With the help of technology and IOT, hotels are redefining the guest experience. Through co-creation and technology, the hotel guest experience is becoming more personalized and targeted.
Blair Hildahl is the CMO of Base4, a global architecture, and engineering firm that designs hotels. As a fellow 2x Inc. 500 winner, Hildahl knows a great deal about hospitality, design, and ROI.
READ FULL TRANSCRIPTBlair, welcome to the Brand Lab Series™.
Yes, thank you for having me, guys, it’s exciting to be on here, and I appreciate the opportunity.
Yeah, well, Blair, I have had the chance to get to know you and see a lot of the interesting work that you’ve been doing, that Base4 has been doing, but why don’t you share a little bit with our audience about Base4, your role as Chief Marketing Officer, and I’m really interested to know what is a PE and LEED AP. You’ve got a lot of titles after your name.
Don’t let the letters confuse you, I just put ’em there to look important. [chuckle]
Well, it works. [chuckle]
It’s marketing, right? But yeah, I appreciate you having me on here. So little bit about Base4, we are an architecture and engineering company; that’s ultimately our service offering. We specialize specifically in the hospitality and hotel sector, so we more or less design hotels. Now, the only thing that’s really different there is how we go about doing our business. We are definitely not a traditional brick and mortar company, we actually consider ourselves much more of a tech company than we do a traditional design company, and the reason for that is just mainly in the way we operate.
All of our staff in the US, myself included, we all work from home offices. We also have large offices overseas, down in the Caribbean, in the Dominican Republican, in Santiago, Nagpur, India, Tbilisi, Georgia, the country of Georgia, and Shanghai, China. And our model is actually quite simple: We try to work 24 hours a day in our sector, we’ll design everything in-house so we don’t outsource anything, and we work on really nothing, but US-based hotels. So that’s kind of the gist of how we do business, and we’ve tried to bring a sector that has traditionally been very antiquated and old school in the way architecture is done and try to bring a fresh tech sense to the way business is being done.
Well, I know Natalie’s gonna ask you a little bit about technology in a minute, but that was a great overview on Base4, and I’ve had the opportunity to get to see some of this really innovative things that you guys are doing, but could you expand then a little bit upon maybe your role as Chief Marketing Officer there?
Certainly. I have two business partners myself, and then I have two individuals based in Nashville and Miami, and we’ve all kind of taken our silos of the company, and mine happens to be on the marketing and branding side. And really my job in this company is to make sure we’re in front of our clients and protect our brand. Those are kind of my chief roles, on top of leading our business development efforts and making sure that our pipeline is full. So as far as what those efforts look like from a day-to-day activity, our main marketing efforts, I guess you could say, are a couple things: Primarily content marketing, we really invest a lot of time in our newsletter program, which I try to send out almost on a weekly basis, and that’s really on an educational level. We’re targeting hotel owners, hotel developers, operators, management companies, and contractors, and just picking a topic every week, diving into it, and saying, “This is a topic we think that you guys would be interested in, and would save you time and money on your projects moving forward.”
And we really try to stay away from anything salesy, really dive into the education piece and bringing great value in very short snippets, something you can read in a couple minutes, really tear it down to a couple thesis points and trying to deliver some great content. Outside of that, we really push the social media platforms, primarily LinkedIn, again just trying to stay where our clients are, and really utilizing that platform to get out in front of an area where we know a lot of developers are right now. And then some of the more traditional aspects, which would be attending the conferences and trade shows and doing the dog and pony show where you stand at booth. So those are the three main marketing aspects.
On top of that, I lead a team on the concept and business development side of about 25 staff, and those staff basically provide non-billable work. Our goal is when we meet a developer, we wanna show them what we can do. We’ve found that if they get a taste of working with us, they’ll see the value that we can bring as an organization, primarily in the way we do business on the tech side and how quickly we can turn things around. If a developer comes to us at three o’clock in the afternoon and he’s got a new site he’s looking at possibly purchasing, we’ll just say, “Send us the site, give us a quick program of what you’d like to put on this site,” and by the next morning, on his desk by 9:00 AM, he’ll have a full code study, which would be a 10-page document that would say, “This is what you’re allowed to do on this site as far as how high you can go, how much surface area you can build.” And then a full full conceptual layout, so a site plan, floor plans, elevations, and large guest room plans, and showing them… When we do that work for free, obviously, there’s a lot invested there, but it also gives us a great opportunity to show a client much more than just sharing it in words what it’s like to work with our firm.
