Adam Knight: Building a Dream with Intuition & Iteration

Meet Creating Hospitality: a conversation series where we explore an important question that impacts the journey to joy: how can today’s hospitality leaders create healthy, happy teams categorically capable of helping guests find their joy?

Host and Sertifi CMO, Shawn Gaines, chats fun and unique stories with hospitality leaders to inspire others how to build successful teams, careers, and customer experiences from the start.

In episode three, we chat with Adam Knight, CEO of Recreation Stays, about his journey starting a hospitality business, from growing his team to empowering them with the right process and tools.

Episode Transcription

Shawn Gaines: Welcome to Creating Hospitality, a conversation series that explores how today’s hospitality leaders can create healthy, happy teams categorically capable of helping guests find their joy. I'm Shawn Gaines, your host, Sertifi’s CMO, and just a guy who gets inspired by talking with cool people.

Today, I will be chatting with Adam Knight, who as the CEO of Recreation Stays among other roles. And I'll stop there and let Adam introduce himself. So Adam, welcome to the podcast.

Adam Knight: I appreciate it, Shawn. Thank you so much for having me today. So, I guess I got to dive in and talk about myself, huh?

SG: Yes, please! Tell us a little bit about yourself please.

AK: A little bit about me... well, I have been in the hospitality industry, believe it or not, a little over twenty five years, probably coming on twenty seven years at this point, which is really crazy to say because I don't feel that old. But I started immediately out of high school. Like right away, when I was seventeen. The one thing that I knew for sure was that I didn't want to go on to any sort of post-secondary education. That's the one thing I knew for sure. Didn't know anything else. But I was done with school. I wanted to move on.

SG: Why was that do you think? Like what was it about that, that point in time?

AK: Honestly, that's a great question. Probably a different show!

SG: Fair enough!

AK: No, but honestly, I think it just came down to I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I didn't, at the time, see any value in just continuing on and getting a generic degree. It just didn't work for how I learned and what I wanted to do with my time in my life. So, I applied for a job at a ski resort that we used to stay at growing up all the time, and I got hired on as a pot washer.

And just a little funny story, sort of a side story on this, you had to be eighteen to live in staff accommodation, and I was seventeen. So, my parents had to co-sign a lease for me at an apartment in the main ski town that I lived at by myself. So, I had this bachelor apartment, you know, in the ski town. I was seventeen years old and moved away from home and started working. And honestly it just took off from there.

SG: It sounds like that's the plot of an early nineties buddy comedy. A seventeen-year-old's got his own apartment at a ski resort...

AK: Yeah, it really does! And living through it, it kind of felt like that, too, at times. But no, it was honestly such a great experience to do that. I did end up moving back home for a short amount of time after that. Eventually, I did go on to a hotel management program and stayed with Fairmont, which is the company that I worked with primarily through my career. And then they sort of moved me all over the place. I started in Western Canada and then I moved to the Caribbean and then I moved into the US and lived and worked sort of all over.

And, one of the fun stories I used to tell new hires when they were coming in when we were in the new hire orientation, is that this is such a great industry because there's not many, anywhere in the world, that will pay you to live in places that people dream of visiting one time in their life.

And, one of the fun stories I used to tell new hires when they were coming in when we were in the new hire orientation, is that this is such a great industry because there's not many, anywhere in the world, that will pay you to live in places that people dream of visiting one time in their life. And, you know, I had that realization at some point. I was, I don't know where I was - I was either living in Bermuda or Barbados or wherever. Honestly, they moved me everywhere, and at some point, it hit me how lucky I was to be able to do what I was doing. Even though sometimes it's a really hard way to make a living. If you can keep perspective and appreciate where you are and what you do, then you can have a really, really great career in this industry.

SG: See, I love that you couldn't remember the place you were at out of this list of amazing places that you went through that you could have been at.

AK: Yeah, my wife and I counted it up. I think I've moved like twenty six times.

SG: That’s wild!

AK: It’s crazy!

SG: At that point, too, when you were living in these amazing places, moving so often, how did you keep yourself grounded?

AK: Not easy. I mean, when you move to a new place, the benefit of being with a larger company was that at some point, if you've been around long enough, you get to meet a lot of the people in the company and everybody generally is in the same boat. If you're moving up the ladder, then you're all moving around a lot. And so, you cross paths with a lot of people. So, one of the benefits was that often you went into a location, and you knew or knew someone who knew more than a handful of people at the property.

