all that back to the client in a
12:52
simple like one hour meeting, say, here's all the stuff we've
12:54
been doing for you. Here's the outcome.
12:56
You know, here are the next steps.
12:57
Here's how it's going to move the needle for your business.
12:59
And so I moved from media to account management.
13:02
I worked, I, I did that for about four years, three to four
13:05
years. And it's a true story.
13:07
And people don't don't believe me, but it's, it's as AI now is
13:11
kind of taking over. I'm trying to learn from some of
13:13
my lessons taught back in the, in the mid 90s or so.
13:17
So in the early, early to mid 90s, e-mail was was brand new,
13:22
right? I mean that it's hard to believe
13:23
that we worked without e-mail for a period of time right in
13:26
our careers, but we did. So you get an e-mail address
13:28
back in the early 90s so you can communicate with the department
13:31
upstairs, which seems like why, just why just walk upstairs?
13:34
Why do you need any e-mail e-mail, right?
13:36
No one saw the power of the efficiency, the real time
13:39
communication advantages that you would have.
13:42
And so the client at the time, so I was account management from
13:47
media account management and I was blessed to be placed on the
13:50
Levi Strauss core account. Levi Strauss was not the
13:53
biggest, but was one of the biggest accounts that FCB had,
13:55
is probably the one that made the the most famous.
13:57
They'd had the account for the entire history of Levi Strauss.
14:00
I mean, that's how long that relationship had gone, had gone
14:02
on. And the engine at the time was
14:06
TV spots, right? Levi's produced award-winning TV
14:09
spots that moved the needle consistently.
14:11
And at the time, Levi Strauss had over 50% market share in the
14:14
US. So literally one out of two
14:16
people owned a pair of Levi's, right?
14:19
So that's pretty, pretty powerful.
14:20
It's a big, big brand and globally was growing and
14:23
expanding and was a massive brand.
14:25
So the production world for Levi's was incredibly lucrative
14:29
from a agency perspective. That's where we generate the the
14:32
most amount of our profits. When you're running and
14:35
building, you know, million, $2,000,000 TV spots and then
14:38
campaigns at the time, we'd be investing 15, twenty, $30
14:41
million in a six month TV campaign.
14:43
But again, it moved the needle for a company that again ran 50%
14:47
market share. Our talent budgets were in, you
14:50
know, the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
14:52
We worked with some of the most expensive but most impactful
14:56
talent, right? These are celebrities at the
14:57
time. It's the Brad Pitts of the
14:59
world. You go look at the history of
15:01
actors and actresses that launched their careers.
15:04
Many of them started actually by starring in Levi's commercials.
15:07
And that's not just here in the US but also in the UK.
15:11
So the client at the time, rest in peace.
15:15
Unfortunately, gentlemen, that's passed away.
15:17
He came to me and said, hey, Sean, we missed budgeted and we
15:21
have some savings, right? And we have to use the money in
15:24
the calendar year. This is 199394 time period.
15:29
And he said, you know, I'm interested in in e-mail and the
15:31
Internet. Like could we use e-mail as a
15:34
marketing channel? It's a great question.
15:36
I said, well, we use it internally.
15:38
I said, I hadn't thought about using it externally.
15:41
And so we literally created a, a, a e-mail address for Levi's
15:46
and we ran it in a single ad. And for it was for Levi's silver
15:51
Tab jeans, which at the time was kind of the innovative Youth
15:53
focus Jean product that we were rolling out and.
15:56
And this was 93 or 9493, OK. Yeah, 93 and summer of 9093 and
16:04
is in a magazine, I don't even know if it exists anymore called
16:06
Details magazine. So Details was sort of a, a
16:09
men's focus fashion magazine and we ran a single ad.
16:13
We're silver tab jeans. The campaign was shot by a black
16:16
and white photographer, Albert Watson, prolific photographer.
16:19
And he was mad. He's like, you don't, I don't
16:21
want you to mar my beautiful ad I did for you guys with this
16:24
little. I said, well, we already put the
16:26
800 number in so you can call Levi's using the 800 number.
16:29
I said, what's the difference? Albert?
16:30
He's like, I don't even know what this Internet thing is.
16:32
Like what's e-mail? I said, trust me, it's not going
16:34
to be a bad thing. So we, we ran the single ad and
16:37
we had something like 2500 / 2000 emails.
16:41
We got off the single ad back in 1993.
16:43
And so the client and I said that's interesting.
16:46
Like that's way more than we expected.
16:48
About a month later, we convened a meeting within Levi Strauss of
16:53
the head of consumer affairs, right?
16:55
So this is the person that oversaw all the 800 numbers,
16:58
Brett Ladov. If he's out there somewhere,
17:00
Brett, I'm giving you a nod. So he joined the team, a
17:03
customer service person joined the team, their IT lead.
17:08
Her business card. I can't make this up.
17:10
This is how awesome Levi's was. Her business card, I'll always
17:13
remember was global. Her title was global Keeper of
17:17
knowledge. OK, so she was the head of IT
17:21
myself on the agency, this client, and their goal was not
17:26
about connecting with consumers per SE, but they were managing
17:29
over 25,000 phone calls a month. So people would call Levi's 800
17:33
number to try to figure out where to buy the Levi's.
17:36
If they look for a specific gene type, where to get it, you know,
17:39
can I return my jeans like the five in one guarantee?
17:41
All the crazy things people would call, like who calls Levi
17:45
Strauss for that stuff? But 25,000 people a month did.
17:47
So we had the staff operators, right.
17:50
So his thing was how do I reduce the churn rate that we've got
17:53
within the call center? And so the e-mail solution was
17:57
his solution. Our side of it was like, wait a
17:59
minute, we may have found a way to connect with consumers here
18:02
before our competitors were doing it and started to think
18:05
about what are the other things we could, we could do.
18:08
And ironically, the production offices at Foote Cone, the
18:12
agency I was with had and very early what they call an Avid
18:15
system. You, you may remember that name,
18:17
but Avid systems were basically where you would create
18:21
television spots in an analog environment before you spent all
18:24
the money to go into a production studio to build the
18:27
spot to Air Levi's. Foote Cone and building was the
18:29
first agency in the country to have an Avid system.
18:33
And so late at night, I'd be talking to the guy in the Avid
18:35
system saying, what are you building?
18:37
He's like, well, we're building this stuff.
18:39
I said, well, how do you share back with the creative
18:41
directors? He said, Oh yeah, we use the
18:42
Internet. It's called they called the blog
18:45
internally, but they would send the the raw unfinished 32nd or
18:49
62nd commercials back to the creative team in house and that
18:53
group then and they. Had the bandwidth to actually
18:55
send the piles of those sides. Yeah, because it was there.
18:58
And so it became very interesting.