Okay, so we still haven’t heard what P-E L-E-E-D and A-P stand for. [chuckle] Maybe you can tie it in a…
Yes, my background is, I’m actually an engineer, I’m a licensed structural engineer. Professional Engineer is what the PE stands for. A LEED AP is actually… It’s one acronym. That’s a LEED-accredited professional. LEED is the US government’s certification program for green building. So if a developer wants to get a lot of green credits, their building will be certified as a LEED building, and there’s different levels of certification for a building, but it basically means that they’re meeting some standards for environmental and design, and will include things like rainwater recycling, energy efficient HVAC equipment, those types of items. So as a LEED AP, that just means I’ve gone through the training program and passed their certification exams to sit on a project of that type.
Very cool. So talk about how technology is changing the way you design and build hotels.
Well, as I alluded to, we really rely on technology in our sector. We’re trying to really bring it into every aspect of the way we do business. We’re on a Skype call here, Skype is actually how all of our staff communicate. We have 230 staff around the world, and we use the Skype platform to communicate one another along with other platforms like GoToMeeting. We’re essentially sitting next to each other working off the same server, just not seeing each other in person, even though they’re on a video screen. So just in the way we do business, that’s the tech side.
Now, as far as design, we use a software called Revit. I won’t dive into it too much, but traditionally, especially in our sector, architects use a software called AutoCAD, which is basically just a digital 2D piece of paper where you draw a floor plan, and then you go up and you draw the next floor plan, you draw an elevation. It’s all in 2D. What Revit does is it allows you to take it to the next level. We’re actually drawing everything in 3D space, so if you look at one of our hotels and you go into the fitness room, and you’re looking at one of our models on one of our computer screens here, and you fly into the building, you’re gonna see it in 3D space, you’re gonna see an elliptical, a treadmill, all modeled out. You’re gonna see where it plugs into the electrical outlet that our electrical engineers have designed, where the HVAC duct dumps into the ceiling height or the structural beam is, it’s all there in 3D space.
So we’re essentially building the hotels virtually before a shovel ever goes in the ground. And what that does is it eliminates a lot of the issues that you see with coordination. A traditional design would be an architect would do it in 2D, and then he would also outsource the structural and MEP design to another firm that would do it in 2D CAD. So now you’ve got all these plans with floor plans, and trying to figure out what happens in between really falls on the contractor, and more often than not issues arise in the field in construction, and those turn into change orders for an owner, because they’re items that the contractor hadn’t originally bid, and problems that he has to solve that shouldn’t have really been there in the first place. And 3D design in Revit takes away a lot of that aspect because, as you can imagine, when you’re building things virtually 3D, you can’t physically draw a mechanical duct through a steel beam without there being a red flag in the software that says, “Hey, Mr. Designer, this is an area you need to look at and address.” So that is really heavy where we’re seeing the tech side.
So every day we’re saying, okay, how can we take this and push it to the next level? We’re designing in 3D, we’re bringing the coordination aspect, what can we do next. Right now, just to kinda give you a feel for what we’re pushing in 2018, is we wanna be able to pull all the quantities out of a drawing package. And what I mean by that is traditionally when a project goes to a contractor to build he has to bid it, which means that he’s gonna go through and he’s gonna calculate all the concrete that’s in a project, all the wood, every little piece of millwork. And if we can take that model and we can pull out attributes of it, so we could actually deliver with our plans a full quantity, so every piece of concrete, every piece of rebar, every piece of 2×4 that’s in that building and give it to an owner along with their bid, there’s a lot of value in that, and also doing things like shadow studies, and drone fly-throughs, and really pushing the edge on what we can do with virtual reality.