But other than that, it was just about creating a routine for myself. So, you know, what was important to me: finding a great gym and finding some of the great restaurants in town or some of the things that people like to do in the area and just developing that - I usually call it, what are you doing on a regular Tuesday in February right? How do you set your life up to be able to be happy on those super mundane, normal, nothing-exciting-going-on times. And so that became sort of the MO when going to these new locations.

SG: Love it, love it. So, you spend a good amount of time in the hospitality world and then, I guess, staying in the hospitality world, but moving to the entrepreneurship side. Can you tell us a little bit more about that part of your journey?

AK: Yeah, so I moved on from Fairmont probably ten years ago or so. I went to work for Saint Regis for a little while and then took on a couple of corporate jobs for two different independent hotel companies - one based just outside San Francisco in Silicon Valley and then the other one based in Bellevue, which is just outside Seattle.

And everything was going great up until the pandemic. And everybody knows what happened there. We all ended up losing our jobs, and I was trying to figure out at that time what I was going to do with over twenty years of experience in an industry that was falling apart around me. I had no idea what was going to happen and decided, at the time, after a few conversations with some people that I knew that were dabbling in short-term rentals. Airbnb's at the start of the pandemic, if you can, you listeners, if you can sort of take yourselves back to that period, were really starting to take off. I mean, it was a big deal pre-pandemic, but with work-from-home and needing to isolate and doing all those things, everybody really started looking for those great experiences that were really self-driven in remote.

So, there's so much overlap if you do a Venn diagram between hotels and short-term rentals. It made perfect sense to get into that space. And so, that's how Recreation Stays was formed and launched. And it was started with the intention of making it and pulling from some of the operations of the best hotels in the world using the methodology, the hospitality methodology, and the processes, and how we take care of our guests, and how we take care of our owners, and imprinting that - or a version of that - on the short-term rental experience. So, that's been the goal from day one.

SG: Well, the timing certainly sounded good. I mean, I certainly remember, me and my family found an Airbnb in Indiana at the beginning of the pandemic that had an indoor pool. Like, this is it. We’ll stay here for a week. We'll figure it out. Just those types of experiences being so important.

But something interesting you said is, you built Recreation Stays with the intention of kind of creating this fantastic experience. What was the building process like, and did everything go as intended?

When you get into this entrepreneurial world, you think you're going to get into it, and you might work less. My experience has been completely different. It's probably largely due also to the fact that this is still a hospitality business. It's still 24/7; it's still working when everybody else is off.

AK: No, not at all! It never did. No, it was - I'll tell you, when you get into this entrepreneurial world, I fell for this just like a lot of other people do, where you think you're going to get into it, and you might work less. Maybe you'll work a little bit harder at the beginning, but eventually, you're going to find your freedom and you'll be able to enjoy doing the things you want to do. And I gotta tell you, that might work for some people, but my experience has been completely different. It's probably largely due also to the fact that this is still a hospitality business. It's still 24/7; it's still working when everybody else is off. You know, it's all of those things that are just like working in a hotel.

And there's been a series of challenges that had to be dealt with along the way, and the first was just getting our first management contracts. Right? What's funny is at the same time, because so many of these things ended up happening at the same time. So, you go out there, you have this great idea to start a new business, and you go to market with something that you think is really well thought out, and you know what you're going to sell. And you find out as soon as you end up in that very first sales conversation, you don't even know what you're selling. It all sounds great in your head, but as soon as you have a conversation with someone, and there's just a little bit of pressure on what you're saying, everything falls apart.

So, we had to go back and really think about, what is the offer? Who is our ideal guest? What's our ideal property? How are we going to manage these properties? So, just the process of getting thoughts to paper and then out to communicate to potential homeowners, that was the first hurdle. And then eventually, we got our first management agreements and that was sort of a proof of concept. And then, every day, there's just a little thing to get over.

We had to go back and really think about, what is the offer? Who is our ideal guest? What's our ideal property? How are we going to manage these properties? So, just the process of getting thoughts to paper and then out to communicate to potential homeowners, that was the first hurdle.

SG: Yeah, like that constant iteration seems to be a big part of what you were just saying there. 

AK: It totally is, yeah. 

SG: And you kept saying a “we.” So, who was the team getting started there? 

