Latest / The Modern Hotelier / #340: Streamlining Wi-Fi Management for Your Hotel | with Hannah Greenberg, CEO of Eleven
Transcript
- The Modern Hotelier #340: Streamlining Wi-Fi Management for Your Hotel | with Hannah Greenberg, CEO of Eleven === David Millili: Welcome to The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Don't forget to follow, like and subscribe and let us know in the comments what you think about today's episode. Steve, who do we have on the program? Steve Carran: Yeah, David, we got a good one today. We have on Hannah Greenberg, the CEO of Eleven. Thank you for joining us, Hannah. How you doing today? Hannah Greenberg: Doing great. Pleasure to be here with you both. Excited about our conversation. David Millili: All right, so we're gonna jump in. We're gonna go through a lightning round, get to know you better, talk about your career, and then dive into some thought leadership topics. Sound good? Hannah Greenberg: Sounds great. Let's do it. David Millili: All right, so when you were young, what did you want to be when you grew up? Hannah Greenberg: I had two. One was hotel general manager, the second was the head of the CIA. David Millili: All right. What's something that you wish you were better at? Hannah Greenberg: Golf. David Millili: All right. What's a luxury you can't live without? Hannah Greenberg: My comfortable mattress and my Oura Ring. David Millili: Okay. All right, so if you could take a person dead or alive to lunch, who would you take? Hannah Greenberg: It's a good question. Probably, Malcolm Gladwell. David Millili: Okay. All right. And give us something that's on your bucket list. Hannah Greenberg: Japan is on my bucket list, and we'll keep it at that. David Millili: Okay. Steve Carran: Were good answers. Well done. So now we're gonna move into your background, a little bit about what makes you tick. So you grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, is that correct? Hannah Greenberg: I did. East Bay in Alameda, small town outside of San Francisco. Steve Carran: Beautiful area. So how did growing up there shape you into who you are today? Hannah Greenberg: It's interesting. So it was a small town relative to sort of the greater Bay Area, but very close enough to be towards the big city, right? So I'm an only child. I grew up very independent, quickly grew up to be an adult, maybe earlier than most. And what that gave me, Steve, was a few things. First, it gave me access to a big city, lots going on, like a lot of technology, right? I was close to Silicon Valley. Lots of hotel development, hotels generally. We'll get back into that, I'm sure. But small town with access to big city is sort of like my vibe. I like that, and I've always liked that. So family person and small community was great. Access to all the exploration and kind of newness also kept me excited growing up. Steve Carran: Nice. David Millili: Great. And so you went to Cornell and earned your degree in hotel administration before getting an MBA from the University of California. What led you to pursue those schools and degrees? Hannah Greenberg: Yeah. So the Hotel School at Cornell is number one hotel school in the world. I knew I wanted to go there from middle school. So it was very early on my dream was to go to Cornell, not just to Cornell, but to the Hotel School. I have always been in hospitality. Again, dream was to be a general manager. I grew up playing a lot of sports, and so we would travel for travel softball, travel soccer. In second grade, my teacher went around and asked everyone what their favorite smell was. You know, people would say roses or pizza, right? Things that a kid would say their favorite smell was. My answer was the smell of a hotel lobby, right? So like the mix of chlorine from the pool with a little bit of this fresh scent, like I was that kid. And so I had my sights set on Cornell Hotel School from a very young age. And that was my vision board. That was my number one choice. Steve Carran: Wow. You might be the guest that early, earliest in their life knew what they wanted to do when they grew up. Pretty impressive. So this was a pretty fun story I found out. You said you grew up quick and, but at age 10, you started a neighborhood holiday gift wrapping business. You would charge $5 to $10 a present, and sometimes you made nearly $5,000 in a season, which is like a billion dollars for a 10-year-old. Was this when you discovered your love for entrepreneurship, or did you know that beforehand? Hannah Greenberg: Yes. So I was a hustler. I've always been kind of a go-getter, but I think I found my love for entrepreneurship and for gift wrapping, right? Both things I think had to be true. And so I also learned the economics of a business because I had zero money to begin with, right? Again, I was in middle school. I was 10. So I borrowed from my parents to go buy the raw materials, right? I did need wrapping paper and ribbon and tape and glue and tissue and all of those things. And so they loaned me the money to go to, you know, Costco and buy in bulk all of these things. And then I would go, I didn't drive, right? So I had these, like, Radio Flyer wagons. I had two of them, and I would go to the neighbors, pick up all of the gifts for their kids and their family members, so lots of gifts. I would have my little sticky note of who the gift was going to, take them back to my house, and every day after school for about a month and a half, I would just wrap and wrap with the paper and the bow and the little gift tag, and then I would deliver them back in those wagons to the neighbors. And so it taught me