Well, Blair, I’ve seen some of this through, as you alluded to earlier, a lot of great content marketing. As someone who’s not actually in the business per se but really appreciate design, the use of technology, I’m super fascinated, as I see some of the modeling and some of that kind of stuff that you share. And it’s really cool and very consistent with a couple other guests we’ve had on where technology is still core to their business and they’re using it in a way to obviously be efficient but also be differentiating. And as technology continues to evolve… And I know this past year a huge buzz has always been the Internet of Things, or as Howard Tolman would say, the Internet of Everything. So as you start to see some of the IoT aspects of technology, how are you seeing that in either the hotel design itself, or maybe it’s the rooms, or maybe it’s how the facility is managed? Are you seeing any of that yet?
Definitely, in fact I was just reading an article a couple weeks ago, Marriott has something they call their Innovation Lab, and they’ve partnered with some of the bigger electronic companies, such as Legrand, Samsung, and they’ve built their IoT Guestroom Lab. It’s a way to test out new experiences that might be something they wanna start implementing in some of their projects down the road. And it’s everything from tying in the ability for a guest to turn on their shower at a specific temperature, or notify housekeeping that they’re gonna be leaving the room and they’d like to have it cleaned. The lab is actually just powered by an IoT system that connects all the devices throughout the room.
Now, all of this is very cool, which as a tech guy myself, and Brian you’d probably really appreciate, the challenge here is cool doesn’t always mean there’s an ROI. And really diving…
It doesn’t?
[laughter]
So the challenge is looking at each one of these items and saying yes, this is really cool, this would be awesome to have in a hotel, guests would love it, there’d be a wow factor, but is there an ROI? Is a guest actually willing to pay extra for this feature? Because there’s of course a cost associated that comes with every one of these items. I saw that… I believe was Hilton in one of their most recent releases of testing out this type of technology, they actually have a shower, they just put it in it… In fact, it may have been Austin, I could check on that. But you walk into your shower and the glass is actually an activated device that’s tied back to an IoT system. In other words, if I’m in the shower, and everyone knows we have our brightest ideas in the shower, I sketch it out in steam with my finger on the glass, and then I’ll hit send and it will be sent to my device. And later in a boardroom meeting [chuckle] I will open up my tablet and show them my sketch that I came up with in the shower the night before.
Now, these are all obviously areas that are being tested out and seeing where does this make sense? Obviously an item like this I’ve seen lots of pushback, especially just in the privacy side of no one really wanting an internet-connected device anywhere near their shower, in a hotel room for that matter. But it’s just always pushing the curve on where can we really push more technology into this industry?
That reminds me of a guest we just had on, the Global Innovation Leader for Bosch Global, Dennis Boecker, and we were in their Connectory IoT space, and they had some phenomenal things, some which are already in market today, and some were some prototypes, but everything from standing in front of a mirror to be able to… As soon as it recognizes that you’re looking at it a certain display can come up and you can get all types of information right on your mirror, and you can push a button if you’re upstairs, I guess, in your home, and you can activate your coffee maker so that when you walk downstairs or into the other room your coffee’s ready for you exactly the way you like it. So that stuff. As you said, is super cool, but you always have to think about the feasibility, the scalability, the economics involved with that. But that’s really interesting to see where some of the technology could take us. And as you think about all of what you’ve been talking about so far… And Natalie, now do you see why I knew Blair would be a great guest to have on?
Yeah, for sure, this is fascinating. It reminds me of that movie The Minority Report.
Well, that was a little scary, so hopefully not…
Yeah. [laughter] I don’t know how to read that one. [chuckle]
But one of the reasons why, as I said, I’m not exactly in your core business, but I really appreciate it is you’re marrying together technology with design, and in the long game this is really improving the customer experience of the hotel guest. And I know both of us travel a lot for work, so talk about how some of the good design that you’re seeing in the building of these hotels can really improve customer experience.