AK: That's a great question. So, I had a business partner in the early days, and we were building this together, and it was just the two of us. And it was that way from the beginning of 2021 until May of last year. And May of last year was when we made our first hires. So, we brought on five guest services agents so that we had 24/7 coverage for guest communication, and we brought on two supervisors to assist the guest services team in delivering.

And to go from zero employees to now - well, we have nine now - but the first batch that came in was a completely new learning challenge. Again, it's one thing to hire the guest services team and have them just talk to guests. Just make sure the guests have no questions or if they do, you answer them and deal with whatever comes up. But you quickly find out that you don't have a communication platform for the team to even just communicate and keep track of things. And they don't really know what you stand for and who you are and why what they do is important on a day-to-day basis. So, I very quickly learned the importance of, I mean, everything!

The scaling of a business presents you with different challenges that break everything that you thought was working properly as you go along the path. As we've scaled Recreation Stays, we've had to contend with and really figure out how we grow in a way that doesn't affect the rest of the business, the brand promise that we're putting out there, the team, the guest experience. 

It's so funny because my brain is going in a lot of different directions, but like the onboarding process: who you are, what you stand for, what their responsibilities are, the tools that you use, training to use those tools, SOPs (standard operating procedures), policies, communication styles, literally everything. It mushroomed so fast. Like last summer was a really big - we went through some growing pains. And it is very true what they say. The scaling of a business presents you with different challenges that break everything that you thought was working properly as you go along the path.

And so, as we've scaled Recreation Stays, we've had to sort of contend with and really figure out how do we grow in a way that doesn't affect the rest of the business, that doesn't affect the brand promise that we're putting out there, that doesn't affect the team, the guest experience. And as I've grown as the CEO of the company, those are the skills that I've had to uplevel, to be better at, because I'm an operations guy by trade. I can do that in my sleep. All of the other stuff about running a business has been what I've had to spend time on to get better at so that the team can thrive.

SG: What aspect - because as you pointed out, there's a ton of these aspects that just, like you said, mushroomed out of nowhere. Essentially, what did you find may be the most challenging for you personally?

AK: You know what's funny is that very often, sometimes I can't see what's right in front of my face. And what I mean by that is sometimes it takes me a little while to get to a very obvious place. And so, I guess like we're saying earlier, something as simple as what tools do we need to use to communicate in inter-team and intercompany communications. Well, we use Slack, of course, but we didn't build out Slack in a way that made it easy for the team to communicate about different types of problems that pop up. So, there might be a cleaning issue, or there might be a maintenance issue, or there might be a guest that just needs something that we need to deliver on. And so, really quickly what we found was, things were just falling through the cracks because there was just this endlessly long Slack thread.

SG: Right.

AK: And you can't find anything in that. So, at one point someone just said, "Well, why don't we just create these different channels and then we can keep track of what we're talking about?" And I'm like, yeah, of course! Should have done that in the first place. 

SG: Yeah!  

AK: Sometimes you just get so in the details that you missed the obvious things. 

SG: Yeah, and in this case, too, right, you had the right solution. There's nothing wrong with saying Slack's the right solution. But then, in terms of teaching and training and the “how” of using it - like, I do this every morning with the kids. I'm like, oh, it'll be so easy. They'll make breakfast for themselves. I'll just put out the cereal and milk. Little do I forget, one is six and has a little trouble pouring milk. And I come back, and there's this milk all over the floor and then somehow the cereal ended up on like the ceiling? I don't know! The intention's good. But then in terms of how do we get the team aligned on using it?

Great guest service is table stakes. What often gets missed is what's the owner experience in your company. The owner is the one who ultimately suffers because they're trusting us to be good stewards of their asset. Everything is connected, so you really have to think about everything holistically and what are all of the connection points and the failure points that could happen along the chain.

AK: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And when you're operating at a - when you're trying to deliver a high level of hospitality service to guests, your tools and systems have to work right, because the guest is the one who is impacted by it positively or negatively at the end of the day. And ultimately, too, your owners as a management company, our owners are just as important as our guests. I actually say this a lot, that great guest service is table stakes. Everybody has to do that. But what often gets missed is what's the owner experience in your company. Making sure that guests have a great experience impacts the owners, because if they don't, then you may not get great reviews and then people won't stay with you. You'll have trouble getting bookings, you'll have trouble pushing your rate and driving incremental revenue. The owner is the one who ultimately suffers because they're trusting us to be good stewards of their asset. Everything is connected, so you really have to think about everything holistically and what are all of the connection points and the failure points that could happen along the chain. So, it's true that property management at this scale, there are a lot of moving parts.  

