Rob DelliBovi’s Hospitality Revolution: From NY Boutique Hotelier to Dual-Sided Travel and Consulting Empire

Anthony Codispoti (00:01)
Welcome to another edition of the inspired stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Cotispodi and today’s guest is Rob Delabove. Rob is the owner and CEO of RDB hospitality group, a one-stop shop and hospitality that has been operating since 2009. They’re based in Miami beach with a presence in New York, Orlando, and Nashville.

They offer travel agency, concierge, and event services, plus executive recruiting, training, and hotel consulting. Under Rob’s leadership, RDB Hospitality introduced an industry-first VIP hotel greeter program. Rob has been recognized among the top 1 % of Virtuoso producers, and he brings extensive hospitality experience.

from his previous roles overseeing sales and revenue across more than 160 properties and brands. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. Imagine being able to give your hotel employees free access to doctors, therapists, and prescription medications. And here’s the fun part.

the program actually puts more money into your employees’ pockets. And the companies too. One recent client was able to increase net profits by $900 per employee per year. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible. To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the owner of RDB Hospitality Group, Rob DeLeBovey. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

Rob (01:55)
Thank you for having me. Good to be here.

Anthony Codispoti (01:57)
So Rob, tell us about how you first got into hospitality and travel. What was the moment or experience that made you say, this is where I want to build my career?

Rob (02:06)
So very, very immature story. I was in television production, which is what I thought I wanted to do. I worked at MTV. I was not happy about it. It was a rough job. It was 12-hour days. It was seven-day weeks. It was low pay. was not my favorite place to be, although I studied television production in college. And selfishly and weirdly, I wanted to move to an island and be a bartender, like Tom Cruise in Cocktail. Right? wanted to walk bare.

Anthony Codispoti (02:35)
Was that your

inspiration? Was that character? Okay.

Rob (02:37)
That was my inspiration. I wanted to walk

barefoot to work. I wanted to hang out with tourists. I wanted to not have a lot of responsibility. ⁓ So I figured the easiest way to do that would be to apply for a job in my home city of New York and to transfer to the Bahamas location, like a hotel job, to transfer to the Bahamas location ⁓ of whatever hotel company I worked with. That would be the easy way for me to get to the Bahamas and work at a hotel bar, right?

So I applied for a sales job at a hotel in New York City, got the job, started that next Monday and fell in love with the industry immediately. Weeks in, I said, this is what I want to do. This is where I want to be. I love hospitality. I love hotels. I love taking care of people when they’re on the road, making sure they’re enjoying their stay in the best city in the world. And that whole kind of immature idea of moving to the beach and being a bartender.

⁓ to my parents happiness went away very quickly. And I said, no, forget that. I want to be running hotels in New York City. This is a great job and a great industry. That’s how I got into it, fell into it.

Anthony Codispoti (03:44)
What was it

that you loved about it so much just in those first few weeks?

Rob (03:47)
Yeah, so every day I was working and talking and meeting people from all over the world in every industry. ⁓ And it was just amazing. I’m a people guy. I’m a relationship guy. And one day I was dealing with a rock band from Australia. The next day was dealing with a bunch of lawyers from Europe. The next day I was dealing with people who were just on vacation from Idaho.

And I was meeting all these new friends and talking to all these new people and learning about different cultures and foods and places in the world. I was like, wow, this is what these people in hospitality do. They double their Rolodex daily by just meeting and dealing with all these people from all over the world and of all walks of life. And I just fell in love with it. I was like, this is where I want to be, what I wanted to do. In a way, I did not know at the time, because I was young, that relationships were really what were important to me.

And this is where I learned that from the first couple of weeks on the job in a hotel in New York City. So I said, okay, forget the bartender thing. This is where I want to be.

Anthony Codispoti (04:47)
So you were okay putting shoes on every day for work then.

Rob (04:50)
Shoes were, yes, I changed my mind on the shoes, which was big, and the responsibility level. was like, I’m ready to take on responsibility. Don’t forget, half the reason I wanted to be this bartender on the beach was I was done with the 14-hour days and going home and stressing about the next day and all of that. So yeah, that all changed. That all changed within weeks.

Anthony Codispoti (05:09)
Yeah, and so

you’ve had ⁓ multiple career stops along the way, all of them sort of staying in this hospitality realm. As you think about some of those stops, Rob, can you pick one that maybe was the most formidable for you?

Rob (05:24)
Sure, I opened a hotel in New York City called the Hotel Gansfork in 2005 ⁓ that was at the time the coolest hotel on planet Earth. It was the first thing in the meatpacking district of note in New York City and it was just under very, very high demand. It was written about in every publication in the world as the nicest, the coolest hotel on planet Earth and I was the guy working there.

Anthony Codispoti (05:40)
⁓

Rob (05:52)
So it took the experience I just told you about and it kind of doubled it in my head because now the whole world was calling. We had 187 rooms and I was having the most important people on planet earth, dignitaries, royal families, celebrities, everybody called me and say, are you sold out? we kick people out so we can stay? And I was just like, wow, I belong to this brand. My name is associated with opening this brand. And the brand took off.

And that’s really what really doubled my kind of respect for the industry, but also my name within the industry was that one job. I didn’t know going in, it was just some hotel that was gonna pay me 10 grand more than the last hotel. But when I started, it ended up being the coolest thing on planet Earth and I then associated cool with this industry. This is something that I not only would work at all day and night, on Saturday I can stop by for a drink and some food.

You know, this is really made me think of my own industry in a new way. And that’s really what solidified. I was already in love, but this is what really solidified like this is where I need to be type thing.

Anthony Codispoti (06:58)
What

was so cool about it? Why was this so different and special?

Rob (07:01)
It was, the design was unique and new. It was in an area of New York City that was a bit unexplored and an area that had restaurants and nightclubs, but never was a place to stay. Never had, never had a hotel property. And just, think the hotel did a great job of selling and marketing and developing press around, you know, creating visibility around this property as a cool place with a rooftop bar and an amazing restaurant, ⁓ new place in New York City and the whole world.

⁓ listened and as you know, the Meatpacking District today is still a top tier place, you know, was hospitality wise, I was really one of the first guys there, one of the first people there. And ⁓ you know, I was kind like, okay, great. It’s also interesting in this industry to open something in a new area and to teach, know, the unlike maybe Times Square where people already know about and they’re coming to see the world.

you know, to maybe teach the world about something that they didn’t know about in an area that’s new to them. So it just put a whole other layer to what was going on here. And I was like, wow, this is the industry. This is where I need to be.

Anthony Codispoti (08:08)
So what was the path that got you from being with some of these cool hotels and these really neat brands to opening up your own businesses?