Well, we say every day that we’re in the business of guest experience. We talked a lot about tech, but ultimately at the end of the day, we’re in the guest experience business. So what does a guests see, feel, smell, when they enter their hotel room? These things play a huge impact on what that guest walks away and says about that hotel, or whether they’re gonna be a returning guest. And it’s little things, and if you travel a lot you see them. For example, there’s something called a PTAC, it’s in every hotel room, and you might not even know that it’s what it’s called, but it’s the little air conditioner that’s underneath the window that’s in your standard mid-stay select service hotel. They are a staple of the industry, and everyone hates them because they’re loud, the compressors kick in when you’re sleeping. And this goes back to the ROI talk about delivering something that you know the guest wants, you know the guest really needs, but it really has to make sense from the bottom line. And I think really everything in our industry has really rolled back to ROI, and I’m gonna keep saying that because really there’s so much stuff we could be putting into these properties, and just really innovative features, but it really has to make sense from the bottom line.
For example, a lot of the new hotels right now are putting in energy management systems, which is one area that’s very tech-friendly, but also really works towards the bottom line. The way those would work is you would tie the occupancy sensors in a guest room, which basically notifies the system… We’ll call it an energy management system for the hotel, if there’s a guest in that room. And they’ll say, okay, Brian Walker is in Room 322 right now. All right, Brian Walker has now left Room 322. He had the room set at 72 degrees. We’re gonna pull that setback back to 76, because we know it’s 8:00 in the morning, he’s a business traveler, he just left for the day, he’s likely not gonna be back for eight hours, we wouldn’t expect him to set his thermostat back and save us money and energy, but we will do that for him. And then as soon as you come back, the occupancy sensor picks you up immediately and says, okay, Brian’s back from his day, we’re gonna kick that back in.
The same aspect can get applied to pretty much everything in the room. If you leave the TV on, it will turn the TV off, if you leave lights on, it will turn the lights off. And really tying this back to a management system that can also tie in with facilities management. So if I’m the Maintenance Manager for a large Hilton property, okay, I can see that this HVAC system in that room 233 has run maybe 1000 hours more than the next system. I know that that system’s gonna need maintenance soon, so we can actually track the hours that specific appliances, specific HVAC systems have been on, no unfilter changes need to pop up because they’re actually gonna be flagged by how long that piece of equipment has been run. So systems like that are making much more sense to a developer. Now, a customer doesn’t see any of that which is the challenge of course, because as a customer, if anything you might be even a little frustrated when you come back to the room, and you’re thinking, “Hey, why did this swing back up to 76 degrees while I was gone? I’m hot, I’ve been wearing a suit all day, It’s 90 degrees out.”
So there’s obviously a different level of acceptability, based on the brand, and if I’m staying at a lower tier property, there’s an expectation level. If I’m staying at a five-star property there’s an expectation level. When I walk into that room it’s gonna be left as when I found it. So there’s all kinds of different things we’re seeing from design, but really it rolls back to, “Where can we ultimately deliver, on the bottom line, without sacrificing guest experience?”
I have a little dirty secret for our audience, and you, is that I like my hotel rooms between 63 and 65 degrees. So when you’re talking about 72, let alone 76, I’m already starting to sweat, but I absolutely agree with you about… One of the biggest things about customer experience in general is expectation setting, and I think what’s getting harder and harder for brands in your industry, whether you’re talking about the very high-end, Four Seasons-esques of the world, or even the more moderately priced, run-of-the-mill hotels, I think a lot of times consumers are struggling with that expectation gap, because they kind of have the expectation that if nothing else, they’re gonna have a good experience wherever they go, mind it, that could be mitigated a bit but it’s so interesting to understand all the different nuances that really go in behind the scenes, or could, in the near future through the advent of all this technology you’ve already described, really improve the customer experience of the future.
Without question, and I think we’ve got a long ways to go. The technology is there, it’s just a matter of implementing it and finding the right pieces as we continue to push the curve on what we can do.
Does any of your design thinking involve co-creation or customer input at all?