SG: Yeah, I mean, you're clearly an operations guy as you said earlier. Even just talking about where's the point of failure along the chain, right?  

AK: Yeah. 

SG: So, I'm curious, with someone with an operations mindset, I think you said, was it last May, you said - is when you hired the team? 

AK: That's right. 

SG: So what ducks had to be in a row for you to say, "Hey, it's me and my business partner, but now I'm going to bring a bunch of other people into this dream" or into this idea that is not yet established until you kind of build out the team in the first place?

AK: Right, you know what it was: we took on a hotel to manage. That's what it was.

SG: Got it.

AK: Where all of a sudden, the unit count went up pretty dramatically overnight. And all of a sudden, all of the things about running a hotel specifically just came flooding back into my brain. And in one of those things, especially in the types of hotels that we manage where they're, for lack of a better way of saying it, because there's not really a great term for this yet, but like an Airbnb hotel. So, this is like an unseen service type of property. So, it's almost entirely guest driven. Very minimal staff on site, really just a maintenance person and some cleaners. Everything else is done remotely. So, when you're doing this, really going above and beyond on how you figure out the guest communication piece and how you're providing relevant information at the right times along the guest journey, that was very quickly determined to be a need for how the company is evolving.

So that was the tipping point for when we decided we need to bring on our communications team. Because at that point, now, you don't really have the luxury of waiting, you know, thirty minutes to respond to somebody like you do on some of the other traditional short-term rental options. Now, the guest - it doesn't matter how you define the hotel - the guest thinks they're staying in a hotel, and they expect the service and expediency that they would get in a hotel even though there's no staff around. So, it's a bit of a different puzzle.

SG: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I feel like I've been asking you a lot about the challenges that kind of came with starting your own business and growing it. What are some of the successes? If you look back, especially the last year when you were managing a team now, what are you maybe most proud of?

I remember having this mantra, early days, where I just have to put another brick in the wall today. Those small bricks may not seem like they're doing anything when you're doing them, but the exercise of repetition and always building towards something else and small, iterative improvements eventually lead you to where you want to be.

AK: Well, I mean, it's been... where we are today is exactly where I wanted to be when this company started. And, I remember having this mantra, early days, where I just have to put another brick in the wall today. Just something. Some small win. And it can be - on this entrepreneurial journey, which can be isolating, those small bricks may not seem like they're doing anything when you're doing them, but the exercise of repetition and always building towards something else and small, iterative improvements eventually lead you to where you want to be. So, not quitting and staying at it - and when things seem tough, and you want to give up and just go back to doing what you were doing before, if you stick with it, it will pay off eventually. So that's the thing that so far been the most rewarding, is seeing the benefit of the foundational work that was done in the early days. And you know, a lot of that foundational work in the early days set us off on the wrong paths. But it was the exercise of going through that that allowed the company to develop its identity, to figure out what worked and what didn't. And that's the thing that I'm most proud of today is how we sort of launched this thing. It's been incredible.

SG: That’s fantastic. I mean, I love that, and I love - we learn from our challenges, right? And it sounds like you were even aware of that. Like, to get to the place where you're at now and feeling content about where you've got despite the challenges and hurdles you've had to go through. And it shows you have to have that level of emotional maturity when starting a business, right, to know that I'm going to fail. I'm going to land on my face in some cases, but it's all about getting to this higher place or to this level of contentness that I think is why I'm doing this in the first place.

AK: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. And you know, there's a lot of really amazing content out there to help you grow as a CEO, if you're going to go down this path of starting your own thing. I don't even watch regular TV anymore more. I just watch YouTube videos of like, you know, whether it's ridiculous things how to optimize your day but also down to learning from a lot of the experts that are putting free content out there about sales and marketing and revenue management and culture and process improvement and all of these things. The educational content out there is unbelievable, and it's all for free. You just got to go look for it.

SG: Yeah, I'm a big Simon Sinek fan. 

AK: Absolutely! He has so many great things about culture and personal development. I watch a lot of Alex Hormozi's stuff about sales, and that's helped our company a lot. And there's another, I don't want to plug a lot of other shows here, but...