19:00
And, and I'm bringing this kind of full circle, a little bit of
19:03
serendipity from my time at Stanford.
19:05
My 2 roommates at the time, there's five of us living on a
19:09
flat on petrol, Petrol Hill in San Francisco.
19:12
If you have any San Francisco listeners, they'll they'll know
19:14
what I'm talking about. And my 2 roommates, 1 was a
19:17
photographer, the other a computer science major.
19:21
His father was the head of computer science for Yale.
19:24
And unbeknownst to us all, the universities had been using the
19:27
Internet for years. And it's basically how they
19:29
shared research results with each other real time between the
19:33
different computer science departments, right?
19:34
So the Internet was a real thing for academics, for schools, it
19:38
just wasn't a consumer facing type of application yet.
19:41
And so they were using, interestingly they were using
19:45
the Internet to communicate with their dad back at Yale who was
19:49
working on the original Adobe software for Photoshop.
19:54
And so they would at night sit pixel by pixel, literally pixel
19:57
by pixel to build the programming software that would
20:00
become Adobe. So again, a series of
20:03
circumstances, interest in production, a client that wanted
20:06
to take take a risk and about a year later.
20:09
We launched levi.com. We were the first consumer brand
20:12
that. Was.
20:13
Early on the Internet and we came out of a a savings from a
20:16
talent budget, from a production department.
20:18
It was an internal department doing something else, but sort
20:21
of connecting the dots. It was relationships with people
20:24
in the computer science community, the IT community,
20:27
right? And then a desire by a consumer
20:29
affairs person at Levi's not to have to answer 25,000 phone
20:32
calls that led to launch of levi.com.
20:35
Sean, this is what I call a Forrest Gump story where you are
20:37
somehow serendipitous, like at all the intersections of these
20:41
big life world changing events. It's world changing for sure.
20:47
I mean, none of us could have predicted what transpired.
20:49
And it's interesting. I, I, I've been in a lot of AI
20:52
meetings recently and you know, I try to explain to my team the
20:56
parallels from the early, early days of the Internet, right when
21:00
we had literally, you know, even pre 14.4 modems, like the dial
21:04
up sound that we had, like the concept of downloading video
21:07
back then unheard. There's no such thing.
21:10
You didn't have the bandwidth to do it didn't make any sense.
21:13
So, and I tell that to you and all, it's funny when I try to
21:16
give these parallels to my awesome talented team of people,
21:19
all it really does is reinforce how old I am.
21:21
But my point is, back then Netscape ruled the world, right?
21:25
No one knows it is now, right? That was the browser.
21:28
So which AI tools are going to win?
21:30
We don't know, right? You're going to have to make
21:32
some bets, right? Some have some advantages versus
21:34
others. Obviously Google's got some
21:36
advantages with Gemini. You've got the darling of the
21:39
date, Chet GBT. I mean, but back then
21:42
everybody's rushing to be the browser of choice, you know, for
21:44
the world. And so this, what we're going
21:46
through now is I think a different phase of the work that
21:49
we did when the Internet became a consumer facing tool.
21:52
And then as obviously bandwidth increased, thought that
21:55
everything changed, right And the speed now the technology
21:58
adoption is just incredible, but back then went through a lot of
22:01
the same, the same challenges. So this is an interesting point
22:05
to sort of diverge for a second because, yeah, with the
22:08
experience that you had being such early days of the Internet,
22:12
right, you're having conversations.
22:14
People didn't know what e-mail was.
22:15
They didn't know what Netscape or browser was Today, you know,
22:18
if you're half our age, nobody knows what Netscape is today.
22:21
But what do you see? Where do you see AI going?
22:26
Where are you like, oh, here are the parallels.
22:28
Here's what I think we're going to see in the next 612 eighteen
22:32
months. Well, again, I mean, I'd be
22:35
remiss not to say I'm trying to channel, right, trying to go
22:38
back to my experiences, even though it's been many, many
22:40
years and trying to lay those parallels forward so you don't
22:44
make the same mistakes twice. It's, it's, it's so funny that
22:47
you asked that question because I had a meeting this morning and
22:51
I made the comment which is, look, everybody makes mistakes,
22:53
right? And I make them, I make them all
22:55
the time. I don't like to make the same
22:57
mistake twice, right? That's, that's an issue.
22:59
That's something's, something's wrong, right?
23:02
I've, I've not learned, I've not accepted.
23:05
I'm too stubborn, right? But you don't want to make the
23:08
same mistake twice. You're going to make mistakes.
23:10
That's just a guarantee. So I remember when we launched
23:13
levi.com 1994 and the VP of marking.
23:17
So I'm still on the agency side. The VPN marketing, who great,
23:22
great leader for Levi's, did a lot of work for Dockers.
23:25
He basically created the Dockers brand.
23:26
People forget that that's Levi's product.
23:28
That's a whole interesting story in and of itself because he
23:31
created the concept of Casual Fridays.
23:33
That's the truth. That's a true story.
23:35
Levi Strauss created Casual Fridays so people would wear
23:38
denim and Dockers to work instead of the suit back.
23:42
And everyone wore a suit Monday through Friday, right?
23:44
And they created this concept. They did it through a third
23:47
party so that people didn't know that it was coming from Levi's.
23:49
But he created the concept of casual Fridays, which now, I
23:52
mean, look at us, right? It's casual every day.
23:55
But back then that is a monumental, you know, shift, a
23:59
seismic shift in what people wore at work, right?
24:01
But huge benefit to a company like Levi's that's a casual
24:04
clothing giant. He came up to me after we
24:06
launched levi.com. He's like, you know, this is
24:09
pretty cool stuff you're doing. And we, we had awesome partners,
24:11
organic out of the US, out of San Francisco that I think is
24:15
still around a company called Lateral, which became obsolete.
24:20
But like that's the name of the company.
24:22
The owner chose to pick that name.
24:24
So when they became the next company, So very creative,
24:27
interesting people that we work for.
24:28
John Baines was his name. John, if you're out there, you
24:31
know, just amazing talent. So we worked with all these
24:33
talented people and we created a very compelling, very early day
24:37
interface. Very slow, right?
24:39
But you could see as technology would increase how you know,
24:43
you'd be able to integrate video, you'd be able to
24:45
integrate moving graphics, you'd be able to integrate, you know,
24:49
anything that you wanted in now a 24/7 real time medium that had
24:53
never existed before, right? Everything back then was built
24:56
on you tune in at 8:00 to TV and that's how brands got their
25:00
messages out. We got a minute, 30 seconds
25:03
right in the pot in the break, right?
25:04
That's it. So hopefully people TuneIn at
25:07
that time, but the concept of we can deliver messages to a
25:10
consumer about a brand in real time anytime was completely
25:15
revolutionary at the time, completely pioneer and it
25:18
changed how we had to think about what we were doing right
25:20
because consumers live 24/7. 365 brands typically work like
25:25
business Monday through Friday, 8:00 to 5:00.