entrepreneurship. I made a lot of money for a kid, right, that age. It taught me debt, right? How to repay a loan, because I did have to pay my parents back for fronting the money. But it also taught me confidentiality, because if you think about it, all of my friends' parents trusted me with the gifts of my friends. So I knew what all my friends were getting, and I kept that a secret because my business depended on the confidentiality of those gifts. So it was a really good experience. That was my first sort of entrepreneur venture. Steve Carran: And doing some quick math, that's like 500 to 1,000 presents you were wrapping. That is insane. Very impressive for a 10-year-old. So now we're gonna dive into your career, how you became the CEO of Eleven. So like you said, you've always been passionate about hotels, and you would travel with your mom on work trips, and you discovered things like room service, and it really sparked your interest in hotels. And you, like you said, your goal is to become a GM, and you followed that passion, worked in hotels earlier in your career, and eventually came to own your own hotel. But what did those early days working in hotels teach you that you still take with you as CEO of Elevn? Hannah Greenberg: Sure. So my first real job was hotel front desk at the Renaissance in Walnut Creek. It still exists. I live actually pretty close to that hotel now. It's always a walk down memory lane when I drive by. And I was 16 years old, a junior in high school, working the front desk. Within three weeks of starting, I became front desk supervisor, so I was supervising employees two and three times my age. It still may have been my favorite job to date. I loved it, but I learned a few things. I learned that I learned a lot about hospitality. I learned that when you are on the front lines, whether you're at a hotel front desk or a restaurant server or a valet attendant, you are really there seeing people's best moments and worst moments, right? You have people coming to celebrate weddings and graduations, and you also have people there at the hotel in town for a funeral or going through a divorce and staying there temporarily. And so as that sort of frontline deliverer of hospitality, it is your responsibility to show up with empathy and care and no judgment and do the right thing every time. Those are skills that you learn very early on, and that is what makes you successful, but also makes the person who's interacting with you feel like they're being taken care of. And that's not always easy because you sometimes, as I said, get the worst. I learned that, and I also learned the power of putting your hand up and raising your hand for other opportunities. At the front desk, on several occasions, the room service attendant would call out. I would be like, "I'll do room service." Right? The valet attendant would call out, "Let me try to figure out how to park a car." Right? So that's sort of how you build acumen and experience by just volunteering and saying, "Hey, I'll do this." And I feel like hospitality is really, really driven by people who are willing to put their hand up when there's a need in the team. Steve Carran: Great. Well said. David Millili: All right, so after college, you went to PwC, where you evaluated hotel opportunities through feasibility studies and financial analysis. You then went to Seaview Investors, where you were responsible for making those projects real. So what did those roles teach you about the assumptions that look good on paper but break down in the day-to-day hotel operations? Hannah Greenberg: Yeah, it's a great question. I'll dive a little deeper into the development side. So at Seaview, it was a private equity group that was sort of developer, owner, and operators, right? So long-term hold, hold operations. And so on the front side, right, I was evaluating a piece of land or an old building that we were gonna convert to a hotel, and that requires sort of a vision, underwriting, feasibility. What may look good on paper needs to actually pencil out over a very long time, right? A hotel is there, it's set in stone. The location matters. And so a few things I learned. First, I learned that saying yes to every opportunity is probably a bad idea. We said no to way more opportunities in development than we said yes to. The second thing we learned is that, you know, there's a few things in the industry that you can control. You can control sort of what you build, the brand you partner with, right? Many of these were large branded hotels, franchised operations with Marriotts and Hiltons, et cetera. So you could pick some of those things. You could pick the incredible team that you hire. But there are other things you can't control. COVID we couldn't control. Big macroeconomic factors in the areas that we build you can't control. Brands coming into the market, competitors coming into the market, hotels being built around you, you can't necessarily control that. So that was a good lesson in the viability of a long-term asset and owning an asset in a hotel world really depends on a lot you can control and a lot you can't control, right? And so I think that's a humbling experience for someone who owns the hotel. The other thing that I realized is I was the one in charge of sort of getting the hotel to certificate of occupancy, right? Build it, finance it, construct it, open it, and sort of pass it on to the operations team to asset manage it in perpetuity. But once that is built, right, you are now relying on your people, your hospitality, the level of service that you are giving. That's what's gonna keep people coming back