Rob (08:16)
Yeah. So like many entrepreneurs, as I grew in this brand another five, six, seven years, there were a lot of things happening that I simply said I can do better. Or I simply said to myself, I don’t think that this is happening on a high level and it needs to be. I guess in the playbook of an entrepreneur, like solving a problem is a great thing to start a company around. So I noticed that when big names were arriving,

at these hotels I was running in New York City, we weren’t ready for them. The hotel wasn’t ready for them. People might have called us and said, hey, so and so is showing up. But they didn’t let us know all the particulars around what this person needed. They didn’t let us know the flight they were on. They didn’t let us know the exact time of arrival. They didn’t let us know they liked the separated by colors. It was very, very rare. And I basically said to myself, hey, if there was a company that really specialized on creating these

travel experiences and and concierge work around the exact details and needs of what that individual is looking for. That company would be very successful. Again, I was running what was the hottest hotel on the planet. ⁓ And it would still be a lot of high net worth individuals, celebrities, people like that, dignitaries show up and we were like, who are you? my God, this person’s important. We need to put them in a better room. We need to make sure that they have, you know, this, this, this, this, and this, whether it be

you know, something weird or something regular, right, in the room. And I just said, hey, I need to start a travel company and I need this travel company to ⁓ be all about taking care of ⁓ particular people and making sure that the world knows, the world is ready for them before they get there. It was not happening on a, really on a high level. It was just here and there.

Anthony Codispoti (10:08)
And so with this initial idea, who’s going to pay for the service? Is the celebrity? Is the hotel that’s receiving them?

Rob (10:15)
What we learned in these hotel jobs is that these celebrities and important people are very happy to pay for all that they want and need. No one was asking them. And when people maybe did ask them, they didn’t convey that information to the vendors, to the airlines, or the hotels, or the car service, or the restaurant, or the nightclub, or the green room at their own concert or event. I think we just put two and two together so we can go to these same people and say, we can do the same thing as

your current representation is doing. But give us 10 things that are important to you, from temperature of the room, to favorite bottle of water type, to type of car you’d like to be in, to do you want the driver to talk a lot or not talk at all? We did that before Uber did that, right? And it blew up the second we started it. These individuals that we contacted and said, here’s our shtick, fell in love with it.

Anthony Codispoti (11:14)
And so were you taking responsibilities away from somebody who’s already in their inner circle?

Rob (11:21)
we believe that these things weren’t being handled at all. ⁓ if that…

Anthony Codispoti (11:24)
Okay, you had an

additive effect, you weren’t replacing somebody.

Rob (11:28)
Correct. Correct.

There might be cases where someone was doing this or supposed to be doing this, but we added what maybe an assistant would be doing to the travel experience. ⁓ Again, on a high level, it was happening here and there when someone was very, ⁓ you know, it was important to someone that something happened. You know, they would tell the hotel it would happen, but on a large scale, these things were not happening. Often we didn’t even know who was showing up. We would get a reservation through the system for a, you know,

a very famous name, we’d be like, is this Will Smith? then they, yeah, exactly. then they’d show up, like, my God, nobody told us, nobody. And the king that they booked needs to be a suite or a penthouse if it’s Michael Jordan, like you’re saying. So it just, that was what started the first part of our company, which was the Travel and Concierge Company. Now,

Anthony Codispoti (11:59)
Is this the Michael Jordan?

And so

we doing this on the side that could you keep your day job or did you leave right away?

Rob (12:21)
So at the very beginning, I did it on the side until I made enough money to quit my day job, ⁓ which ⁓ was about four years, five years. So it was hard. was 18 hour days. It was working day and night. It was doing things at the same time. But ⁓ yeah, I was not in a position where I ⁓ leave a very nice salary and kind of start over financially.

Anthony Codispoti (12:32)
Okay.

Rob (12:49)
So I did, it was your classic side hustle, right? And ⁓ once I realized the side hustle was worth a lot of Ned ⁓ more money than I could ever imagine I was making the hotel business, ⁓ I was like, okay, this is the time, now we’re gonna make a thing out of this, for sure.

Anthony Codispoti (13:06)
Okay, so you’re doing it on the side, you’re getting access to these celebrities, these dignitaries, because of the work that you’re already doing, right? And so you can approach them through that work and say, hey, would you like an elevated experience? We could work together on that, yes?

Rob (13:08)
Mm-hmm.

Right, so what we did was we made sure to start to deal with big names that were unrepresented, right? We didn’t want to compete with our clients, right? We didn’t want to compete with a travel company that was booking these people already. They’d be upset, they’d be like, why is the hotel guy doing this, et cetera. So we, about 70 % of these people were unrepresented, meaning they just booked on their own or their assistant called and that was it. And I started talking to people that we were helping, people that asked us for things, people that I would meet.

I would greet everybody at the door and say, let me take you to your room. Here’s your key, when we knew who they were. And I would tell them, hey, we are doing this on a high level. If you need help anywhere else in the world, let me know. And a lot of them told me to buzz off. A lot of them I never heard from. And some of them said, oh, this is really cool. I’m going to Nashville next week. Could you help me out with that? Where do I stay in Nashville? Is there a good restaurant? Can you make sure the hotel has the temperature

of the room, 68 degrees, just stuff like that. And it just started and then it’s snowballed and snowballed. And then it turned into a company and a real living. And that is when I quit my hotel job and moved in.

Anthony Codispoti (14:33)
was gonna say

what was sort of the ultimate catalyst? Did you just reach a certain number of clients where it’s like, okay, now the numbers make sense? Or were you mentioned in an article somewhere and then it just really took off?

Rob (14:45)
I made the exact amount of money on the side as I did in my, as my regular salary. And I was like, wow, I’m not going to lose a dollar if I make this my main thing right now. I was very risk averse. I, I, I, I just said, this is the time I made that, that exact amount of money this year and, um, goodbye working for someone. And now I’m working for myself.

Anthony Codispoti (15:06)
And was it just you to begin with? Okay. And so in the beginning, you’re a travel service agency deluxe for people who need all the extras. And what has it evolved into today?

Rob (15:08)
Just me to begin with.

Correct. Correct.

So when I left the hotel business to just manage this travel agency, a lot of hotel companies called, including the one I had left, and said, could you help us with the following things? Because I happened to be good at the hotel job that I left, right? A lot of hotels companies called me and said, could you help us in our sales and marketing plan? We want to attract the people you’re now working with. Others said, we know you’re good at this particular part of the business. Could you train our team on it? Other people called me and said, do you recommend anybody?

to do what you do at our hotel. So instead of giving out lots of free advice, I said, this is a different company and I’m consulting now. And I started the consulting half of our company. So our company is two halves. It is a travel concierge and it is, let’s call it a hotel services, because we do so many things on the other side. And a business started just from nothing I had forecasted or predicted. People were just calling me and asking for things and me being an opportunist, I said, yeah, we do.

recruit, I can help you with that. I can help you find somebody. And I would help them find somebody and I would send them an invoice for 10 grand or whatever it was. And all of a sudden, I have two companies ⁓ working at once. And the big news is that I believe we’re the only company on planet Earth that works on both sides of the game. I’m not aware of another company that represents the traveler slash eater slash drinker slash party or slash meter. And

is also representing the venues in terms of helping them with sales and marketing and operations and higher talents. And I’m not sure there’s a company, you’re either on one side or the other in our business. So this has afforded me amazing Intel and perspective. I now know what both sides are thinking. I know what the guest wants in a venue and I know what the venue’s priorities are in terms of servicing guests and making money. So now we do lots of due diligence projects for lots of different, even investment firms who

Anthony Codispoti (17:01)
Yeah.