25:28
Well, if a consumer reached out to us on the Internet at 9:00 on
25:31
a Saturday, they don't don't want to wait till Monday to hear
25:34
back, right? And we weren't staffed to, we
25:36
Levi's wasn't staffed to respond to those people.
25:38
So we'd get early negative feedback on wait a minute, you
25:41
sent me a message, I sent you a message.
25:42
Why did it take you 2 days to get back to us?
25:44
Right? So coming full circle, trying to
25:47
learn from those lessons in the early days, I'll never forget
25:51
VPN marketing after we launched the website setting.
25:53
Great, Sean, you've lost the project, you're done.
25:56
When can you move on to something else?
25:58
I said, no, man, I said we're not done.
26:01
We just started, scratched the surface, a whole new business
26:06
that we've got to fund and resource.
26:07
And he looked at me like, well, we paid for this out of savings.
26:10
We don't have anything budgeted for next year.
26:12
And I'm like, well, we're going to have to figure this out.
26:13
I said this is going to be a game changer and in fairness to
26:17
to Levi's as a company, very innovative, a lot of firsts that
26:20
they did, you know, across the board and they recognize they
26:23
didn't know exactly what would come out of this, but a direct
26:26
to consumer, you know, type of communication from a brand was
26:30
powerful, right. And so Bill's loyalty, right,
26:33
It's just it's it's it's for a brand, you know, it's the Holy
26:38
Grail, right. And so, yes, so in terms of what
26:40
I think about AII don't know, I'll be totally honest.
26:42
I mean, I've, I've studied it for years.
26:45
It's, it's not new, you know, it's been around in many
26:47
instances. We use it for everything from
26:49
our call center. We handle probably 50% of our
26:52
call center calls now go through some sort of an AI tool, right?
26:55
Try to get smarter and faster so you don't have to sit there and
26:57
wait to talk to a human to answer a simple question that
27:01
our AI tool may have to use. So we use a, a tool we call
27:04
coral, right? We're an oceanfront facing
27:06
brand. Almost all of our resorts are on
27:08
beaches. Coral reefs play a big part of
27:11
it. So we nicknamed our AI bot
27:13
Coral, right? So you're going to basically
27:15
interact with Coral more now than ever before.
27:18
So for us. And I do this through your
27:20
website. Correct.
27:21
But no through our call center, well actually it both but chat
27:24
through the it's called Coral also, but chat through our
27:26
website. But through the call center
27:28
where we get thousands and thousands of calls a week, if
27:30
not million over the course of the year, about half of those
27:34
calls now are handled by by Coral.
27:37
And it's only going to grow and that's only going to get smarter
27:39
and better. So I call into an Outrigger
27:42
number. Now there's a one and two chance
27:44
that I'm going to be speaking with an AI agent.
27:47
Do I know this is AI? Is that identified to me or does
27:50
this seem seamless? It's it well, it's a great
27:53
question. The goals is it is for it to be
27:55
seamless, right And so we have to train that through fax FAQs,
27:59
obviously ongoing training that we're doing it started with the
28:03
intent to move anybody that's coming, I'll call for a service
28:08
call, right. So you think about how call
28:10
centers is structured, right? You have on call operators,
28:13
typically ours is based in Denver, but you know, they're
28:16
all over the world now. And so, but the highest and best
28:20
use of that call is conversion, right?
28:23
It's converting a potential lead, somebody that's looking to
28:25
book a trip, a room, an activity, whatever it may be,
28:28
right? But fully 50 to 60% of the calls
28:32
that you get, ironically back to my old Levi's days have nothing
28:35
to do with the conversion. People just want information,
28:38
right? What time is the restaurant
28:40
open, right? What time does it close, right?
28:43
What's your street address, right?
28:44
You know, what's the phone number of so and so that runs
28:48
the spa. I mean, it's the the questions
28:50
are endless. It's funny.
28:51
We get questions when not to not to go off tangent, but you'll
28:55
see how the power of AI here in a second is when Southwest
28:59
Airlines came to the market. So they only have been flying
29:03
here since about 2019 right before COVID, they launched into
29:06
Hawaii. They're now 20% market share.
29:08
Talk about a powerful brand. When they go in, they go big.
29:10
That's the CEO talks about all the time like we don't go in to
29:14
try to be the number 5 player, we go in to try to be the number
29:16
one player and they do it through secondary markets and
29:19
get a lot of efficiency with the same planes and what they've
29:22
been doing for a long time. So I was curious when they
29:25
entered the market and this is pre AI, but you could go on
29:28
Google and actually see the rank of the questions.
29:31
I was curious what questions were the Southwest Airlines
29:34
customers who are new to the market, what are they asking
29:36
like what, what, what? And you can go on the Southwest
29:39
site and it would rank the questions, you know the number
29:42
one question that the Southwest consumer asked about traveling
29:45
to Hawaii. Tell me.
29:47
Do I need a passport? And that's that's just 2019.
29:55
I need a passport to travel within my own country.
29:58
In my own country, right? But I mean, that's an ongoing
30:00
education we have. One of the challenges we have in
30:02
Hawaii is a lot of people do, it's the US currency to take the
30:06
US currency, right? Do they speak English?
30:09
Do you need a passport? I mean stuff that some of us
30:11
take for granted, but you know, a huge percent of the population
30:14
doesn't have a passport, doesn't travel, right?
30:16
And so to them, Hawaii, especially coming out of a
30:20
typically a Southwest gateway is somebody that's not traveled
30:23
overseas generally, because Southwest didn't, didn't have
30:26
the capability to do it. Not until they went to Mexico
30:28
and then eventually Hawaii. Could they be certified to even
30:30
fly over water, right. So that SW traveler was
30:33
traveling within the continental United States for the most part.
30:37
So it's, it's a, Hawaii's a far, far destination.
30:40
My point on AI is back then we didn't have AI, but I could just
30:43
manually go through. Now we do like I can get into a
30:46
lot of depth with customers and guests.
30:49
Our goal with our service calls is to move all those service
30:51
calls into an AI environment because why would you waste an
30:54
expensive, you know, person on our side just trying to give you
30:58
the time that the restaurant opens when the simple voice
31:01
query that comes, you know, from you to our AI tool can get you
31:05
that answer instantly, right? So your question is about half
31:09
the, about half the calls would go through AI.
31:12
But the intent, the strategic intent is 100% of the service
31:15
calls go through AI, which frees up our people to do the work, to
31:19
explain to people, you know, why you save this property versus
31:22
that property, What's the difference, what's the room
31:24
types, what's the view types, you know, what's the best time
31:26
to come, etcetera, etcetera. Sean, tell us about the
31:30
Outrigger properties. What is the customer experience
31:33
like? So I think in the intro you
31:37
identify we have about 32 properties that are that are
31:39
branded Outrigger that we own and or operate.