to your hotel. So, it was an incredible experience. I said I spent half my time with a hard hat and construction documents, and the other half of my time in a suit raising capital and trying to get debt for these hotels. So, it was the most rewarding experience I've had, getting boots on the ground and understanding how a hotel is actually constructed and managed, and it certainly helps me today with that background. Steve Carran: Absolutely. So from there, you co-founded Venn Capital Partners and became CEO of Eleven. You know, from our conversations, you have a pretty interesting story about how you came to Eleven. You came through a search fund, which I'm not sure if our audience knows a lot about that or have encountered a search fund. So for those that might not be familiar, how does it work and why was that the route you wanted? Hannah Greenberg: Yeah. So most people, by the way, don't know what a search fund is. Sort of the common language today we use is entrepreneurship through acquisition or ETA, also known as a search fund. And in very basic terms, what it is, is you raise, me in this case, raise a pool of money from a group of investors to go find an operating business, search for an operating business. It could take up to two-ish years, two and a half years. So you raise enough money to fund the search to find a business. In my case, I was very specific on what type of business. It was critical software for the hospitality industry. I know the industry very well, very interested in software. There's a lot of really great solutions out there, so that was the thesis. Once I identified Eleven as the target, you know, had an LOI or was working through due diligence, you raise additional capital from the same group of investors to go then acquire the business. After acquisition, I became the CEO, and I think the why matters here because this is a flavor of entrepreneurship that is not a startup, right? I didn't have some novel idea. I didn't have an idea that I wanted to create that was maybe different from what was in the market. I knew that I was an excellent builder, problem solver, wanted to take something that was already established in an industry I knew very well with great bones and make significant adjustments to make it a higher growth, sort of a longer story trajectory, and that's what the original thesis was. It's very different from private equity or traditional private equity, which is like kind of managing a portfolio, has sort of a lifespan or a term of a fund. This is a bit different. This is truly more of an entrepreneurial, longer-term vision-type entity. And it's also not venture capital, so it's not, we're not betting on an idea, right? We're acquiring an established business. The idea was to do this once. We've now done this a few times. We did some add-on acquisitions along the way. So today we're more like a portfolio of companies, but the original acquisition was a single acquisition of Eleven in 2022. Steve Carran: You are our first CEO on this podcast who's actually bought the company. So that is very cool. What a cool story. David Millili: Yeah. And so for those not familiar with Eleven, can you share more about what you do? Hannah Greenberg: Sure. So at its core, Eleven is, at scale, a global company software provider of Wi-Fi management. Key customers are the largest hotel brands in the world. We also have multifamily residential customers, but at its core, we are the guest layer that sits on top of the network in any hotel or any asset that manages onboarding, signing into Wi-Fi, authenticating who is on the Wi-Fi, management of the Wi-Fi, data and analytics of the Wi-Fi network, loyalty enrollment. So if you are a member of any of the loyalty programs, you probably signed up through our platform. But all of that authentication of the guest hotel Wi-Fi network is the Eleven layer that sits on top of the network. Usually, you don't know it's Eleven because it's branded as the hotel's own brand, but underneath it all is Eleven. Steve Carran: Very cool. And when we talk to most people in the industry, they use hospitality to mean the hotel business, but you kind of look at it a different way. What's the distinction and how does that change how you run Eleven? Hannah Greenberg: Yeah, that's a great question, Steve. I think a lot of people tend to see hospitality as we work for hotels, we deliver services to hotels. I am in the hotel or travel industry, and therefore I am in hospitality. I have a really different point of view, actually. I think hospitality can happen in any industry, but I do think it starts with how you make people feel at its core. Going the extra mile, giving someone what they need or want, even when they don't know they need or want that. Going the extra mile. Making people feel a certain way starts, in my opinion, internally. So Ritz Carlton had this famous credo, "We are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen." I came up through the Ritz Carlton sort of curriculum as an intern and then grew my way that way. But that's core to my belief. Like, you need to take care of the people who are on your team and do the right thing so that they can then deliver service. In an industry like ours, which is very technical, I think a product maybe gets you in the door to have a conversation, but the product is not actually solving the issue for a customer in a hospitality industry. It always comes down to the relationships and how you make people feel, how you show up when things are going well, and more importantly, when things are not going well, and how, at the end of the day, you make the people