Rob (17:21)
want to know about starting businesses like this just because we’re really the only ones who could speak on both sides.

Anthony Codispoti (17:27)
And so is it really important to a lot of hotels to bring in this certain kind of clientele because it boosts their image? Is that the thinking?

Rob (17:37)
Yeah, in the days of Instagram, right? Having a famous person at your walk through your front door, or maybe the paparazzi gets a shot of them, or maybe someone in the restaurant takes a quick pic or even talks about it to a page six or anyone. know, the amount of impressions, we’re talking about millions or billions of impressions, and it could change property’s entire business. Instagram has obviously changed the business.

When owners are in a meeting to create a hotel, a couple of billionaires in a meeting, it’s hilarious because they say, what is our Instagrammable moment? They say that. like old people, people don’t know what Instagram is, say that. So yeah, I mean, look, the PR value of having the high net worth, I’m sorry, the fancy people, the celebrities, the highly visible people. Yeah, you can’t put a price on that, right? So all the properties want this.

Anthony Codispoti (18:14)
that right.

of the highly visible.

Rob (18:35)
We are experts on ⁓ delivering it and understanding ⁓ how to persuade it at a property.

Anthony Codispoti (18:43)
And so on that other side of the business where you’re being hired to consult with the hotel properties, they’re bringing you in for a lot of different things. It sounds like, Hey, can you help us find somebody who would be good for a particular role in our hotel? Can you help us attract these highly visible people? Can you help me with the list here?

Rob (19:07)
Sure. So the phone rings off the hook and they’re always asking for something different. It’s tough on a podcast like this because what we do is so, it sounds scattered because we do so many things. Some people call us and say, we want to work with Sony. Could you get Sony on the phone and to send us business at our hotel so Sony people are staying with us? It’s something as simple as that to something as big picture as, Rob, we’d love your company to manage our hotel. Right?

So, and everything in between. So yes, it is recruiting and training, right? It is showing the property how to sell, market, revenue manage, and operate. But it’s also something as small as, could you look at this two page document that we’re about to send out to our clients and let us know if it makes any sense. So we attach a price to anything and everything. But our core, would say, if you maybe pick something out of our hotel services that we do the most, it is…

on the commercial side, sales, marketing, and revenue management, showing hotels how to fill. That is what we specialize in. However, we’re doing 100 different things for 100 different companies.

Anthony Codispoti (20:14)
And you said actually managing the hotels is one of the things you’ll do as well. so ⁓ explain what that means in the hotel world.

Rob (20:22)
Yeah, that means it’s our show. That means, Rob, please, we would like our DB hospitality group to oversee operations at this property, meaning the GM now works for us. And we are putting together all strategy in terms of commercial and operations and running the hotel. Owners ask, oh, there are a lot of owners, a lot of real estate guys open hotels because real estate guys don’t have a lot to talk about at cocktail parties, right? And hotels are cool.

Right. So, you know, I think, so a lot of real estate guys call us and they say, we own a hotel. We don’t know anything about the hotel business. Could you make sure the hotel company that we’re using is doing their job correctly? It’s called asset management in our business. So it’s like an owner representation thing. And we’ll be like, like we think Marriott’s doing a good job or we think Marriott could be better in these areas or we think whatever it is. So we do a lot of that as well. So it’s everything from the tiniest thing, like train our sales manager.

to the biggest thing, like run this entire operation, you’re now responsible for our bottom.

Anthony Codispoti (21:28)
trying to connect dots here. Why do you think I mean, this wasn’t like an overnight success, right? I mean, this was years of grinding on the side long days, long nights. And then eventually you got the traction to where you were making the same money in both roles. And you’re like, okay, now I can leave and not work for somebody else. But the way that you’ve continued to grow this and bolt on these other services that clients have been asking for

Rob (21:33)
No. Yeah. Yep.

Anthony Codispoti (21:54)
I’m sort of like trying to look in the rear view mirror and like connect the dots on how Rob got here and tell me if I’m getting it right or what I’m missing. You had this idea because you were in a really cool place working for a really cool hotel, getting to meet a lot of these, you know, highly visible people. And Rob DeLobovi is an opportunist. And you’re like, I’m going to go for it.

Rob (22:13)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Anthony Codispoti (22:22)
I’m going to go for that. Now I’m going to go for this. Now I’m going to go for that. Yes. What else am I missing?

Rob (22:27)
No, working at a cool place, had access to these people, saw that they were being underserviced, started a company around that. Once the company servicing important people was growing, all of the hotel side was calling me asking for favors. The opportunists started the hotel services company out of those favors and asks, which we did not expect, and both sides grew concurrently. Now the

The way we go from small favors to hotel management is we simply had a lot of success ⁓ with what we were charging for on the consulting side, on the small side. when we were asked to help ⁓ look at a sales and marketing plan, our review of that sales and marketing plan and our recommendations caused more sales, caused more money, right? The owner was then happy, right? And said, can you do these three other things? The owner tells his friends or her friends, these guys are doing a good job.

They made us 10 % more top line, right? I meet the friends, I talk about what we do. We show them a little improvement on their property by training their team, hiring their people, consulting on their strategy. And they say, well, you guys are really doing a great job here and this is unique in terms of strategy. We’d like you to manage our entire property. So it grew. So again, we still have that travel and concierge company. That’s our big business. But this hotel services company, which was unexpected and came out of nowhere, ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (23:46)
⁓

Rob (23:56)
grew on its own organically by just us knowing the business. And of course, we hired people ⁓ over these years as these companies grew on their own too. We’re 29 people now. So it’s just a, it’s a great story of growth based on showing numbers and success.

Anthony Codispoti (24:17)
So people love celebrities. They’re gonna wanna know. Obviously privacy is important, but is there anybody that you work with that you have permission to reference their name?

Rob (24:19)
Yeah.

Not really, no. We sign NDAs. have some celebrities, we have three or four NDAs. We have one for their parents, one for their assistant, one for their family. We’re not allowed to give names. ⁓ We do have amazing, amazing stories. I’ve quoted on a number of these type things. We have people that requested a dog in every city they went to. They wanted to play with a request of a medium-sized dog is what they requested.