31:43
So we operate everything and we own about half, right.
31:45
So we in the hotel business, most people assume that some of
31:48
the big brands own everything. Most of the big brands don't own
31:51
much of anything. There are management companies,
31:54
they call it asset light is the term that used in the business,
31:56
right. So the paid management,
31:58
management fees by owners of these assets and then the brand
32:03
is on the side of the building again, whether that's a Hilton,
32:05
a Marriott, a Four Seasons, whatever.
32:07
And that owner pays management fees, grant fees, sales fees,
32:11
whatever it may be. We're a little bit unique.
32:13
I mean, it's not that we're Luddites, we're not like not
32:17
that we're not sophisticated, but we actually like the real
32:21
estate, right? And so we own the real estate in
32:25
addition to the asset, in addition to the brand.
32:27
So it's a, it's a different type of model for us.
32:30
It makes sense, right, because the investment we make in
32:32
branding and marketing, operating, you know we operate
32:36
at very high service levels, some of the highest in the
32:38
business. All of that increases the value
32:41
of the real estate, the physical asset, right?
32:43
So and that's for many years, we were owned by the Kelly family
32:46
for over 75 years of our existence.
32:48
And so for the Kelly family that was their source of wealth was
32:50
real estate, right? And so that's the history of the
32:53
company going back to 1947 today, here we are in 2026 and
32:58
we have a little bit of a hybrid.
32:59
We manage some. So we're asset like in some
33:01
cases, but still the bulk of value of the company is in the
33:04
real estate assets that we have in Hawaii where it's a challenge
33:07
to own real estate. So we're distributed across all
33:11
four islands down here. So we're in Oahu about Hawaii
33:14
Island, nicknamed the Big Island, Maui, which obviously
33:17
everybody knows and then Kauai Island.
33:19
And so we operate and own Outrigger Resorts.
33:22
They're branded Outrigger Resorts.
33:23
So Outrigger is our flagship, Outrigger Resorts is our
33:25
flagship brand. And then we have craft hotels,
33:27
Outrigger craft Hotels, which are our off beach properties
33:30
here in Waikiki. And then we also operate
33:33
Outrigger Resorts in Fiji, Thailand, Mauritius and the
33:38
Maldives. And so years ago, we decided to
33:41
double down and own some white space.
33:43
And it's, it's just something that I was taught at a very,
33:48
very early age from a branding and marketing perspective is
33:51
what can you own What, what is something that is unique to you,
33:54
authentic to you as a brand, just like a person, right?
33:57
Brands are just like people that differentiates you from
34:00
everything else legitimately, right?
34:02
That's something that you can claim is your space and you can
34:05
keep people out of, right? And that's not easy.
34:07
It's a tough exercise to do that.
34:09
But what we decided is, you know, no hotel company, no
34:13
hospitality company operates solely in beach resorts, right?
34:16
There's no expert in beach resorts.
34:18
And so that's what we said we wanted to do.
34:20
We wanted to own that. Surprising.
34:22
Yeah. But you start thinking about, I
34:23
mean, you know, Club Med has dabbled in that, in that space.
34:26
And you know, Atlantis has got a couple properties, but they're
34:28
also in Dubai. If you really think about where
34:31
we were born, our first Outrigger being right on the
34:34
beach in Waikiki, arguably the most famous beach in the world,
34:37
the history with Duke Hanamoku and the birth place of surfing.
34:40
We had a legitimate claim to say we were the first to do this.
34:44
All right. And there, well, we started in
34:46
47. That's actually the company
34:48
started, but the brand started in 1967.
34:51
The brand started at the site of the Outrigger Canoe Club where
34:54
Duke Hanamoku, legendary Duke, conducted surf lessons and
34:58
surfed every day and Roy Kelly got the opportunity to buy that
35:01
property and then build the first Outrigger.
35:03
It was the site, ironically, of the Outrigger Canoe Club, which
35:06
is a very famous club here in Hawaii.
35:08
Some of your listeners may know know the Outrigger Canoe Club,
35:10
but it was located between the two original properties in
35:14
Waikiki, the Royal Hawaiian, the Pink Lady and the Moana Surf
35:17
Rider. So those two anchor properties,
35:20
we were slotted right in the middle where the canoe Club was.
35:23
The canoe club was moved about a mile down the beach, which it
35:26
still stands there today. And the original Outrigger was,
35:30
was, was erected in 1967. So we're about 60 years old as a
35:34
brand, 80 plus years old as a, as a company, if you will.
35:38
So that's, that's how we how we got our start.
35:41
And so the exercise we went through from a branding
35:43
perspective is those are our roots.
35:45
That's primarily where we've been successful.
35:48
We've expanded over the years. Let's just double down and focus
35:51
on that and being the best at the beach experience, being the
35:54
best and having the best. If you're going to have you're
35:57
going to own the beach, which is the term we use internally and
36:00
be the best that we call barefoot luxury, right?
36:03
That's kind of a unique space. Then what are the amenities that
36:05
you're going to offer? Well, you should have the best
36:08
beach bar, right? If you're going to if you're
36:10
going to own the beach, what do people expect, right?
36:11
That great restaurant experience.
36:13
We call it having the best beach bar.
36:15
And we're blessed to have Duke's with our partners at TS
36:17
Restaurant. So Duke's anchors our original
36:20
Outrigger property here in Waikiki Beach Resort.
36:23
We've got Monkey Pod over at another property and I bring a.
36:26
Guest to the show. So you're seeing consistency
36:29
here. We work with great local third
36:30
parties, right and have the best beach bars.
36:33
Another big part of a beach experience to us is live music.
36:36
So one of our brand pillars is live music every day.
36:39
So every one of our properties around the world has live music
36:43
every day throughout the properties.
36:45
And, and part of that's also for me tied back to culture.
36:48
I've been blessed to work in the live music space for many years.
36:50
Levi's been very active. And it's ironic even see Levi's
36:54
in the Super Bowl, right? the Super Bowl ad for Levi's,
36:57
which is, I take a little bit of legacy credit for, was actually
37:01
all driven by music and culture, right?
37:03
And that's, that's a big part of how Levi's has been successful
37:06
and I think stood the test of time.
37:07
So we take that through our resorts, right?
37:10
And then we have signature experiences at the properties
37:13
generally tied to beach. We do Val renewals on the beach.
37:16
We do surf lessons on the beach, right.
37:18
The things that you would think you need to do, we take very
37:21
seriously. We work for the best of the
37:22
best. Our surf lessons aren't like a
37:24
maybe once in a while thing. It's every day from the time you
37:27
wake up until the end of the day.