that you are serving feel. And I've felt that way my whole life. I think that's how I go about my own team and the industry that we serve, but it's certainly well beyond just working for hotels or delivering service for hotels. Steve Carran: So now we're gonna go to the industry thoughts, kind of the thought leadership section of the podcast. So oftentimes when we talk to hotels, and they have a problem, their reflex is usually to go find a product or technology that solves it. Do you think that's the right first instinct? Hannah Greenberg: I mean, for a product organization, I'm actually gonna say no. I'm gonna say that I think products are incredible, right? But what I see often, and I come again from the owner side, is that when there's a problem, we look towards a product, and all of a sudden you have a stack of point solutions or point products that become a large tech stack and become a little untenable because they don't communicate with each other, they don't work together, and all of a sudden you've had all these ideas, all these small problems being solved by individual products with nobody actually to manage the outcomes. And I think the differentiator here is that no product by itself has solved any hotelier problem ever. Like in the history of hotels, a product has never solved a hotelier's problem. It really relies on the people whose mandate is to manage the product, what outcomes come from the product, who's on the day-to-day on the vendor side or the hotelier side, who's actually owning the outcomes of that product. When there's fuzziness there, I think we are all set up to fail, and I've seen it, right? I've been to this movie. I live this movie. And so at Eleven, what we try to do is actually, obviously we have a product, but it's really about who's executing that product, who's responsible for the outcomes. And I think that many vendors out there sort of sell their product and maybe move on to the next. And back to your previous question, Steve, that is the antithesis of hospitality. That's what not to do as a product organization. And so I think that a lot of hoteliers maybe get wooed by these new products out there as like, "This is gonna solve everything that I have on a daily basis. It's gonna solve my operations." I think that's a pretty big misnomer. David Millili: And so it's a pretty entrenched belief that in hospitality you need to come through the industry, have worked in a hotel to really understand it. Do you believe that's true? Hannah Greenberg: I don't. I think it's twofold. I think for someone like myself who's come through the hospitality industry, I think it's easy to have this opinion that you have to be in the know to do well here. I think that's shortsighted. I think there's a few pieces here. I personally, when building my team over the years at Eleven and before, I found some of the most success for people who come from outside the hospitality industry with a fresh perspective, fresh set of eyes, ideas that have worked other places, and the willingness to listen and learn, not listen to win, right? Actually kind of be open-minded. What doesn't work is when people outside the industry come in and just sort of say, "Everything you guys do is wrong," right? Obviously that mentality doesn't work. But on the flip side of that, I think it's really shortsighted to say that because you have to have come from the industry, 'cause what I've witnessed is people saying like, "This is the way we've always done it. This is how hospitality works." And that is not the way to grow and develop and get our industry to be more innovative. Like, there is a thought that hospitality is lower tech than many industries, and for us to sort of reverse that mindset and to combat that and to become more innovative, we have to be open-minded to fresh people, fresh ideas, and fresh thinking. And so we have a bunch of people at Eleven that have been deeply ingrained in the hospitality industry for a long time, like myself. I think that's excellent, but we do need folks who come with fresh perspectives and fresh ideas or more than just, "This is the playbook we've done for the last 20 years." I think that makes us complacent if we think that way. Steve Carran: Love that answer. So it kinda seems when you talk to different vendors, they all say they wanna be partners rather than a vendor. And sometimes that might just be a line. Sometimes it might be something else. But what really separates companies where they do mean that, and that is a true statement, and how can hotels tell the difference before they sign up with them when maybe they didn't really mean that? Hannah Greenberg: Yeah. You know, I have the hotelier owner hat on when I'm thinking this way, and so I would ask myself as the hotel owner or, you know, people in the industry as hotel owners, like, what has the vendor done after the contract is signed, right? Because I think this fallacy is a bit like, "Hey, we're gonna get to the contract. We have this MSA and we have... We are successful." That is a recipe for short-term success, long-term failure. So I think the difference is that hotels are super complex, right? There's all these stakeholders. There's brands, there's management, there's ownership. Sometimes they're the same, sometimes those are different. You have franchise and you have different employees, like there's a lot of stakeholders, and I think the difference in what makes a real partner versus I'm just gonna say we're a partner, is the long-term cooperation and collaboration on what does success look like for each of those stakeholders. I find the best partners out there