SG: This can be the plug segment!

AK: There you go! There's another channel about process improvement. I think it's Process Driven. And I'm an immense fan of this page because - well actually, it's funny, maybe a little side note... I found that channel by accident, and I knew in the back of my head that I had to get all of our SOPS on paper. I didn't know how and it seemed so overwhelming. And then through serendipity I found this page and started following the steps that were laid out on it. And now we have an entire library database of SOPs and policies that the team can pull from. And after doing that, the questions and the outreach and how do we do this and why do we have things set up this way, those disappeared. So, my personal workload went down quite a bit because I wasn't answering the same question again and again. Anyway, I could go on and on, but there's a lot of great stuff out there.

SG: Well, I'm learning a ton. I think this is fantastic. And you know, I want to be cognizant of our time and make sure we get to one of my favorite parts of our podcast, which is the one actual segment we have, which we like to call "Hospitality Shoutouts." So, Adam, now that you shared a bit about running your own business and all of your personal experiences in hotels that you've worked in, have you had a recent very positive hospitality experience you could share? So, at another hotel or a restaurant or an entertainment venue?

AK: I did actually. So, we went to this hotel - I'll call it out: the Wickaninnish Inn in Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and had one of the best hospitality experiences that I've ever had. This hotel does an incredible job of just making you feel comfortable and at ease as soon as you walk in the door. There's something about the design and the smells and the sounds and the color palette that are just - they bring you into where you are and take you away from where you came from. So, you sort of forget about everything when you're there, which is incredible. But it was this experience that I had sitting at the bar talking with the bartender, and they had this - this is so silly, but these things stick with you - they have this ice cube former sitting on the bar. I had never seen one before. He said it weighed like one hundred pounds, sitting on the bar. And they take a giant block of ice, and they put it in the ice cube former, and this big press comes down, and it forms it into this perfect sphere. And they make a show of it when you're there. It's intended to be like, "Oh, what's going on over there?"

SG: I'm not a science guy, and this doesn't make sense, but I love it!

AK: I have no idea how it works, but it's unbelievable!

SG: I love it!

It just brought me back to the fundamentals about how important it is to just connect with people. Regardless of where you work or what department you're in; there's always little connection moments. There's always a way to engage with a guest to make their stay a little bit better.

AK: It's this big piece of copper that comes down and forms a perfectly spherical ice cube. And then they take it out and make your drink. And anyway, I spent an evening talking to the bartender about the ice cube maker and how it came to be. And then it just got into the cocktail program at the hotel and where he came from, and it was just one of those hospitality experiences where you felt like there was nobody else there. They were so engaging. And it just brought me back to the fundamentals about how important it is to just connect with people. Regardless of where you work or what department you're in; there's always little connection moments. It helps to have a little hook, this happened to be the ice cube former.

SG: Yeah, right. 

AK: There's always a way to engage with a guest to make their stay a little bit better.  

SG: Awesome. I love that. Also, I'm trying to get a list of places I need to go from all of these hospitality shoutouts. This place sounds amazing.

AK: Oh, man, this place on the list for sure.

SG: It's jumping up there. Awesome. Well, Adam, huge thank you for being our guest today. I really loved this conversation. I love to share what I've learned, and I think from today, probably the big takeaway I learned about is as you grow a business, as you build a team, the importance of repetition and iteration. I think that came up over and over again in your journey of keep trying things, keep failing fast, keep being willing to keep improving and learn from others. You know, find a way to make a bunch of what were the documents? What was it?

AK: Oh, SOPs? 

SG: SOPs! Yes. Learn how to make a bunch of those on your own by going and learning from YouTube. I think all of that ability to learn and iterate and grow seems to be kind of the root of what has made you successful today.

AK: I couldn't have said it better myself.

SG: Awesome. Well, Adam, again, I really appreciate you taking the time. Love learning about Recreation Stays and your whole your whole journey. Anything else you want to share with our audience before we wrap up?

AK: If anybody wants to learn a little bit more, you can find us at recreationstays.com, but also, I'm on LinkedIn so if you’ve ever got any questions or you're looking at starting your own thing, or you just need a sounding board to run an idea by somebody else, just reach out to me on LinkedIn. Happy to help.

SG: Awesome, love that.