37:29
You can get surf lessons here at Waikiki with Faith surf schools,
37:33
the monies family, the world famous monies family.
37:35
So Tammy and Tony, arguably two of the most decorated surfers.
37:39
Their surf school is run by their kids and by some other
37:42
great servers. They have three professional, I
37:44
think it's three professional surfers in their families still
37:47
to this day, right? So we work with the best of the
37:49
best. It's not just, you know, a theme
37:52
we put on it. It's like we feel like we really
37:54
need to deliver and have the most the word authentics
37:57
overused. But that's what that's what
37:59
we're going for, right? And so we've been able to
38:01
achieve that, I think pretty consistently.
38:03
The other thing we do is we don't take the beach experience
38:06
from Hawaii to Fiji as an example.
38:09
They have their own beach experience, right.
38:10
And so we call, they call it the Bula spirit, Bula.
38:14
Bula is their word for hello. And so we try to celebrate the
38:17
Fijian culture in Fiji, not take Hawaii to Fiji.
38:20
Same in Thailand, same in the Maldives, same in Mauritius,
38:23
we've done it in Guam. So the the premise of our brand
38:27
again is own the beach, right? We want to be the premier beach
38:30
resort company in the world. That's our high, high mission.
38:33
And then the anchor, what out of your way is this idea of
38:36
celebrating the place and the culture and the guests,
38:39
obviously of each of the places that we operate in?
38:42
What's the future of Outrigger? Look like you guys have growth
38:45
plans. Are you kind of holding steady
38:46
for the time being? Right.
38:48
What's the old you grow or die right side the old expression.
38:52
And I sort of laughed, but we were acquired by a private
38:55
equity company in late 16, early 17.
38:57
They're very growth oriented. The Kelly family was awesome to
39:01
work for. I'm still friends with many of
39:03
the Kelly's that still live in in Waikiki in Hawaii.
39:06
But access to private equity capital gives you more growth
39:10
opportunities, frankly, than we probably had with a private
39:13
family. And so that's the, the growth is
39:15
clearly the, the mission that we're on.
39:17
We're probably growing 2X what we would have previously.
39:22
But great news for us. They bought into the mission.
39:25
They bought into the outer your way.
39:28
A new CEO, Jeff Wagner, joined us in 2018 and he's challenged
39:32
us to do things that have much more elevated manner than we've
39:35
been doing it before, which has been great for us.
39:36
So he's set the bar super high, not only not only growth, but
39:40
elevation of the brand, elevation of the experiences.
39:42
Yeah, you can own the beach, but are you doing it in a
39:44
contemporary, you know, consumer facing way that helps us elevate
39:48
the properties and the and the brand.
39:50
And so that's that's the mission that we're on.
39:52
So yes, growth, but I'll also say brand elevation, quality of
39:57
the experiences. I mean, many people come to our
39:59
properties with literally their life savings.
40:01
They've saved up, saved up their entire lives for a vacation with
40:05
us, with their family. And it is expensive to come to
40:08
Hawaii or to go to Fiji, but we think we deliver the trip of a
40:11
lifetime for people. So we're very, very focused on
40:14
leisure. We're not, we're not a business
40:16
hotel, a City Hotel. We don't have big groups for the
40:18
most part. So we're very focused on
40:20
families, multi generational travel, honeymoon.
40:24
You know, first time visitors to the place and then trying to
40:26
create lifetime loyal guests. And it's, it's, it's worked for
40:29
us and it continues to work. And then again in this business
40:32
you have to constantly reinvent yourself.
40:34
You have to constantly renovate acquisitions a big part.
40:37
So in the last five years we've acquired 8 new hour ago resorts
40:41
both here in Hawaii and also in Asia.
40:43
And then we have renovations ongoing, but we'll have finished
40:47
I think about half a billion dollars worth of renovations in
40:50
the past four years in Hawaii and in Thailand by the end of
40:54
this calendar year. So we have two more renovations
40:56
that we're working through here in Waikiki and two more on our
41:00
neighbor island, as we call them.
41:02
But by the end of 2026, we'll have renovated effectively the
41:06
entire Outriger Resort portfolio.
41:08
Wow. So I hear Hawaii, I hear Asia, I
41:12
hear other Pacific locations. Anywhere else in the world that
41:15
you have your sights set on? Mainland USA.
41:18
Mexico. I.
41:19
Don't know European beaches? Yeah, it's a great question.
41:23
I mean, for the folks who know a little bit about development,
41:25
you know, it's not just throw the dart at the wall, you know,
41:27
and hope for the best, right? So we have a very rigorous
41:30
development criteria that we go through, especially if you
41:33
haven't got a private equity owner, they want to know where
41:35
their money's going, right? Why did you pick that location?
41:37
Why is that a target, right? And so I'd say for probably for
41:41
every 100 opportunities that we've identified, maybe 1 we get
41:46
to the finish line on. So it's very difficult.
41:48
It's time consuming because we have this criteria.
41:50
One has to be on the beach. Well, that limits your, your
41:53
choices, right? Second, it can't be a cold
41:54
beach, right? It's got to be a warm weather
41:57
year round beach. So you're in the tropics, right?
41:59
Generally ordeal flow is in the tropics on beaches, right?
42:02
So that's kind of the first set of filters.
42:05
Then generally we like to look at places either where we have
42:07
operational experience like Hawaii for obvious reasons,
42:11
Thailand for obvious reasons, Fiji for obvious reasons or
42:15
ideally an overlap with source markets, right.
42:18
So for instance, Australians tend to travel to three or four
42:23
places when they go, they go to Hawaii, they go to Fiji, they go
42:27
to their own country, right. The Gold Coast is a big
42:29
destination, all places that Outrigger has operated and has
42:33
operated successfully. So our brand awareness in
42:36
Australia, even though we're a small regional company that a
42:38
lot of people in New York have never heard of Outrigger, but
42:41
everybody in Australia has heard of Outrigger.
42:43
They know us, they like us and we don't have an operating asset
42:46
in Australia. So Australia is an obvious
42:49
target for us. We've had good success in
42:52
Thailand. We're opening a new property in
42:54
a place called Peepee Island, famous for the beach, the
42:57
DiCaprio movie, that's Peepee Island, just beautiful,
42:59
spectacular water. It's about a a 40 minute boat
43:02
ride from Phuket where we've operated for over a decade.
43:04
So we have experience in that market.
43:06
We understand it. There's a lot of places in
43:09
Thailand that we can take advantage of.
43:10
So Peepee Island, we will be opening here in May.
43:13
It'll be our 4th asset that we've got Fiji, we've had
43:17
experience and we'd love to be back in Fiji.
43:19
We are there now, but we'd like we think we can expand and do
43:21
more in Fiji here, you know over time.