are the ones when things go poorly, are there to help troubleshoot, are there to actually stand up and say, "Hey, we made a mistake. We're gonna be direct. We're gonna fix it." Because things are going to happen, mistakes will happen. In our situation, we're a software business, of course, there's gonna be problems. There's gonna be bugs. Things aren't gonna go well. How do you show up when those things are not going well is one piece of it. I think the other is when you think of a hotel decision-maker, that person who's signing the contract, they're often not the person who, after the contract is signed, is going to have to deal with that vendor or that partner for the long period of time. The team that is responsible for that solution and making sure that that solution works, they're waking up every day with the outcome of, "Hey, this has to be... This is in my lane. It has to work." Those are the people that you need to delight. You need to make sure their lives are easier because of you. You need to ask in advance what concerns they have. My favorite question I ask for every one of our customers, whether it's in a QBR or just an ad hoc meeting, is, "Tell me all the things we're not doing well, everything that's not working." I actually don't care much about what's working. We'll keep doing it. It's good to know for morale and to make everyone feel good, but that's not how you build loyalty and build partnership. Tell me all the things that aren't working, and that excites me, and I think that should excite someone who's trying to build meaningful, long-standing relationships. Because in this industry, as I mentioned, it's not about the product, it's about the people who are responsible for the outcomes of the product or solution, and that's how you build loyalty over a long period of time. David Millili: I love this next question because I'm old enough to know when Wi-Fi was super expensive when you checked into a hotel. So Wi-Fi got classified as an amenity decades ago, and the labels stuck even with mobile check-in, your in-room entertainment, keyless entry, loyalty all running over it. What changes at a hotel company the day leadership stops treating the network like an amenity and starts treating it as operating infrastructure? Hannah Greenberg: Yeah. So I think today strong, secure Wi-Fi is table stakes. If you don't have it, you are so far beyond as a business traveler, will never go anywhere without strong, stable Wi-Fi, right? I can have no hot water, but I certainly need Wi-Fi. So I think this concept of Wi-Fi as a differentiator, I think those days are gone. I actually think paying for Wi-Fi, those days are gone outside of some situations, right? Some resorts, some specific circumstances still have a good Wi-Fi revenue stream. But at the end of the day, where this industry is going, there's so many solutions. As we talked earlier, there's a large tech stack in a hotel that really rely on the quality of the network. Not just the quality of the network, but the security of the network, the compliance of the network. Actually making sure that the network is in a place where it is no longer a liability to the hotel owner, to the brand, or to the management company. I don't think we're fully there yet. I think we're still in this transition period, but a rock-solid network is more than just fast, right? It's more than just speed. And I think that the best brands that we work with, our best customers, look at the Wi-Fi infrastructure as really driving business outcomes, various business outcomes. Loyalty enrollments is obviously a big marketing push to get additional customers through the channel of being a loyalty member. Adding on IoT is something that's very important to hotel brands. Making sure that the reporting and the compliance has it so it's less vulnerable for attacks. Today, there's a lot of cybersecurity issues out there, right? So all of these different stakeholders in a brand, so you have CTO's lane, you have head of marketing's lane, you have the CISO's lane, they all care deeply about the network. As I mentioned, the best hotel brands out there are having those conversations on how can the network deliver on the business outcomes of these different lanes. From a guest perspective, a business traveler, we only care about fast, stable, secure. If I have to put Wi-Fi in any of my guest satisfaction surveys, like, you've missed the mark. Wi-Fi should not show up in any satisfaction score survey or else you're behind. Steve Carran: That's the quickest way to ruin guest loyalty for me. If I go to your hotel and it takes me 10 minutes to upload a video to LinkedIn to post, I am out. So we're on the same page on the Wi-Fi situation. So one thing we talk about almost every episode is AI, and every hotel group, or not every, but a lot of hotel groups have it on the agenda to put something AI in their hotel. But what I find funny is they're still using systems in their operational stack that still don't talk to each other. So if I'm a hotel, what is the first step I should be looking at before they buy anything with AI in the name? Hannah Greenberg: It's great. Funny, last year at HITEC, I was walking the show floor, and I was starting to count the number of booths that had AI in the marketing. Within 10 minutes, I had to change and count the number of booths that did not have AI in the marketing of the booth because it is just everywhere, and I think a lot of it is noise, to be quite frank. But there are some companies like ourselves and many others that are doing really meaningful things. But if I'm the hotel brand and I have a whole group