HILTON GM ALREADY TALKING EXPANSION
Connecting with local market is key to success, according to Parkinson.
Only two years after opening, the 400-room Hilton West Palm Beach is so busy that General Manager John Parkinson hopes to add more beds in the near future. “We need more rooms,” Parkinson said. “The market has grown so quickly since we opened this hotel. The convention center increased its bookings by threefold, so we’ve reached a point where, in a very, very short period of time, we can actually justify the need for new rooms.” Parkinson said it’s unclear how many rooms the hotel might add, or where they would be, but he said Hilton is studying demand and how it might expand the property, which is directly east of the Palm Beach County Convention Center. During the 13 years between the opening of the convention center and the hotel next door, local officials lamented a lost opportunity. Without an adjacent hotel, the convention center attracted mostly local events. Now, the meeting hall is bringing in more out-of-town conferences. And, Hilton West Palm Beach commands as much as $400 a night during the peak of the tourist season. “One of our biggest challenges is driving great service so people feel comfortable paying those rates,” Parkinson said. He seems to have met that issue head-on. Hilton Worldwide honored Hilton West Palm Beach as its hotel of the year for 2017, an award based on service and profitability. Name: John Parkinson Age: 41 Hometown: I’m from Orlando. I live in downtown West Palm Beach now. About your company: We opened in February 2016. The business that we’ve brought to Palm Beach County, 90 percent of it has never been here before. That was our big goal. We didn’t want to just open the hotel and start pulling business from other hotels. We’ve been really successful at bringing in a lot of large national companies. We’ve also found that West Palm is a very local market. People enjoy living here. We learned very quickly by doing our due diligence and our reconnaissance that, if we’re going to be successful here, we need to support local. Instead of going with big-box coffee, we have Rabbit Coffee, which is a local roaster. The beds in the hotel were made in Riviera Beach. We feature a lot of local companies. In Galley, the restaurant here, the bands that play on Friday night are local bands. When we realized how localized the community is, it became a lot of fun to participate in that.
First job: Knocking on doors and asking people if I could mow their lawns for five bucks when I was 12 years old. It was great — in Florida, especially in the summertime, you’d have to have your lawn mowed every week, so there was a lot of repeat business. We’d mow the lawns in the morning and then go to [Orlando waterpark] Wet ‘n Wild in the afternoon. Then we’d do it all over again the next morning. My first real hotel job was valet and bellman. I saw leaders from a different perspective. I would observe leaders because I wanted to be one of them, and I would watch what they did and what they didn’t do. Sometimes you learn more from the poor leaders than from the good ones. Best business advice you’ve received: Take care of the team. Great leaders understand that if you take great care of your team, they’re going to take great care of your customers, and your customers are going to take great care of your business. It’s a really simple philosophy I’ve followed for my entire career. I always have an open door. I want everyone to have a voice, and I want everyone to feel they’re empowered. Best business book you’ve read: “Winning” by Jack Welch. I just think he’s a great leader. He gives great examples of leaders and how they run their business. He was one of the great American CEOs of a great American corporation, and I was surprised by how well he knew the people who worked for him. The way he detailed and chronicled these people and how they had risen through the ranks, it showed that he paid a lot of attention. Biggest mistake you’ve made in business: Most managers have to learn
how to give honest feedback and how to give bad news. I think early on, I wasn’t an expert at giving feedback and giving bad news. Giving bad news the right way can be one of the best traits that any manager can learn. I probably rallied too much and tried to be positive. Sometimes, you need to just sit down and say, “We need to fix this. We’re not where we need to be.” As a very competitive person, it’s not fun to realize that we’re behind on something. But every single day, we have to improve on something. I think early on, I was maybe embarrassed that we weren’t where we wanted to be. But now, I embrace those opportunities.
How hard is it to find good workers with 4 percent unemployment?
When you take really great care of your people, you tend to have less challenges in the labor market, because you have less turnover. We work very hard to make our team members a priority. For example, their meals are free. We have great benefits, great health care. And on top of that, all of the services we offer to our guests we also offer to our team members. So they can attend a yoga class.
What’s the most important trait you look for when hiring?
Good people. We can teach you the business; it’s not rocket science. Passion and energy and enthusiasm are the traits we look for.
What you see ahead for Palm Beach County:
We have probably the greatest opportunity of any market I’ve seen to just be a great business destination. We already are an amazing leisure destination. We’re well known for our beautiful beaches. It’s paradise here. The opportunity we have is to really drive great businesses to our area. Palm Beach County, and specifically West Palm Beach, can really grow and be one of the great business destinations for business travelers as well as leisure travelers. [Motivational speaker and author] Tony Robbins has a big event here twice a year. We’ve had everything from microbiology conferences to the CrossFit Games. We have a world- class airport that’s extremely accessible, and it’s less than two miles away. We have a hotel directly connected to the convention center. You don’t even have to walk outside. If the carpet didn’t change, you wouldn’t even know you were in a different building. And CityPlace is right across the street with world-class dining and entertainment.