43:24
And then for obvious reasons, you know, our biggest source
43:27
Mark is the US and specifically the West Coast.
43:31
We probably index to the one, the West Coast to the East
43:34
Coast. You know, East Coast you can go
43:35
to the Caribbean, you go to Mexico.
43:37
Most of the US leisure travelers from the West Coast will go
43:40
either to Hawaii or to Mexico, right.
43:43
So we over index there. So Mexico, Los Cabos
43:47
specifically would be a place of interest.
43:50
Now there's risk there. Obviously what's just
43:51
transpired, you know there's sensitivity about that part of
43:54
the world. And then our parent company has
43:57
other assets in the market that are run by other companies.
43:59
And so a balancing act that Mexico would probably make a lot
44:02
of sense for us, Australia. Then interestingly our second
44:05
largest source market in the world is Japan.
44:09
And probably many of your listeners don't know, Japan
44:11
actually has some phenomenal beaches.
44:13
It's got a couple domestic islands, Okinawa, which many
44:17
people would probably know more from its military, but there's a
44:20
lot of great brands, a lot of great beaches in Okinawa is
44:23
that. Tropical.
44:24
It's tropical. It is most of the year, yeah,
44:26
not, not the entire year, but probably for 70% of the year.
44:30
It's, it's, it's tropicals. So Japan's a place we've got our
44:34
ion, we've operated in in Guam before, Marshall Islands, Palau,
44:37
we've been in those places. Those are typically smaller
44:40
isolated opportunities, but we'll keep our eyes open in the
44:43
South Pacific and then Indian Ocean's interesting.
44:45
So the Indian Ocean could probably unlock some more
44:48
opportunities over time. We're currently operating in
44:50
Mauritius, which is in near near the the South African Madagascar
44:55
border. And then in the Maldives, the
44:58
Maldives has about 1008 holes, right?
45:01
Each of those eight holes has islands within it and we operate
45:03
in, it's what's called the South RE, which is in a plain zone.
45:07
There's probably room for more than one Outrigger in the
45:09
Maldives. We're having great success
45:10
there. Again, fits our brand profile.
45:12
We're very family friendly for that, for that part of the
45:15
world. So I think the Indian Ocean and
45:17
then you have places like the Seychelles, even India, Goa,
45:20
it's a bit, there's a lot, there's a lot of beaches in that
45:23
band, a lot of beach opportunities in the band.
45:25
But we try to go where we know how to operate and places that
45:29
our our brand is known and places where our source markets
45:31
have overlapped. So we've gotten to touch on a
45:35
number of really cool, fun, exciting successes here.
45:38
We've skipped over, you know, the time at Hard Rock and AEG
45:41
Live just for time. But behind every success story
45:46
is typically a chapter that almost broke someone.
45:49
And I'd be curious to explore a time in your life that you had
45:53
to overcome a really big challenge, Sean.
45:56
Well, there's there's plenty. I mean, I'm not a kid, but I
46:02
have two kids, right? So I'll give you 2 answers.
46:05
One's professional 1's personal, I guess the, the professional
46:07
1's also personal. But I have two young, two young
46:10
children, two daughters, blessed to have two daughters.
46:13
But my wife and I had children pretty late in our lives, right?
46:16
So I've got a 15 year old and an 11 year old daughter.
46:20
That is incredibly challenging at my, at my old age and with
46:25
the responsibilities I have to the company from a leadership
46:28
standpoint and also frankly to the, to the visitor industry.
46:31
So I, I, I, I chair the visitor Convention Bureau here, which
46:35
one of the goals is to stimulate business to Hawaii during a
46:38
tough period right now, right? It's challenging.
46:41
We've had our, our challenges with COVID.
46:43
Then obviously Lahaina burned down a few years ago.
46:46
So we have the biggest wildfire in the history of Hawaii, one of
46:49
the biggest wildfires in the history of the United States
46:51
actually just two years ago, right?
46:52
So we've had some some pushback from a tourism perspective and
46:56
so we're trying to stimulate that.
46:57
That's a, that's a lot of work, right?
46:59
And so, you know, I feel like the balance of that.
47:02
And then my fantastic wife who really manages the household,
47:06
you know, how do you balance, you know, our needs as a family
47:09
with the work load that we've got?
47:11
So that's just an ongoing challenge and trying to make it
47:13
work kind of every day a week. I travel quite a bit, as you
47:16
would have guessed from the properties that we have, the
47:19
source markets that we have and you know, mainland trip from
47:22
Hawaii is not short. It's, you know, 5, six hours,
47:25
Japan, 7 hours, you know, if I want to get to Dubai or other
47:28
places that we have business partners, you're looking at 18
47:30
to 20 hour trips, right? So these are long trips away
47:33
from my family, you know, away from supporting my kids
47:36
education and their growth and development.
47:38
So that's just, that's not going to, that's not going to change.
47:42
That's just going to be, I think, the world that we live
47:44
in. And my, my wife jokingly calls
47:46
it first world problems, right? She's like, don't complain, just
47:49
get home. But it's still tough, right?
47:51
It's still hard being away from your kids, and it's harder on
47:53
your wife too. It's hard on my family, it's
47:55
hard on the wife, hard on the relationships.
47:56
And like I said, I'm just blessed.
47:57
We just celebrated our twenty year anniversary.
48:00
I'd be remiss not to give Brooke a big shout out because she's
48:02
put up with me for all these years and the travel and it's
48:05
it's, it's just always been the case.
48:07
It's been, that's been my career going back to my early Levi's
48:10
days. And so that's, that's, that's on
48:13
the personal side, trying to balance work and family, as well
48:17
as all the other things you do to try to keep you keep you
48:19
whole. So that's, that's an ongoing
48:22
kind of time management thing more than probably anything.
48:25
I, it's interesting. I found the business side and
48:27
many people that know me know the story.
48:28
So it's, it's a fascinating story, But so I, I had huge
48:32
success early in my career. I was the, I think the youngest
48:35
VP, not, I'm not bragging, it's just what it was at Foot Cone
48:38
and Belding. I was blessed to have this
48:40
opportunity that kind of fell in my lap.
48:41
We took advantage of it. We launched the we launched the
48:44
website, which was a huge coup for foot Cone.
48:47
Basically being the agency that launched the first consumer
48:50
website was a huge cue to them, right.
48:52
So I got promoted to VP of a department that never even
48:55
existed. I didn't have any competition
48:57
because no one else wanted the job.
48:58
They didn't even know what the digital media job was, right?
49:01
So I'm a VP of digital media at like 20, whatever 627, you know,
49:06
so it looks good on the resume. I went to Levi's and sort of a
49:10
lot of the success continued. It's ironic because the first
49:14
Super Bowl spot that Levi Strauss ever ran, I placed that
49:18
media by when I say I I was the client.
