Hospitality is still an industry where the dishwasher can make it to the top—literally. In 2008, Lodging queried dozens of the industry’s top CEOs, asking them one question: What was your first job? Close to half cited dishwashing in restaurants and hotels. It’s now 2014, and the industry is immensely more complex and global than ever. Yet, the route to the top echelons of the industry remain open to those with the right mind-set and work ethic.
For this article, Lodging interviewed three hotel executives at the top of their game to look back over their careers and share their stories about the way up. Each represents a different area of the industry: Art Adler is managing director/CEO Americas for Jones Lang LaSalle’s Hotels and Hospitality Group (real estate transactions, advisory services, investment banking, and asset management), Walter Isenberg is CEO of Denver-based Sage Hospitality (ownership and management), and Tina Edmundson is global officer/SVP luxury and lifestyle brands for Marriott International. All three began humbly (two were dishwashers), and all quickly developed a vision of where they wanted to go and evolved the skill set to get there.
They would tell you they have the best jobs in the world and would not trade them for anything. Their message to anyone at any level in the industry, but particularly newcomers, is that passion, hard work, and flexibility are the keys to getting ahead.
AN APTITUDE FOR ACCOUNTING
Adler grew up in Paramus, N.J., the son of a German immigrant who would become an architect. “A normal kid with a public school education” is how Adler describes his youth. “Not a particularly notable school career. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do, like most high school kids.
“Because we were a very middle-class family, I always had to work, whether it was mowing lawns or whatever,” he continues. “My first job in the hospitality industry was washing dishes at a Howard Johnson. I was 14 or 15, and it was a minimum wage job.”
His next job, while still in high school, was a night houseman at a Holiday Inn in Paramus. “I would hang out with the front desk clerks and talk with them,” Adler says. “I learned how to use the front office equipment—a Holidex machine, the NCR 4200 electronic cash register, and the switchboard. And so I became a front desk clerk.”
Still not knowing what he wanted to do, Adler enrolled at a small state school and continued to work in hotels. Fate turned when the young woman working the desk for her summer job told Adler about Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration, which she attended. He applied and was accepted.
“Looking back, my grades were OK and my SAT scores fair at best,” he says, “but I was a really good candidate. All my jobs growing up were in hospitality—whether it was washing dishes, bussing tables, cleaning rooms, or working the front desk. I already had an interest and passion in hospitality, and they saw that.”
Did Adler know then that he was on his way to heading up a major hotel real estate transactions firm doing deals annually totaling more than $10 billion?
“Of course not,” he answers. “I didn’t even know what hotel real estate was. Even when you’re at Cornell, most people think they are going to be in hotel management.”
Adler spent his summers working at Catskill resorts, learning enough to know he didn’t want to be in food and beverage and to recognize his aptitude for accounting.
“When I got out of school, I really wanted to work in consulting, because I had an aptitude for the numbers side of the business,” he says.
However, he didn’t land a consulting job at first and, instead, went to work in the front office of the 2,100-room New York Hilton as a management trainee, working his way up through the rooms side of the business. A key move came when he became an assistant operations analyst at the Hilton. “It was like being an internal consultant. You worked directly for the general manager, and you analyzed the profit and loss statements and various departments, focusing on payroll, overtime, big investment items, like china, glasses, and special projects.”
At age 23, Adler took over as head operations analyst, a position that required him approximately once a month to serve as weekend manager of the hotel. However, to proceed further in the hotel’s management hierarchy required a return to pure operations, something Adler didn’t want.
Instead, he applied again to Laventhol & Horwath, the accounting firm to which he originally applied directly out of college. “They literally hired me on the spot. That was 1980.
“That backed me out of operations to more the real estate side,” he says. “That’s where I learned that side of the business. At that time, you really didn’t learn that at Cornell.”
The 1980s and ’90s saw Adler working for Laventhol & Horwath, Sonnenblick Goldman, Coopers & Lybrand, and, in 2000, Jones Lang LaSalle. He was 43 at the time, and JLL’s hotel real estate head, Peter Barge, was working on creating a global hotel real estate transaction firm with divisions in Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Adler took the job as head of the Americas for the London-based company where he has been ever since.
“I felt I could go in and make a difference coming into such a terrific platform, especially since I was used to a larger platform, both at Laventhol & Horwath and Coopers & Lybrand,” he says. “I turned out to be correct—it was and is a leading hotel transaction platform and continues to be. Today, we are about 110 people in the Americas and about 275 globally.”