within my organization, any of the brands that are focusing on the brand's AI strategy, I would ask every new potential vendor or solution how does it fit with our AI strategy versus the opposite. I think a bunch of these vendors have this big, robust roadmap. Some of it's real. I think some of it is maybe just a little bit of posturing. Either way, that does not necessarily fit the needs of the brand. The brand has its own investment, its own team, its own budget about its AI policy, right? Rather than trying to fit the brand into the vendor, I think it needs to be the other way around. So that's one thing I would look for. The second thing is that interoperability has been one of the biggest challenges in our industry for a long time. All of these point solutions do not talk well to each other. We do not all play well in the sandbox, and this is a problem that groups like AHLA's HTNG is trying to solve, right? I'm actively involved in the T100. These are the big, meaty discussions that we're all having. How do we actually work together as a tech stack? That's sort of the vendor's problem to solve, less of the hotelier's problem to solve, in my opinion. And so the hotel brand should be asking, "How are you solving this? How do you fit within our ecosystem?" When we go in, we have a very robust AI engine, right? Both for internal use and really far along in terms of our product development. That helps Eleven. That helps new customers. My question to my own team is, "Guys, how does that help all of our existing customers? We have 30,000 hotels. How is this gonna impact what we're already doing?" Because that's the value add. It's not just the shiny object that we're gonna be selling for new customers. How is it gonna serve our incredible top-tier customers we already have? I don't think everyone thinks that way, and I think that's dangerous because what it seems like is that some vendors are sort of in this dark room or in a tunnel working on their own solution, and they're gonna come out of the tunnel and realize that it doesn't necessarily meet the mark of the most important group, which are those that are going to buy that solution. Steve Carran: I have a follow-up question here just because of your background in hotels and technology. Where do you think we're gonna see AI make the biggest impact in hotels? Hannah Greenberg: You know, I was just listening to a panel the other week, and I think that one of the takeaways really resonated with me. I think the way in which we book is certainly gonna change, right? That's already changed, and the way that we actually book. And that has cascading effects into all of the hotel brands, obviously, the reservation systems, the PMS systems. Like, all the vendors are actually impacted by how travelers book. So I do think that is gonna be the biggest change. I also think the expectations of the level of service is going to continue to rise. I think COVID, we had a bit of a dip because COVID was an anomaly and service wasn't normal. Post-COVID, expectations went higher. Like, and that continued to happen. That continues to happen. Like, the average traveler expects a higher level of service today than they did 10 years ago. I think with the use of AI and the always connected, the easy to get a response, whether it's via a chatbot or somebody, a human, that is going to continue to push the envelope. And so if your solution does not deliver better, not just faster and more convenient, but better service, not frustration, which is happening a bunch, I think you're gonna be in trouble. And so I think the way we book and the level of service that we expect as an industry are both moving in a direction that if AI isn't going to solve for, we're gonna have a crossroads. Steve Carran: I agree 100%. David Millili: Definitely agree with that. So what advice would you give to the younger generation, the folks that want to get into either owning their own company or even just getting into hospitality? What type of advice would you give them? Hannah Greenberg: Yeah. You know, I mentor a lot of up-and-coming entrepreneurs that wanna go through the search fund process or are currently searching for businesses, and I tend to keep to the same script. One thing that I always say, and this may sound cliché, is like, "Be brave. You gotta take risks." Like, at the end of the day, I always ask myself, and I still to this day, "What's the worst thing that could happen?" If you actually sit down, and whether it's in your head or in a journal or talking to yourself while you're on a walk, ask that question. The answer is usually a pretty mundane answer. Like, the risks are typically not as big as we think that they are, right? The risks of failure. So be brave is one of them. The other thing, and I subscribe to this deeply, is find people that have done it and go talk to them. Like, I think mentorship is the most underrated and beneficial thing we could do in our lives, is be a mentor or have a mentee, and the power of mentorship. And so I rely heavily on people that are experts. If I don't know the answer, I'm gonna go find someone that does. You gotta be humble enough to go ask for help. But finding people that have done it, interview some CEOs, take someone to coffee, ask for a 20-minute chat. Like, that's how you're gonna actually understand what it means to be in this role, what it means to have all of the mistakes happen along the way. I think people are afraid, especially maybe the younger generations are afraid to be like, "I don't know. Please help me." And so I think you gotta be humble enough to ask for help. So be brave, get a mentor