We’re in a business where our ultimate end user customers are really everyone. There’s very few people that don’t stay in hotels, so we’re always getting input from customers. So it’s a little bit difficult question to answer, but what I will say is that the brands of the world, the Marriotts, the Hiltons, the IHGs, the Hyatts, they’ve invested a lot in figuring out what the customer wants. Now, the challenge is, every customer wants something different. We got the Brian Walkers of the world, that want their room at 62 degrees, and now that they’re gonna be setting up guest profiles, they’re actually gonna be charging you extra $10 a night for that additional energy you’re using, Brian, just as an FYI. But we’re seeing all these additional brands that keep entering the market. Marriott right now, alone has 30 plus brands, that are meant to target a different demographic of the industry. And it’s everything, if we’re looking at a mid-20s-year-old millennial in an urban environment, that’s what a Maxi’s targeted to, where it’s super edgy. We’re talking about things like shared male and female bathrooms on the first floor and no check in desk, you walk up to the bar, you get a drink, they hand you your key.
And trying to segment all of these brands into different kind of silos so that they’re distinguishable to a customer, because to the average customer, it’s a hotel and you look, “Okay, well, maybe I’ll check the reviews online at TripAdvisor. What are the services? Do they offer free breakfast?” But often the customer doesn’t see the difference, they don’t realize that they’re staying in a hotel that’s really targeted towards traveling businessmen on extended state trips. So I think that we get input typically through the brands more than anything about what they’re targeting in a specific product.
Base4 is global and moves really fast, two times on the Inc. 5000 list, just like AE Marketing Group. What’s the secret to your success, Blair?
Well, we’ve been very fortunate, we’ve grown very, very quickly over the last eight years. I guess I’d attribute it to a couple of main things. First off, surrounding ourselves with great people. When we started Base4, I wouldn’t say that we had any idea we were gonna be in the hotel business. There’s a famous analogy and a great read that talks about loading up the bus with great people and then figuring out, where are you gonna drive the bus? At that time, had we had three business partners, total in the US, or I should say three partners in the US, and we got together in a room, and just talked about building this company and realizing that we had a great group of guys, and a great staff at that time that we knew we could reach out to, not knowing exactly what we wanted to offer specifically, but letting the market drive our product. And ultimately that’s how we fell into this hotel niche and we went out in a lot of different areas and eventually found, “Hey, this is a great segment for us. This is where we can really induce technology. It’s a very antiquated industry, it’s a very segmented industry with a lot of different players that are offering services on a much smaller scale.”
Our typical competitor for our projects is a 5-10 person company, that’s outsourcing a lot of their services, working in a traditional AutoCAD. So when you come in into an industry like that, and you’re a 230-person company, you’re offering everything in-house and you’re bringing all this technology piece, it’s ripe for innovation. And that wasn’t something that was highly targeted from the beginning, we stumbled upon it while we were looking at the market. And the other piece there that I’d say is one of our secret sauces is the Base4, the four in our name actually stands for our four underlining values of our company, and this is something that’s been basically the basis of starting this company to begin with. And those are honesty, humility, respect, and fun. And we basically ask all of our staff, all of our colleagues, all of our customers, to salute that flag. And when we started the company, we were coming from much larger organizations, we’re in an industry sector that’s a ripe with… I don’t wanna say disrespect, but, “Time is money.” If you would imagine the typical contractor, they’re very much on the move.
There’s an extreme lack of humility, extreme lack of respect and ultimately, the end of the day, it wasn’t fun. And that’s why we started Base4, we said, “These are gonna be our underlying principles that are gonna drive what we do,” and we’ve carried them with us all along. And we quite frankly, we fired clients, if you’re the type of client that’s gonna write me an email in all caps, with exclamation points on a Saturday afternoon, and say, “You have to call me now,” when I’m spending time with my kids, we shouldn’t be doing business together, because we have a different value system. And we’ve held to that, and our employees love it. We have a great deal of flexibility, especially with our US staff. We have a ROW environment, which means that we’re a results-oriented work environment, we don’t have set hours. Majority of our staff work in their pajamas and they can take off for the day, go to spend time with their kids at school, come home, go to the gym, as long as the work gets done. So I think those are kind of been the keys to our growth over the last few years.