49:21
A huge team worked on that campaign and it's it's if you go
49:26
back and check the director was Spike Jones.
49:30
So everybody knows now super famous director, actor, awesome
49:33
talent. He and his brother actually
49:35
produced this spot kind of on spec for us and he had an idea.
49:38
It was like a digital graphics idea set to a Mexican hip hop
49:42
song back in this would have been right around 2000.
49:46
I forget exactly the date, let's say 2000 and one 2000, something
49:49
like that. And the clever move that we made
49:53
to launch that spot, it was the first spot that Levi's had ever
49:56
bought in a Super Bowl. And it was not a positive move.
49:59
I pushed hard to get this. I've to me, I viewed the Super
50:03
Bowl back then as I think kind of how people do now, which is
50:08
it's the only game in town. Everyone's going to watch it and
50:11
they're going to watch the commercials.
50:13
Back then, that was not necessarily the case.
50:15
It was starting to become the case, but the Super Bowl vibe
50:18
was just evaluated against any, anything else you could
50:21
purchase, right? Prime time television, the Cosby
50:24
Show, you name it. Like you could get the same
50:26
eyeballs. Somebody would argue, and we did
50:29
argue by just buying a bunch of other stuff over the course of
50:32
the day or night or week versus spending a huge premium.
50:36
That was the, the, the perception on a Super Bowl spot.
50:41
But I was blessed to have a good partner at Levi Strauss who said
50:44
I believe I he was that head of merchandising.
50:46
He's like, I'm fully behind you, Sean.
50:48
Nick Koh is his name. I'm fully behind you.
50:50
We need to do this. We need to elevate the Levi's
50:53
brand. We need to be where people are
50:54
watching like we were in the Video Music Awards.
50:56
We're in the Grammys, but we've never been in the Super Bowl.
50:59
So we rolled the dice. And then there was a huge debate
51:02
once we made the media by, well, what spot are we going to run?
51:05
What's the best spot, right? And that's highly subjective, as
51:08
you can imagine, right? From my perspective was it was
51:11
we're buying a platform, which now the Super Bowl has become,
51:14
but back then, there was no real social media, right?
51:17
The Internet was still relatively young.
51:19
And so leveraging a buy beyond just the TRPS, the rating
51:23
points, the eyeballs that see it into all these other things,
51:27
that was pretty early, right? And so I remember going to the
51:30
CEO directly and I'll just leave it at that for the audience.
51:35
I didn't report to the CEO, but I went to the CEO and said,
51:38
here's here's how we pick the commercial because internally we
51:42
could not make a decision. I said, why don't we let the
51:45
consumer vote? He said, what do you mean?
51:48
I said, well, let's put it on levi.com.
51:50
We'll put all the spots we got and they get to pick.
51:56
And he's like, that's a pretty good idea.
51:57
Now bear in mind, we maybe had two months before the spots
52:01
going to air right? So there wasn't a lot of time to
52:03
stand it up. There wasn't a lot of time to
52:05
build the the the voting. So you.
52:07
Put clips of the actual commercials there and.
52:10
Ask the actual commercials on. We put 4 commercials on on.
52:13
And then you told people, hey, we could do right before the
52:16
coin toss. We could do.
52:17
Is that what you're talking? About.
52:18
Well, no, we would. So the idea was or just.
52:21
Picking which of the ads to run which.
52:22
Ad we're going to run. Got it, which was a first right
52:25
now now a lot of brands do, you know, pick the flavor of the
52:27
chip or whatever, you know, so so but back then again, you
52:30
remember, this is 25 years ago and so is the technology even
52:34
going to work right? You know, downloading video back
52:37
then was not quick and easy was, you know, five years after
52:40
basically the Internet came online and would anybody care?
52:43
Like who's going to go online and vote for Levi's commercial,
52:47
right? Like everything we were doing
52:49
was counterintuitive to kind of how the traditional media and
52:54
world of branding and marketing worked, right?
52:57
But and again, people can go check my facts, use AI if you
53:01
want, but I'm telling you that Levi Strauss vote for the
53:04
commercial was the first Internet poll.
53:06
That was how many? Votes did you get?
53:08
And we got over a quarter million votes, right.
53:11
So it it not only did it work, it worked really, really well.
53:16
And we ended up picking the spot I hoped we would pick, which was
53:20
this crazy spot shot by Spike Jones on the streets of Mexico
53:24
City. And that spot was the first spot
53:27
that Levi's ever ran in the Super Bowl.
53:29
So Fast forward to the Super Bowl in New Orleans, right?
53:34
Went to that Super Bowl next day, front page of the New
53:37
Orleans paper. That spot was the top spot for
53:39
the Super Bowl, at least as their readers voted.
53:42
And USA TODAY had it like two or three.
53:44
I mean, it was so it was highly ranked.
53:45
It still makes the Eclipse, it's called Crazy Legs, it still
53:50
makes the greatest spots of the last 20 years periodically.
53:54
So it's a blast to see that because it was shot with a very
53:57
low production budget and it was shot by Spike Jones and my team
54:01
worked on it and a lot of people work in these things.
54:03
I mean, I was the guy taking the bullets that if it didn't work,
54:06
you're not right. But we believed in it.
54:08
My team believed in it, The head of merchandising believed in it.
54:11
A lot of people believed in it. We had some new people coming on
54:13
board from the European team that we're not huge fans.
54:17
They just didn't get it. They just didn't see how that
54:19
could pop. Why would anybody vote for that?
54:20
That's not a beautiful pretty denim shot, right?
54:24
No, it's gritty streets of Mexico City with Aladdin.
54:26
Think of bad Bad Bunny. We ran a Latin hip hop, a
54:30
Mexican hip hop song in 2002 thousand and two right.
54:34
I mean, that just didn't happen, right?
54:36
And so, but feedback from the consumer was super, super great.
54:41
I got to be careful here because I don't want to get in trouble
54:43
with anybody. But so huge success on so many
54:46
levels. Internet votes, right, the, the
54:49
top commercial or top five or however you, it's all
54:52
subjective, as you know, right? I left Levi Strauss within a few
54:56
months. Why?
55:01
I left Levi Strauss after a few I guess.
55:03
This is the first time in the entire interview where you
55:06
paused. Wasn't my, wasn't my choice.
55:11
OK. All right.
55:13
Wasn't my wasn't my choice. So coming off what I consider to
55:17
be one of the great successes of my careers, others didn't see it
55:20
the same way. Interesting.
55:23
OK, so looking forward now, let's just like be a little
55:26
introspective. I I'd be curious to hear what
55:28
you think your superpower is, Sean.
55:34
I, I don't have a superpower. I mean, I, I hope I've used the
55:37
word I probably more than I usually do because it's a we,
55:40
it's a we business that we're in.
