GM. Revenue strategist. Finance director. Twenty years in hotels, from the front desk to the ownership call. Basketball coach on weekends. This is where I write about what actually works.
Most hotel finance people came up through accounting. I came up through the front desk, revenue management, and two decades of ownership calls. The difference shows up in how I read a P&L — and in how I explain it.
Started on the floor. 30 people on the team, one hotel to run, no manual for how to do it right. In seven months as GM, occupancy was up 16% month over month versus the prior year.
I didn't know then I'd end up in finance. But running a hotel teaches you something a spreadsheet never does: the number is always a story about a decision someone made, or didn't make.
Built the revenue management function at Hardage Hotels, covering Chase Suites and Woodfin Suites. Then moved to Stanford Hotels as Area Director, running strategy across full-service Hiltons in Charlotte and DC and Luma Hotel Times Square, independent, ranked #2 on TripAdvisor in the US at the time.
Revenue management at this level is mostly about saying the unpopular thing with confidence: the weekend rates are going up, the group is displacing transient, the pick-up doesn't support the forecast. Getting good at that taught me how to talk to operators, not just at them.
Started at Sage running revenue strategy at the corporate level. Then 2020 hit. COVID tore the whole playbook apart — occupancy collapsed, forecasting became guesswork, and the job turned into triage. I spent that period figuring out how to manage costs, communicate with ownership under real uncertainty, and rebuild a revenue function from scratch when demand came back.
That experience pushed me toward operations finance. I'd spent years on "what's the right rate?" and started asking "what did it cost us to earn it?" The pivot toward the P&L side felt like the natural next step — and it pointed me toward Peregrine.
33 hotels, $235M in revenue. I build the tools, the bridge workbooks, the monthly reporting, and the narratives that go to ownership. If the numbers are off, I find out why. If the story doesn't make sense, I make it make sense.
This is the job I've been building toward for 20 years. It takes everything: the operations instincts from the GM days, the market fluency from revenue management, and the financial discipline to put it all in a format an ownership group can actually use.
I coach 8 and 9-year-olds in basketball on weekends. I also coach GMs through their first ownership calls, finance teams through their first month-end close, and operators through what their P&L is actually trying to tell them. The skill is the same: read what's in front of you, figure out what's actually happening, and help someone understand it.
If a report isn't being used, it's usually because it arrived too late, answered the wrong question, or nobody trusted the numbers. Fix the process before you fix the format.
Portfolio-level labor benchmarks tell you almost nothing at the property level. What matters is what that specific hotel, with that specific mix, should cost to run this week.
A 200% flow-through means something went wrong. The question is whether operations caused it or absorbed it, and those need very different responses.
A bridge that buries bad news under jargon doesn't protect the relationship. Tell the story clearly, with context, and then focus on what's being done about it.
By the time you're reviewing finals, you've already lost the chance to fix most of what you're discussing. The work that counts happens in the last week of the live month.
Every hotel tech implementation that goes sideways goes sideways for the same reason: the team expected the software to create discipline that didn't exist before. It doesn't work that way.
I built RoomToProfit because the gap between what gets published and what actually happens in a hotel finance role is pretty wide. I've been in the ownership calls. I've found the $40K that didn't post right at 11pm on a Tuesday. I've built the bridge that had to explain why GOP missed without making the GM look bad and without hiding the real story.
This is where I write what I've actually figured out. Examples are anonymized. The thinking is my own.