We have people that requested the whole room to be blacked out so you can’t see your hand in front of your face. They want it to live in complete darkness and unscrew all the light bulbs. We’re asked for every illegal thing in the world, of course. We do not fulfill illegal requests. Our company is doing too well for that, to get in trouble for that. And then we do get the &M’s separated by colors. And we need peanut butter with no peanuts in it and all of that stuff. And every day, we have an exciting list of all these crazy things people ask for. But that’s kind of the…

the purpose of why we did this. Those people were not comfortable asking for those things in mass before us, in my opinion. It happened. It happened, but not in mass.

Anthony Codispoti (25:27)
Yeah.

So clearly somebody didn’t ask for peanut butter without peanuts. You were making a joke there. But what is like one or two of the most ridiculous or maybe not ridiculous, but just wild requests that you receive?

Rob (25:46)
Peanut butter with no peanuts is real, to be clear, to start. ⁓ There is a peanut butter with no peanuts. ⁓ It’s like a… ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (25:55)
It’s talking about like

a nut, like an almond butter or a sun nut or like a.

Rob (26:00)
I believe it’s nutless. believe it does not have nuts. It’s something that mimics peanut butter. Very easy to get in New York and Los Angeles. Very difficult to get in Omaha and Minneapolis. So there’s these organic, ⁓ kind of weird food stores where you can pick up things like this. But that’s real. That’s very real. And we took that from a celebrity, a very well-known celebrity who requires that. ⁓ The weirdest thing we’ve ever been asked for is a colonic, an in-room colonic, which is a cleaning of the colon. ⁓

Anthony Codispoti (26:03)
Okay. Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

Rob (26:27)
So we were asked, we had to set that up and we had to do like a mobile colonic unit to come into a hotel room and clean out that area for a guest. It the weirdest ask we’ve ever had. I guess the question is, know, guest spending a weekend in New York City, why would that kind of cleaning be needed before a ⁓ weekend stay? Who knows, right? But doesn’t matter, it happened and we arranged it, no problem. We got done. A bunch of doctors thought we were crazy asking, but. ⁓

Those are the sorts of things. There’s less like, you know, rock stars breaking everything happening lately. Actually, the rock stars are more into organic food and yoga now, right? So it’s a little, yeah, totally. So it’s a little boring on the music touring side, but there are people that still have their crazy and we’re here to accommodate that as long as it’s legal.

Anthony Codispoti (27:08)
how times have changed.

So, okay, your career spans overseeing sales and revenue across more than 160 properties now. What patterns or insights have you gleaned from that scale of experience that informs the way that you help other clients as they come on?

Rob (27:35)
Sure, we don’t believe that salespeople sell effectively as of late. We believe people are afraid to pick up the phone. We believe this new world of Zooms and Instagram and texting and phones has really murdered the sales process and how sales is supposed to work. We find that 80 % of salespeople in our industry ⁓ are not effective. They kind of watch the phone.

They wait for the phone to ring and they answer the phone and they say, how many rooms do you need? No problem, right? ⁓ We push proactive sales. Get out there, meet people. ⁓ Hi, Anthony, great to meet you. I run an amazing hotel in Los Angeles. Next time you’re in town, give me a call. We’d love to take care of you. Follow up with you three months later. Follow up with you three months later. ⁓ Take you to dinner next time we’re in the place you are. The sales process, which is a process, ⁓

is no longer. The younger generations, the millennial Gen Z, they do not want to pick up the phone. They do not want a cold call. They don’t want a cold email. ⁓ Sales is different now. ⁓ The old school people, ⁓ they don’t necessarily have it all correct either, but we push properties to ⁓ focus on proactive sales.

Anthony Codispoti (28:42)
Mm.

And so what

does that proactivity look like? Because I think about like cold calling today, it’s totally changed because I got so bombarded on my phone that if you’re not a recognized number now, my phone number rings. And I think a lot of people either have their phone set up like that, or they just look at it and you know, I don’t know that number and I set it down.

Rob (29:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, to answer the first part about the proactive, we believe most are only reactive, meaning they’re not talking to anybody they don’t know, right? In terms of cold calling, cold calling to me doesn’t mean calling. Cold calling is just an old school term that right nowadays means contacting people you don’t know, right? Figuring out Anthony C., the podcaster, I wanna get in touch with podcasters, figuring out what your email address is by scouring AI and the internet, sending you a quick email.

saying, hey, it’s Rob, I’d love to be on your podcast, it looks really cool, I love that it’s inspiring people in business. That’s a cold call, right? Because I don’t know you if I’m doing that. So we stress that whereas cold calls are lower conversion, less of them are going to come through as a client, it’s still a very important part of growing your Rolodex. So if you’re running a hotel and you’re a salesperson and Google has an office next door to you, you’re gonna wanna figure out who’s in charge of travel for Google, right?

And if you don’t know and you don’t know any people that have relationships with that person, you’re going to have to contact them on LinkedIn or via email, firstname.lastname.google.com. You could figure that out. Or a number of other ways, but that would be considered cold to me because they don’t know you, you don’t know them, and you’re reaching out hoping for the best.

Anthony Codispoti (30:41)
So for you, cold calling could just be the email. And you’re saying even younger folks today, they’re afraid to send a cold email.

Rob (30:48)
We’re saying 80 % of them are not proactive in any way, meaning they don’t even think to send that email. They’re reactive. Whoever’s calling the hotel, they’re going to answer the phone. They’re going to be great. They’re going to say, come stay here. And the reactive sale has its value and is an important part of sales. being out there and being proactive is very important as well.

Anthony Codispoti (31:10)
So you guys launched a VIP hotel greeter program. What is that and where did the idea come from?

Rob (31:16)
The genesis of this is from the airline greeter business. There is something called an airline greeter, which is someone who will greet you at your car at the airport, walk you through all the craziness of the hotel, I’m sorry, of the airport, and take you to the gate and sit you on the plane. This is a service that’s existed for years. ⁓ It’s obviously for high net worth celebrities, people with trouble being seen in the airport, people can’t stand in a 20 minute security line without being, you know,

attacked by fans. It’s a really cool service that the airlines offer. It is very expensive and everyone loves it. Airline greeters are all over the place. Whenever you’re in the airport and you’re waiting in line in security or you’re waiting in line really anywhere and you see on the side a person in a uniform walk by with some fancy people, that’s a greeter who met them at the car and is walking them.

Anthony Codispoti (32:08)
don’t think I’ve ever

noticed this, but maybe that’s because I live in Columbus, Ohio.

Rob (32:12)
You will

now know, no, no, this comes to CMH. Is that what Columbus is? Yeah, Columbus, there’s weed book readers, especially for the limited execs in in ⁓ in Columbus. So and then on the way home, they greet you at the gate at your at your gonna see this is what you’ll see when you get off the plane. There’s a little sign with the name on it. Anthony, right? They’re gonna greet the person at the gate, walk them through back of house and out the back to their car so nobody sees them. This is huge business.

