FOLLOW YOUR HEART
“Lessons that you shouldn’t have to learn but you do is that it’s a very small industry,” Adler says. “The people who you work with very early in your career, even the people you went to school with, are the people you are going to be with your entire career.”
Adler says one of his biggest career mistakes was in not following his heart at a key juncture. Senior management at one of the major accounting firms lured him away from another company whose work better suited his passion for transaction consulting.
“My heart just wasn’t in it,” he says. “It was a very short period of time—45 days. But I could not sleep at night. I was doing very well as a partner there, and when you’re a partner in an accounting firm, you basically have a very stable income. At the time, I had a young family, and I stayed. After 45 days, I went back. Moving out of consulting into something else was not the right thing to do.
“What I’m saying is, you have to follow your heart, and you’ll do well,” he says. “You have to have enthusiasm and passion for what you are doing. Otherwise, you have to find something else to do.”
Passion and ambition have a downside, Adler learned. The demands of work and family had to be reconciled.
“Yeah, there are sacrifices,” he says. “And the sacrifices are not so much my sacrifices—my family has had to sacrifice. However, I never missed a vacation, a concert, or any of the kids’ activities.
“But I clearly had to travel a lot, and I still do,” Adler says. “That’s been very difficult on the family, particularly for my wife. She gave up a career in commercial real estate and made the decision to stay home with the family.”
His advice to young people on the way up is fundamental.
“It’s important to take the initiative, not just to work harder but also smarter,” he says. “If you’re just starting out, no matter what the job—working in a hotel or consulting or finance or accounting—when the managers get to staff assignments, you want them saying: ‘We want him or her. That’s who we want taking on the task.’ That’s what gets you ahead.”
ON-THE-JOB TRAINING
When Walt Isenberg was 14, he answered an ad for a dishwashing job at a nearby country club. The environment appealed to him, and soon the maître d’ took him under his wing, moving him to busboy and then server. Three years later, Isenberg was still at it, prompting the maître d’ to suggest he apply to Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration.
“One thing led to another,” Isenberg says. “Through some members of the club, I met Phil Pistilli, who without question was the hospitality leader in Kansas City and was chairman of the [then] American Hotel & Motel Association and chairman of the Cornell Society of Hotelmen. He was gracious enough to spend some time with me and, ultimately, wrote a letter for me to get into Cornell. Before I left for college, he put me into a sort of management training program where I rotated through the departments at the Alameda Plaza Hotel.”
When asked if he had any idea while studying hospitality in college where he would be in 35 years, Isenberg laughs. “Not a clue.”
At school, he thought maybe he’d own his own restaurant, he says. “One of the great things about being at Cornell is the curriculum sobered you up to the financial realities in the restaurant business. Frankly, I was getting more and more interested in the hotel side.”
Not coincidentally, then, Isenberg’s first job out of college was as a food and beverage manager for Southern Host Hotels of Atlanta. Within a year, he was general manager of a Holiday Inn in Jacksonville, Fla. Over the next four years, he was a GM of hotels in seven cities.
In 1984, while working for Southern Host, Isenberg got a call from a former college classmate who had just quit his job at an accounting firm. Zack Neumeyer told Isenberg about a client who repeatedly asked him to operate a hotel he wanted to build. “‘You’re one of the only guys I know in operations, so what do you think?’ he said. I quit my job, and fate was started. Not really smart,” Isenberg admits.
Neumeyer’s client never panned out, but six months later, they landed another management contract. “And we stumbled into the distress real estate business,” he says. And within five years, the two partners had 75 hotels under their management—all with owners who wanted completely out of the hotel business. Realizing they needed equity in a property, they acquired the first in a series of one-off deals beginning in 1991. “But in 1994, we bought 30 Fairfield Inns in a transaction worth $100 million,” he says.
They were off and running. Isenberg would become CEO and Neumeyer chairman.
“Fast-forward to today, we’re operating 65 hotels, and 10 years ago, we started a restaurant company, with 10 restaurants open,” he says. “Last year, we did $500 million in revenue. So, today, our focus is being great investors and operators of hospitality real estate.”