or ask people who are in the seat you want to be in, "Do you have some time to talk?" And I think the third one is to have a thesis and conviction and go for it. Like, I find a bunch of people who want to be entrepreneurs, they start on a journey, and when something goes wrong or it's not going the way exactly in the direction they want, they pivot quickly. It's like you gotta have a little bit of patience. Things are going to go wrong. Have conviction, stay with it, and then at some point, you could do a go, no-go if it's not working out. But I feel people kinda give up early, and that doesn't really align with the grit needed to be a CEO or grit needed to be an entrepreneur. Like, you gotta be gritty. And so those are the three things I see that are often holes that people fall into, and I'd love to help combat that if possible. David Millili: That's great advice. Steve Carran: Great advice. Well said. Hannah, this has been an awesome conversation. We appreciate your time, but this whole time we've been asking you the questions. This is where we turn the tables and let you ask David and I a question. Hannah Greenberg: Oh, I love this. Well, I'm gonna ask—could I ask two? Steve Carran: Sure. Hannah Greenberg: Okay. Because I'm a voracious reader, what's the best recent book that you've read, and why would you suggest that book? That's my first question. Steve Carran: Can I be honest? I have been an actual terrible reader. I have a newborn and I haven't had a ton of spare time to read lately. So this year I have been miserable at reading books. I probably should get better or listen, maybe should listen to some audiobooks. So, I got nothing for you that I've read recently. But I did read Rick Rubin's book, and I really enjoyed that book. So that one I read last year, and that one always motivates me. David Millili: Yeah, I'll probably say my favorite, the most recent one I read that was the funnest was, my friend Anthony Melchiorri wrote a book called Show Up, and it was about his life as a, getting into hotels and getting into show business, having a TV show. And that for me was just kind of fun because when I was reading it, I was hearing his voice in my head because I didn't know all the stories, so it was also, for someone who I'm very close with, it was kind of cool to get some nuggets that you just wouldn't be talking about over a beer or if he's driving back from work or I am and get on a call. So for me, that was kind of cool. And it was, it kind of gave, it had that mentor feel, and it was kind of about this, how do you succeed when things aren't always going great? Hannah Greenberg: It's super valid. Last question, I promise. Steve Carran: Wait, can I redo my answer quick? I actually, man, I really messed up that one. I just forwarded a book this year called Worth at Work, and I did read that one, and that was my favorite book this year. So go check that one out. Hannah Greenberg: Worth at Work, you said? Steve Carran: Yes. Yeah, it's great. It's about valuing yourself, since there's such burnout in the hospitality and hotel industry. So it's a great read. Hannah Greenberg: Awesome. I'm gonna read those both. My last question is, what is your most controversial opinion about the industry that most people don't share? What do you believe that most don't? Steve Carran: Ooh. David, I'll let you field this one first. David Millili: Yeah, I bet so. Like you, I've read. It was funny because when you were talking about your front desk experience, I was getting flashbacks because I was in Hollywood Beach, Florida. I was the only front desk agent on Fridays who took care of the entire property, and it was all these old guys from Boston and New York that could have been older than my parents that were reporting to me, basically. I think the biggest challenge in our industry is we keep talking about it, but nobody will really just step up and admit that we really do suck at not adopting new technology and embracing technology. And I think we kind of skirt around the issue, and we have all these shows and HITEC, and we got all these new cool things that can be out there. It's like, for me, it blows my mind that I can still check into a hotel in the back half of 2026, and they don't have SMS messaging where I can just ask for towels or something, and there's no communication. So I just wish we would do more than just keep talking about it, 'cause I feel like that's all we do so much of, just talking and talking and talking, and we don't do as good enough of a job of implementing that technology into the actual physical properties. So— Hannah Greenberg: Agreed. Steve Carran: All right. I'm gonna go on a limb here. I'm gonna say there are people that should not work in hospitality. And let me elaborate on this. We travel quite a bit, and I'll go to a hotel and there are times when I check in and I feel like I'm bothering the front desk agent, or I can't get a smile, or you walk past people in the hallway and they're looking down or looking at their phone and don't even say hi. So I think we need to do a better job at marketing what types of personalities should work in hospitality. If you're outgoing, if your superpower is positivity, you should be working in hospitality. But if you hate people and don't like talking to people, you should not be in hospitality. So that's my hot take. David Millili: Well said, Steve, because that's one of my biggest things. Having worked in hotels, my thing is always, what are they looking at? What is so important on that screen that they're looking at that they don't look up and greet me or acknowledge me? And again, if I hadn't