Anthony Codispoti (32:19)
Okay.

Rob (32:40)
It’s managed by the airlines and the airports. We just booked them, we’re not allowed to do it. It’s only by the airports and the airlines. We figured that this process would work in hotels. We figured that these same people who use airline greeters would not want to go to the front desk of a hotel, a busy hotel lobby. They wouldn’t even want to walk in the main entrance, right? So we thought greeting would be a really good idea. We also thought that maybe someone should check this room.

before they go in there. We’ve all entered rooms that are too hot, too cold, facing the dumpster, ⁓ have something unfortunate in them, right? Have a person sleeping in them, tap into all of us, right? So what we did is we said, hey, for this greeter program, we could arrange a hotel greeter. They’ll go early, go to the room, make sure the room looks great, smells great, is of the correct temperature. All these items I’m telling you about, peanutless peanut butter, make sure that’s all set up.

Check in the room for them. Go to the front desk. Of course, we’re the agency, so we can arrange all of this to happen. Check in the room for them. Make sure all the billing and everything is all set and all the details, the dates, everything is all set. Go to a private entrance at the hotel, if it’s the employee entrance or a designated private entrance or the parking garage, whatever it is. Greet the important people when they come. Walk them directly to the elevator. No front desk, no busy lobby.

Bring them to their room, which is already checked and great. Hand them their keys and say, you’re all good to go. Let us know anything else you need when you’re in town. We thought that this would be a really great idea. Again, it works at the airport, right? We beta tested it, right? And it worked. People loved it. People were like, wow, those are three annoying things I don’t have to do now. They arranged a private entrance for me. And I know the room’s all good to go. The room is 72 degrees.

The shades are open. I don’t have the view of the dumpster or the couple next door. And this is really great, right? So we just took an existing idea to the hotel business and we’ve had high success.

Anthony Codispoti (34:46)
And so this greeter, this VIP greeter at the hotels, they work for you? And so is this somebody that, you know, maybe in Nashville, Tennessee, they may go to two or three different hotels in a single day to provide this service, or are they stationed at a single location?

Rob (34:51)
They work for us.

correct.

If there are delays, they might be stuck somewhere for a bit, right? But yeah, the idea is we map out that they would go to a couple places ⁓ per day if necessary, if we have that many greets that day, and handle a couple of people per day. Yeah, absolutely.

Anthony Codispoti (35:21)
Okay, and so how long have you been offering this service? Okay, what other services are new or maybe you’re cooking that aren’t quite ready yet?

Rob (35:24)
about a year.

Nothing that we are cooking. ⁓ We are constantly trying to think of new, like use the hotel greeter example, new VIP services that are unique and people will pay for ⁓ exclusivity. They will pay for ease. They will pay, right? We have to be able to provide it before we know it’s something that we can offer. Like these hotels, a lot of the hotel companies were a little like, what’s going on here with this? Our rooms are always clean.

And we’re like, we all know that’s not true, right? It’s all good and we’re not hating on anybody, but we’re just double, it’s trust but verify, right? It’s a classic trust but verify. We currently do not have anything that we’re allowed to talk about that is ready to go. There’s always something cooking, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (36:13)
That’s a much better answer than telling me there’s nothing cooking. Yeah, tease me. Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s

way better. ⁓ Okay, so you get to work with a lot of these high net worth individuals, celebrities, artists, highly visible people. What’s a surprising lesson you’ve learned from catering to such demanding and distinct clientele?

Rob (36:26)
Sure. Yeah.

Regarding famous clientele, there is no rhyme and reason to who you think will be great, who’s actually great, and vice versa. So people you think will be amazing, friendly, great people can be terrible. And people you think will be the worst, and we would never want to work with, we’ll make it a new celebrity, we’ll be like, oh no, this is gonna be a disaster. And they end up being the nicest people on the planet. So there’s no rhyme and reason in that world, which is really, really interesting.

Anthony Codispoti (36:50)
Mm.

Just because of how they present on screen or at public events, you make a judgment about, that must be how that they normally are as a person. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah.

Rob (37:12)
Yeah, yeah, like we

don’t work with Larry David. So this is not a true story, but I would imagine Larry David to be difficult. ⁓ And then I think the example I’m saying is that working with him, it’s very possible he’s not right. That’s thing number one. I would say thing number two is that people believe that celebrities get everything for free and that these important people get everything for free. They do not. These people are paying big time for their services and for their travel. There might be barters in this world for

Anthony Codispoti (37:18)
Yeah.

Rob (37:42)
advertising or something like that. everyone’s like, oh, this person makes millions and they get everything for free. Not how it is. Four Seasons brand is not copying or discounting heavily these big names to stay with them. And that’s something that everyone thinks that is simply not true. We get that all the time. These people are paying. And I think that’s important because I think for some reason, the celebrity world gets a bad rap because of that.

Also, we find when just a fun one is that reality stars are more difficult than than than movies than than regular Celebrities, I don’t know. I cannot answer that. That’s a that’s what he got me on. I can answer any question That’s that’s what I have no idea. But you know the reality stars and there are many that we love right we find You know them to be generally pickier and more difficult and more sensitive than then you’re you know

Anthony Codispoti (38:19)
Why do you think that is?

Rob (38:40)
A-listers and then your people you people you would think right like it’s which has always been interesting to us

Anthony Codispoti (38:46)
So Rob, you are recognized among Virtuoso’s top 1 % of producers. What is Virtuoso for those outside the industry and what does this distinction mean for you?

Rob (38:51)
⁓ yeah.

It’s a big deal. So Virtuoso, if you are a Virtuoso agent or hotel, Virtuoso travel agents are the top 1 % of booking travel agents in the world. They’re the people that book all the fancy people. We are the top 1 % of that. You have to earn your way in to be to this club, to be part of this club to begin with. if you’re talking to travel people to represent you,

And the travel person says, I’m a virtuoso agent. That means they’re a huge name. That means they’re qualified by the community as someone who knows it all and books the best people. We, as of two years ago, are the top 1 % of those providers. So in terms of production, meaning it doesn’t mean necessarily we’re the best. It means we book the most of the 1%. So it’s a big deal. Hotels simply put, take care of those clients first.

⁓ They know that if a virtuoso in person calls that they need to answer they need to be great and ⁓ It’s not only great for my company to meaning, you know, we’re doing a good job It’s great for anybody who wants to work with us because they’re gonna be taken care of not just by us but by wherever they go it’s it’s important

Anthony Codispoti (40:07)
So on that side of the business,

are you only representing these highly visible, highly net worth people or you work with some average Joes who just want some help getting a nice trip book?