Well, that makes a lot of sense, based upon some things that you told me almost a year and a half ago, we were sitting next to each other at those Inc. 5000 awards. I didn’t know it to the extent, but over the course of the last year and a half, and seeing some of these pieces come together, it definitely shows a lot about the values of the organization, and I think a great culture really can translate into a great bottom line which is obviously a key factor and being on that Inc. List, and a number of other areas as well. I also know something that you told me that night in San Antonio, and I’ve seen it since, is that you’re constantly traveling, it’s part of what you do as com, it’s part of what I do as well. So when you’re not traveling for business, is there a favorite place you like to go just for yourself, or with your family? Or maybe there’s a bucket list destination you haven’t gotten to yet?
Oh, geez. Well, I travel a lot for work, as you’ve alluded to, but traveling for business is often, it could be any hotel in any airport in any city, and it all starts to blend the same. When I’m with my family, honestly, we’re very simple, [chuckle] we like to go where the people aren’t. Usually in the summers here, up in the Midwest, that means going up to the lake, staying in the cabin for the week, just really unwinding from the fast pace of life, of running a business, having a family. So I would say, usually it’s that type of vacation. Prior to kids, my wife and I did get the opportunity to travel quite a bit and I’ve been some really cool places around the world. We actually lived in Shanghai, China for a year, so I got to travel quite a bit around Asia. I don’t know that I’d say I have a bucket list of places that I definitely wanna see. I’m a guy that just likes to go new places. I love travel, and I think… I love travel outside of business travel, I should say. [chuckle] Some day, maybe Brian and I can get together in about 10 years here and…
Oh, well, I wonder also if at some point, we’ve been criss-crossing each other, and never known it, in an airport somewhere, but I already alluded to my secret about my hotel room temperature, but another secret about me is that I enjoy travel, certainly in the personal side of life, but I do not like to fly at all. I’ve never really gotten used to that, even when I used to be constantly on airplanes. I don’t love that aspect of travel, but I agree with you that business travel is important to our jobs, but it’s never as glamorous as people on the outside think it is. But I can hear you about the destination of just kind of disconnecting and taking a step back and focusing on what really matters.
Without question. Especially when you’re 6’5″, like me, jamming into planes, I can feel you there, Brian, planes are not getting any bigger, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. [chuckle]
Well, you guys both have a lot of travel stories. I wish we had time to hear more of those, but Blair, how can we learn more about you and Base4? We’re so grateful you came on our show. Tell us where our listeners can find you?
Well, the best way would be to go to our website, www.base-4.com, you can sign up for the newsletter I alluded to there, if you’d like to learn anything about the hotel industry and kind of the trends that we’re seeing, I certainly can pass out my email address and anybody that would like to reach out directly and ask any specific questions.
And as we talked earlier, the content is really great. So even if you’re not looking to develop a hotel anytime soon, I love it because I see all these interesting things that you’re doing from a technical perspective, design trends and again, ultimately goes back to that customer experience. I just saw something that you shared this week about why it’s so important to think through where you put a pool in a hotel, for the sake of sun shadow. There’s just all kinds of really neat things I see you’re doing with 3D modeling, and other type of VR technology. So I would definitely encourage people to take a look at that, base-4.com. Blair, again, I know you were super hard to pin down because of, as you’ve just alluded to, you’re constantly moving. I’m so grateful for you being on the show, I’m glad at the chance meeting that we had at the Inc. 5000, look forward to hopefully seeing you at a future Inc. 5000, and wish you all the best with your continued success, and I hope 2018 is a great year for you and a great year for Base4.
Well, thank you Brian, it’s been great being on and I’m glad we were able to finally connect here, and certainly looking forward to some exciting things in 2018, and hopefully we’ll be seeing AE in San Antonio.
Me, too.
[chuckle] Alright, thank you guys.
Tags: Technology, Co-Creation, Customer Experience, Technology
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