55:41
And I can't tell you how blessed I've been to hire great people,
55:48
create great teams, get the hell out of the way as much as I can
55:52
and then watch them succeed and try to be part of that success.
55:55
And whether it was the launch of Levi's, that Super Bowl program,
55:59
I just talked about my time at Hard Rock, kind of under Hamish
56:02
Dodd's, the CEO leadership turning what was frankly a dying
56:06
brand into now a massive global hotel and entertainment company.
56:11
And then helping launch LA Live and the whole LA Live district
56:14
in downtown LA with with AEGI. Just been blessed to have and
56:18
surround myself with great teams.
56:20
How do you do it? How do you identify that talent?
56:22
How do you hold on to them when you get them?
56:25
You know, it's, it's, it's a great, I mean that it's funny to
56:28
say superpower because I like to think that I'm, I'm pretty
56:31
curious and a good listener and observe who has passion for what
56:37
they're doing. So I'll take the passion and
56:40
commitment over the technical skills kind of all day.
56:43
Figure that people are smart and they'll figure out what they
56:45
need to do. But if they're not committed and
56:47
passionate about what they're doing, they're not, they're not
56:50
wanted to, to take things to the next level.
56:52
And I made that comment, I think earlier in the podcast.
56:55
The advice I always give people is do what you're doing really,
56:57
really well, but do something over and above, right, Do other
57:00
things for other people, meet other people, expand your
57:03
network, expand your value to your company or to the community
57:06
or, or what you're doing. And, and you'll, you'll never.
57:09
And so I look for that in other people.
57:11
It's funny, when I look at a resume, I almost never care.
57:16
I care about how many, how many, how much people bounce around.
57:18
To me, that's almost always a, a negative hit, right?
57:21
When I see ACV or resume and somebody's had eight jobs in 10
57:25
years, like, you know, there's something there that just
57:27
doesn't for me, the way I think about it, I'd rather have some
57:29
continuity, see people promoted from within, right?
57:33
Promoted to a, from a, you know, from an agency to a client as an
57:36
example, see that the person's made the commitment.
57:39
It's been recognized and that's hard, but it's been recognized
57:42
and they move on. The other thing I'm looking for
57:44
on the resume is what did they do outside the job?
57:47
And so, you know, the community section, the hobbies that people
57:51
have in organizations that they're involved in, the, the
57:54
places that they go to help people raise money, the
57:56
foundations that they're a part of.
57:58
That carries almost equal weight to me as the actual technical
58:02
jobs that they've had, the successes, the things, the
58:05
places that they've worked, the brands that they've worked with,
58:07
right. And so I guess that's it's a
58:09
long answer to I'm looking for the other things, the other
58:12
factors of what people do right outside of the actual nine to
58:17
five, eight to four, whatever environment that they work in.
58:20
Sean, I've just got one more question for you today.
58:22
But before I ask that, I want to do 3 quick things for the
58:25
audience. If you want to get in touch with
58:27
Sean D, we've got a few options. First of all, the Outrigger
58:30
brand got to check out outrigger.com.
58:33
That link will be in the show notes, but there's no reason you
58:35
can't remember that one by heart folks.
58:37
It's a single word, easy to spell. outrigger.com, his
58:40
LinkedIn profile. If you search for Sean DDE EE,
58:44
you'll find him Sean D at Outrigger and then his e-mail
58:47
address supereasysean.d@outrigger.com.
58:50
All those links in the show notes.
58:52
And if you're enjoying the show today, please take a moment to
58:54
subscribe wherever you're listening.
58:56
It sends a signal that helps others discover our podcast.
58:59
So thank you for taking a quick moment to do that right now.
59:03
And as a reminder, you can get your hospitality employees
59:05
access to doctors, therapists and prescription meds that, as
59:09
paradoxical as it sounds, actually increases your
59:12
company's net profits, real gains that can change how a
59:15
business is valued. So contact us today at
59:17
adbacbenefits.com. Last question for you, Sean.
59:20
A year from now, what is 1 very specific thing that you hope to
59:23
be celebrating? That's a great question.
59:28
I'm going to add that to my interview repertoire.
59:31
I always, I always like to pick something up from these these
59:34
sessions. What?
59:35
I'm sorry, One thing I want to be celebrating.
59:37
Yep, one one thing you want to be celebrating a year from
59:40
today. What is today, February 27th?
59:47
There's a lot it's I'm so I'm trying to distill it to.
59:51
Terms a couple. A single, well, I, I mentioned
59:55
earlier on the professional side, we're the original
59:59
Outrigger Waikiki is just coming on its 60th birthday.
1:00:02
So next year will be the 60th birthday.
1:00:05
And so we're working on $100 million renovation, the biggest
1:00:08
renovation in our company history right now at that
1:00:11
property. And that's where we got our
1:00:13
start. It's the birth of the company
1:00:15
from a naming standpoint, the birth of the brand for sure.
1:00:19
I have a lot of great memories from my 13 years here at
1:00:21
Outrigger at that property. We met a lot of great friends
1:00:25
and so, and we posted and that's the business where I run the
1:00:28
hosting business. We've hosted literally billions
1:00:31
of people over the years of that property.
1:00:33
And so in a year from now, I, I, I, I touch wood, whatever the
1:00:38
expression is, we're targeted to finish that property this year.
1:00:42
So February of next year, giving us, you know, a couple months of
1:00:44
buffer because things take longer here in Hawaii in many
1:00:49
places, but Hawaii for sure to, to build, to build on time, on
1:00:52
budget that we're celebrating the 60th, 60th anniversary of
1:00:55
the Outrigger Waikiki. That's probably from a
1:00:57
professional standpoint, kind of the top, the top of the top of
1:01:01
the mark. And then I'd like I said, I, I,
1:01:04
I, I, I can't do this by myself. So I have to laugh because my
1:01:08
daughter's 15. So next year I'm hoping to
1:01:11
celebrate my first ride with her in the car that she's the
1:01:14
driver. A safe ride.
1:01:18
A safe ride with my my oldest daughter and and hopefully my
1:01:23
wife is joining us for the ride and we have a lovely dinner
1:01:26
together, all four, all four of us and then enjoy the start to
1:01:29
2027. And then you've got a designated
1:01:31
driver for a while. Yes, I'm looking forward to
1:01:34
that. Well, Sean D from Outrigger
1:01:37
Hospitality, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing
1:01:39
both your time and your story with us today.
1:01:42
I really appreciate you being here.
1:01:44
Thanks, Anthony. Appreciate it.
1:01:46
Good, good to spend time. Folks, that's a wrap on another
1:01:49
episode of the Inspired Stories podcast.
1:01:51
Aloha, and thanks for learning with us.
1:01:53
And if one thing stirred out, put that into action today.