Rob (40:18)
Yeah, we’re bragging, we’re bragging. We have just as many, we’re booking just as many holiday inns as we are Four Seasons. We do it all. ⁓ People tend to want to talk about the big names more, but yeah, we’re booking just as many $99 rooms as we are $799.

Anthony Codispoti (40:34)
Okay, so somebody’s listening and they’re like, yeah, I’m not Michael Jordan. I’m not a highly visible name, but ⁓ I wanna take a trip. What’s the benefit of using you guys when they don’t need the peanutless peanut butter in their room versus, I don’t know, the travel agent down the street?

Rob (40:54)
So it’s our buying power. So we have such high volume and we have such high celebrity volume. All these venues, as we discussed, want celebrities that they take care of our Joe and Jane average me and you guests because they know that one day the Michael Jordans of the world might come. So Hilton, we have a dedicated Hilton person. The Hilton people take great care of all of our guests, my parents, you, me, everybody, because they know that A, we have volume.

And B, it might be one of the biggest names in the world one day we’re calling about. So it’s the general buying power of using us. So they give us great rates so we can get better deals than ⁓ these individuals can get on their own. And there’s perks, right? If there’s an upgrade in the hotel available and the Hilton’s forced to upgrade somebody, they’re going to give it to our people, right? Because they know we’re big Hilton bookers and they know that ⁓ we represent a lot to them. it’s backdooring your way into this network.

Right? it’s really honestly how we pitch people. We get this a lot. get a lot. I guess I must talk. I must brag a lot because we get a lot of people that say, you know, I’m just, you know, I’m a teacher. Can you help me with my trip to Maryland? And we’re like, of course, like, absolutely. In fact, we’re able to help you better than anyone else can because we handle all these these fancy people.

Anthony Codispoti (42:14)
Clearly you must be more expensive than the other agencies.

Rob (42:18)
⁓ We don’t cost a dime our sir. We are paid on the back end The example is if the we’re paid 10 % of everything the travelers spends so if you want to go to the Hilton in Seattle Tomorrow if it’s selling three hundred and fifty dollars a night I can get you two hundred and seventy five dollars and likely an upgrade and you don’t have to pay me to do that That’s the real beauty of this business and why it grows so fast the opportunity is these calls go very well

because we don’t charge for our services. On the consulting side, hotel services side, we charge extraordinarily there, right? If people want to go to a restaurant like a Carbone type thing, we might charge something, a concierge fee for that, right? But our travel services do not cost.

Anthony Codispoti (43:04)
So you could book my upcoming trip to New York, you could do the flight, you could get me a room, and I’m not gonna pay anything more, and I might pay less, and I might get an upgrade.

Rob (43:14)
So your cars, your hotels, and your experiences you’re not paying before, we only charge for commercial air because they do not pay us on the back.

Anthony Codispoti (43:23)
Got it. And what would you charge for that? $50 a person, whatever the itinerary is.

Rob (43:25)
$50 a person.

Right, so

if you have a big thing and it’s you and your significant other, we’re charging you 100 bucks total for those flights. Or a lot of people like to book the flights on their own and we handle the rest. Whatever it is, the hotels, the cars, the experiences, we just don’t, there’s no fees.

Anthony Codispoti (43:48)
So we’ve talked a lot about all the great things that you guys are doing and the amazing trajectory that you’re on. No business is unscathed in a growth process. What’s maybe a big speed bump that you hit along the way? And how did you get through that?

Rob (44:05)
We hit an enormous speed bump and it’s kind of something you’ve touched on a bit. When I quit this industry, the hotel industry, to start the travel business and concierge business, I think the way you mentioned it is some of the existing providers, meaning our new competitors when we started this business, were livid. I was working in a hotel. I was helping them with their clients.

and meeting their clients. And now all of a sudden I’m one of them. So the entire industry, travel industry, came at me. They said, hey, are you taking our clients? You met all of our clients. We sent them to you as a hotelier. Now that you’re one of us, are you calling all of them? And are you forcing them to work with you? And I had to say 70%, more, 75 % of those

people we’re dealing with were not represented. So those are where we started and how we built this business. You would have known if I called your client while you had them. And even though we weren’t stealing clients, it caused major, major backlash when we started the company. So when I was building this company and now telling the world about what I do, I had a major consolidated group voice against me, right? Telling the…

clients, telling the hotels, telling the vendors, telling the press, this guy just switched sides and is stealing everyone’s clients. Now that was a major problem because I was trying to build the company and sell myself, right? And all I had was my word that we didn’t steal any clients. We had asked those competitors, name the clients we stole. They couldn’t, but it really caused the first year of starting this business to be a major, major challenge. We had to do immediate

⁓ reputation PR right like right away, not with a company, but like kind of on our own saying we’ve just decided to start a business. We believe we have a different value offering than what exists and we are not calling the existing agents we worked with clients. We had to sign our name to it, which we did, but it caused the start to be a lot slower than I thought. This business was building like this when I was when I was in the industry and when I when I quit the industry to do it on my own, it kind of

Plateau to bit because there was a lot of negative negativity about us and me right that was the huge challenge We’ve overcome the challenge. We’re all best friends with those people now. There was no clients dealing that went on of any kind We’re now a community. I’m actually part of that community I’m on boards of things that you know, I’ve been voted to in that community and it’s all good But that one year was a tough year ⁓ and we had to overcome

Anthony Codispoti (46:55)
Say more about how you overcame that, because it’s one thing to, know, years in the future, you know, where we are today, look back and be like, yeah, it was sort of a slow process. But what were some of the key things that you did along the way to get people’s trust back?

Rob (47:10)
just being direct, calling them all directly and saying, hi friend, I’m in your industry now. Anything you believe is happening regarding your clients is not. If I somehow am working with a client of yours, I’m happy to stop. Please let me know if you hear about this. Because I don’t know who people’s clients are generally. And it was a lot of direct conversations, a lot of whining and dining, a lot of relationship management, a lot of taking people out for a coffee or a beer and saying, I hope that you can accept that I’m starting a business.

in your industry. There’s nothing illegal or immoral about creating a new business with a new value offering. so again, like I said before, some of them told me to buzz off. Others told me to ⁓ thank you for doing this. Others said, I think you did something for this one client. I’d appreciate it if you don’t work with them again. I said, great, no problem. And we just dug our way up, right? And it all worked. Luckily, we weren’t doing the thing that people were worried about. So it made it really easy to

manage our way out of this, but we had to manage our way out of this. We called some new clients and they said, we heard about you from the community and we know that you guys are maybe poaching people’s clients. some people, as we grew into this later on, years later, when people said, are you going after clients? I said, hey, Coke goes after Pepsi, Nike goes after Adidas, the Gansbord Hotel I mentioned goes after the Standard Hotel.

There is natural competition in sales and marketing in this business that we will engage. However, the direct, I’m taking the clients when I start thing, I had to manage my way out of. Big challenge.