worked the front desk, I mean, but I would be curious and be like, "Oh, what are you guys looking at back there?" But I know there's nothing that important that they're looking at anyway. Hannah Greenberg: You're right. I call that top-of-the-head syndrome when all you see during the check-in process is the top of their head, and it drives me bananas. So— Hannah Greenberg: Especially because you guys are probably loyal customers to certain brands, and they should be recognizing that, right? You're checking into a hotel, you've probably either been there before or they can easily see that you have been to that brand 10, 15, 20, 30, 50 times that year already, and maybe should acknowledge it, but I agree. David Millili: Well, I always say it's real quick. It's funny that I used to get better service at the Dunkin' Donuts next to Penn Station when I worked in New York City than I did when I would check in for a $400-a-night room. I would get better service from the people behind the desk or behind the counter at Dunkin' Donuts. Hannah Greenberg: And by the way, a technical product isn't gonna fix that. So it comes back to the people. David Millili: Yep. Steve Carran: Absolutely. Well, that was great. So Hannah, this has been a great conversation. Our producer, Jon, has been listening the entire time, so we're gonna kick it over to him for the final question before we get you outta here. Jon Bumhoffer: I've loved listening to this conversation because this touches on a friction point or frustration I have many times when I go to hotels. With my job, uniquely, I'm getting media, I'm uploading media, I'm sending files to people, and the internet is always a bottleneck or an issue that we run into. Some hotels and brands are worse than others, depending on the stay. You mentioned that Wi-Fi really should just be basic operating infrastructure at this point, and I agree with that. But what are some of the things that you see hotels still doing that lead to those negative reviews you said shouldn't happen, or lead to guest dissatisfaction or frustration, that you wish would just go away? There are a couple of things I can think of, but what are some things you see hotels still doing with their Wi-Fi that you wish they would stop? Hannah Greenberg: Yeah, a few things. I wish we could actually control the Wi-Fi, right? We are a piece of the puzzle, but I would say one of the biggest pressure points in the industry today is hotel owners are under a lot of pressure on how to spend their CapEx dollars, right? There are so many things that need to happen. Upgrading a Wi-Fi network is expensive, right? Doing it every five years consistently can be half a million dollars every five years. Do I do that, or do I update mattresses, get new lights, or put a new bistro in the lobby? Which of those is gonna give me additional ADR, right? That's the analysis that the owner is gonna do. So part of this is that there's friction between brand mandates and brand standards, which we're part of, and what the owner is actually spending their money on. A lot of the other network providers are part of that, too. So I think that's part of it. Some of the outcomes of that are hotels that just have old infrastructure, and that's still a problem today. Software can't fix that, unfortunately. But that's one of the issues. The other thing I think drives me crazy is that even with a software or a solution in place, the individual hotel is in charge of how they're using it, right? Even if it's a brand mandate or deployed globally for a specific brand, I still check in and get a little piece of paper that has a password to the Wi-Fi that has been, like, the password 2026. The password could be November 2022. I'm thinking, from November 2022 till now, we've had the same password. It's not secure. There are too many people on it. There are people that shouldn't be on it. There's no managing bandwidth speed. So someone like Jon, who actually needs to use premium Wi-Fi, would probably pay for it if needed, for an additional cost, because you have to do your job. You're sort of getting the short end of the stick. So I think some of this comes down to how the programs are mandated, trained, and passed down to the individual front desk team, right? I see that as a problem. The third thing I see as a problem is when something doesn't work, when something is off. Let's say the Wi-Fi is down altogether, which is, in my mind, a catastrophe. I would not spend my time at that hotel. You go to the front desk, and the answer is sometimes, to your point, Steve, "Oh yeah, the Wi-Fi's not working." How? That is not proactive, doesn't give me any time to resolution, doesn't sympathize or empathize with me, and just says, "This is it. This is what it is." So not only does it not work, Jon, but now you're frustrated and annoyed. I think those are some of the dynamics I see. I wish there were unlimited dollars for hotel owners to upgrade CapEx all the time, but as an owner myself, I know that's not the case. Jon Bumhoffer: Love it. David Millili: Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. Hannah, this is where you get to let people know how they can get in touch with you and find out more about Eleven. Hannah Greenberg: Awesome. Find me on LinkedIn, Hannah Greenberg, CEO of Eleven, elevensoftware.com. Would love to connect, and thanks so much for your time. This has been so much fun. David Millili: Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality. Whether you're watching or listening, we appreciate you and hope to be with you again soon. Thanks for joining us, Hannah. Hannah Greenberg: Thanks so much.