Anthony Codispoti (48:47)
When did you

feel more comfortable kind of being more competitive then? Because like the dust, I think kind of has to settle from something like that first.

Rob (48:56)
I was attending trade shows, every trade show in our industry. the, was kind of alone at the agent sessions where no one would talk to me. When people started to engage me and say, how’s business? And talk to me more that were my peers, these were. Again, it took a year, ⁓ you know, and say, ⁓ you know, it became more of a joke that, you know, I’d switched jobs, right? Then I was comfortable kind of, you know, having a commercial strategy that would be more normalized.

Anthony Codispoti (49:27)
Let me talk just a little bit about ⁓ how you approach recruiting, nurturing and retaining talent because it’s clearly something that you’ve done a lot of from before you started your business, running some of these hotels to now managing hotels. You’ve got your own internal staff. What’s your philosophy there?

Rob (49:48)
It’s the hardest part of having a company. It’s the hardest part of having employees. It’s the hardest part about all of this. Your first question was, what’s the most difficult part of being a business owner? It’s hiring and it’s managing talent, right? Very, very difficult. And you have to micromanage that process a bit, in my opinion. You have to, obviously, not only, everyone in an interview process is trying to say what you want to hear, right? 100 % of people.

whether they’re genuine or not, they are answering questions in the way that they think you want to hear. So you have to see through that. So you have to be very careful about the questions you ask, and you have to kind of walk them through the day to day. You have to kind of find inaccuracies in what they say. It’s very, very important. I also say you also have to like the person, right? Or not dislike the person, right? The person has to be…

likeable, not only in a sales job capacity where they have to be likeable to the public to make money for you, but they have to be a likeable human being in one way or another. Because if you don’t like the person, I think it’s ultimately not going to work out. really, micromanaging the interview process is huge. We do things like, and I’ll give away a secret, we’ll schedule an interview, and then we’ll change the interview. We’ll say, hey, can you meet on Monday? We’d like to interview on Monday at 9 a.m.

and then Sunday we’ll send a change, right? People who don’t respond to that change, they’re out, right? People who get upset about that change, they’re out, right? People who say, okay, great, when’s a better time for you? I’m available Tuesday at eight. They’re still in, right? We love to email them, like, could you email me a follow-up after this, because that remind me to do this? We like to say things like that. Could you please?

Because on Friday, I actually want to schedule another meeting with you with our team Could you email me on that 50 % of people don’t send that email after the interview to follow up they’re out, right? So there’s a number of things like that. And then when they send that email grammar important pleases and thank yous Commas we don’t need the thank you email, you know that used to be the big thing If never when you would interview if you didn’t get that that said the thank you email you’re out to me It’s more about how much attention is this person paying toward their own?

email toward their own life in general, which you would think getting a job is a priority, and to even spelling the right there, there, there in their email. So we watch all of these things. then we ask questions. If I’m interviewing you for a podcast position right now, which it would be the opposite, course, I would make you go through a podcast with me in your final interview. We’d be podcasting together. I’d be asking the questions.

You know, it would just be where you sorry, you’d be asking the question. We would just make sure that your battle tested and most people. Yeah, most people aren’t doing this. Most people are not doing most companies are not doing this. So we’re recruiters, right? So our name is on these people, right? So when I said if you’re hiring a junior podcaster and you hire me to find them, you know, it’s my name if that person doesn’t work out, right?

Anthony Codispoti (52:43)
Give them a little test task. Yeah. ⁓

Rob (53:02)
So it’s really important to micromanage. Micromanagement is underrated in terms of the hiring process, we believe.

Anthony Codispoti (53:09)
Where do you think hotels and travel services, the industry in general are heading?

Rob (53:16)
I think they’re heading to a very interesting place. And this is all obviously, I’m sure every podcast you’re on is talking about AI, right? AI is gonna change this business. AI is really the first thing that I’ve ever seen, the first technology where the public is using it before the companies, which is really interesting, right? I mean, think about it, like the kids, everyone knows how to use AI.

Anthony Codispoti (53:37)
hadn’t thought about it like that. Yeah.

Rob (53:43)
except for like these corporations who are like trying to figure out how they can integrate it what they do. So that especially hits hard in travel, right? Because things that a travel agent does, right? Research is the best place for you to go, ⁓ know, figures out the best restaurant, what hotel. People can do in one second on chat GBT with links, with everything. So we believe that travel people that just offer, travel people that say,

We can offer you the Hilton Nashville and here’s the rate. It’s the same rate that’s online. We believe that they’re in some trouble because every offering and not giving a lot of value in terms of numeric, I’m sorry, dollars and cents value and knowledge value, that all can be done in one second on ChatGVT. And it’s just going to get better. ⁓ AI has not taken over, excuse me, the travel industry yet.

It’s not there yet. It’s not ready yet. This is kind of AI version one. But we all agree in five to 10 years that it’s going to be a big thing. So it’s going to a scary place for many people. That’s why it’s important that we show value. Right. That we can get a better rate than people see online. Right. AI is never going to take that away. Right. We can give you personal experience. The hotel greeter program something AI never going to never going to handle. On the hotel side they have to handle this in completely different way as well.

Because people are no longer going to be searching for them in the conventional ways. They’re going to be using AI. So hotels are going have to optimize AI to ⁓ show up in results like you would a Google search now. And they’re going to have to really change the way they present everything to accommodate AI. Also, AI is going to replace a lot of employees. There’s AI concierges. There’s AI reservation systems. I don’t know in unionized markets like New York how that’s going to work, but

you know, a reservations agent that you’re paying $45,000 a year to, that could all be done on AI right now. And that technology’s not ready. But if it’s good right now, it’ll be great in five years. I hope it doesn’t replace employees, but I don’t see how it couldn’t. You know, the AI concierges that plug directly into Google. You say I want to go to an Italian restaurant tonight, Nashville. It reads Google in one second and tells you the five best per ratings. I don’t know why you would pay a regular

concierge in a hotel in Nashville for that unless they have the inn. They have to provide value, right? So that’s what’s changing not only our industry, but the world. It’s pretty scary.

Anthony Codispoti (56:16)
Yeah, indeed. And so a big part of what you guys want to continue to try to do is provide those things that AI won’t be able to that better rate that’s not online and those experiential things that a program a robot can’t do.

Rob (56:24)
value.

upgrades, just things that we can score via our buying power and relationships that AI can’t. someone who, a big part of our industry are people that look online, see what the rate is, and tell the client that’s what it is. And that person will be deemed useless, unfortunately, by AI, which is very, very bad. So we’re stressing that the industry figure out ways to provide value.

Anthony Codispoti (56:55)
Yeah. Rob, we already talked about a big speed bump that you ran into early on with this business. ⁓ Curious if there’s another big life challenge that you might want to share with our listeners. Something that, you know, is really difficult to get through. You had to figure out what to do next and how to get through it. But now you look back on it, perhaps even with a little bit of gratitude.

Rob (57:21)
I created ⁓ serious sales infrastructure when I started this business. I was out there wheeling and Shaking hands, kissing babies. We had a real value offering. We were telling people why we were better. This also existed on the hotel services side. We were out there and I was traveling the world, meeting with everyone on the planet, doing a lot of press, talking about what we, what we.

what we were doing and how we were doing it. We were having a ton of success, right? Then came all the inquiries, right? It was working, right? But I had three people and we were getting thousands of inquiries for travel, to help hotel companies, help ⁓ restaurant and bar companies. Just, they were pouring in. was succeeding in the sales side. I had not set up the infrastructure on the operations side to service all of that.

I figured, hey, when it comes in, great, I’ll just hire more people. And I did not. And it was a major problem. It caused some upset clients. Like, hey, you just pitched us on all this stuff. And why aren’t we getting the services you talked about? And we were up to here. We were up to here. And we could not service what was coming in. Major, major, major speed bump and challenge. We were losing clients. People were speaking badly about us. This is a small world, this world, right? ⁓

So we had to hire, we had to hire quickly, we had to hire and train quickly, we had to slow down the sales process, and we had to bring people in, right? And we brought in via this micromanaging interviewing process we just talked about, we brought in some great people, and those people, talk about gratitude, worked their butts off to get up to speed. We told them in the interview the problem, we said this is a problem, we need you to start tomorrow, we need you to drop everything and overwork at the beginning. ⁓

long hours, weekends, whatever it is. And we hired some great people and they did. And those people are still here. Those people are not fireable unless they do something really bad or illegal. Because those people really set the company straight. And without them and their work ethic and them really pushing and pounding the pavement, we wouldn’t be here right now. This wouldn’t have worked. ⁓ So I’m lucky that I have not had a lot of personal challenges in life. I’m privileged to say that.

that I can really talk about in that world. But this was a major, major business challenge. And ⁓ we got through it and we then started work on earning back a lot of the clients that we told them directly, hey, we overdid this, we sold very well. And now we’re going to we’re going to be better. And some came back and some didn’t.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:05)
Yeah, you know, and that’s a problem that so many business owners would love to have that are listening right now. Like, wow, your sales process was so effective. You, you know, out kicked your, your operations coverage. ⁓ but still.

Rob (1:00:09)
Yeah.

which should be part

of the sales process, right? Like the sales process to me would be while you’re selling and understanding success, like creating that infrastructure while you’re doing it, which I did not do, stupidly.

Anthony Codispoti (1:00:29)
Yeah.

Well, ⁓ yeah, it just goes to show both sides of the business are really important. You have to have sales first and foremost, any business owner, anybody who’s been around the block, I’ll tell you that the lack of sales will be the first thing to kill a business, but then you need to be able to execute on the back end. And so you guys went through some growing pains and eventually put it together and you figured it out. What would you characterize as your superpower?

Rob (1:00:46)
Sure.

We did. Yeah.

I, my superpower personally, am, ⁓ I’ll tell you, I am an expert relationship manager. I’m bad at a lot of things, so I’m not bragging generally, but you know, managing relationships. I’ve always kind of collected relationships and friendships in my life. I’ve always wanted to have a big circle. As we talked about in the beginning, like I got into this, I liked this industry because of the relationship management aspect. And ⁓ I’m very good at collecting,

⁓ clients, friends, people, and managing my relationships with them well. Meaning, saying hi, checking in, ⁓ making sure they’re okay, worrying about them and their problems and not being selfish. It’s hard to do in scale. This is why it’s my superpower. This is why I put the cape on. It’s really something that I’m good at ⁓ and ⁓ I’ve noticed other people are not good at.

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:38)
That’s hard to do at scale.

Rob (1:01:50)
Yeah, that’s the only way I can answer that question. You’re gonna hear from me forever, Anthony. It’s just how it is. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (1:01:57)
Love it. Already looking forward

to the future. So you have a professional relationship with a lot of well-known people. Have you developed a personal relationship with some of them? Do you hang out with some of these same people that you get to work with?

Rob (1:02:12)
I do, I

do. Again, you can never kind of tell who’s gonna be great and who’s gonna be terrible based on what you think of them before you meet them. But a lot of them end up being great and a lot of them end up being friends. it’s cool ⁓ because it’s like any other friend, you’ve identified someone who’s kind of cool enough to take past your professional life, right? Which is not everyone, as we know.

And ⁓ you know, you got to get to add them to your friend group and then add yourself to theirs. And I think the only downside is, know, when you want to go have a beer, like 80 people run over and try and say hi, take pictures with these, you have trouble like catching up. But the in general, yeah, it’s it’s it’s bled over in many cases.

Anthony Codispoti (1:02:56)
That’s great. Rob, I’ve just got one more question for you today. But before I ask it, I want to do three quick things. First of all, anybody who wants to get in touch with Rob’s company, rdbvip.com. rdbvip.com. And then if you want to get in touch with Rob directly, he’s given us permission to give out his email address, which is just rob at rdbvip.

One more time, rob at rdbvip.com and we’ll have that in the show notes for everybody. Also, as a reminder, if you want to get more employees access to benefits that won’t hurt them financially and carries a financial upside for the company, reach out to us at addbackbenefits.com. Excuse me. Finally, if you’ll take just a moment to leave us a comment or a review on your favorite podcast app, you’ll hold a special place in my heart forever. Thank you.

So last question for you now, Rob, you and I reconnect a year from now and you’re celebrating something big. What’s that big milestone that you hope to be celebrating one year from today?

Rob (1:03:58)
Wow. We really, really, really hope ⁓ to, wow. We actually have a couple of things. I would say open our own hotel from an ownership perspective would be our big goal. And I would say that’s a goal that’s within a year, attainable within one year. That’s like a really, really, really big goal, which is, we want, it won’t be called the RDB or anything selfish like that, but it will be.

Anthony Codispoti (1:04:12)
Okay.

Rob (1:04:24)
You know, we are managing hotels, we’re consulting on hotels, we’re telling owners how to run their hotels. We’re doing everything in the hotel business you can imagine for every company you can name. ⁓ We want to have our own.

Anthony Codispoti (1:04:36)
Okay. ⁓ To get there in a year, probably something that’s already in the works.

Rob (1:04:42)
⁓ Sorry, it won’t be open in a year. I would love to tell you in a year that there’s a shovel in the ground, right, shovel in the ground and you’re gonna be there staying there in two years, something like that.

Anthony Codispoti (1:04:45)
Okay.

There’s a plan. Yeah. Got it.

Great. Well, Rob Delabove from RDB Hospitality Group. I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story today. really appreciate it. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.

Rob (1:05:04)
Thanks for having me.