A Story About Impact Hospitality

In 20+ years in hospitality I’ve always had a “why” brewing just below the surface.  It was never hidden.  Anyone who was paying attention would’ve noticed it and anyone who ever asked knew what the mission was.  “Let’s hand the next generation of hoteliers an industry that’s more fair, more inclusive, more just, and substantially more impactful than the one that we walked into on our first day.”  We’re standing on the tracks at the intersection of the service industry community and the global communities of the historically underserved. Many of us have spent time on both trains.  But, it’s never been more critical for these two groups to actively pour into one another.  Let’s rewind a little to set the table.

What are your thoughts on community impact?

By “measured against any year that started before March 2020” standards, 2019 was a wild year for me.  I went from overseeing two assets in DC to playing soccer in the back yard with DJ (Donte, Jr) full time, to working in Baltimore over a span of a few months.  Two of those things were never in the plan.  But, I’d later find that both were absolutely necessary to fundamentally alter my perspective on hospitality as an industry and to cement my mission within it.

I never spent any time in Denver before getting “flewd out” to interview with the ownership group for the GM gig at Revival Baltimore.  Even then, I didn’t really spend time in Denver. I landed, Ubered to the hotel for the interview, grabbed lunch, crushed a glass of unremarkable pinot, and departed to hop on a flight back to BWI Thurgood Marshall airport.  While I’m always excited for an exchange of ideas, I recall being totally relaxed during the conversation.  Either I’d get offered a job that interested me or I’d get to continue my career as a private soccer coach with one really unruly 4-year-old client.  There were only positive outcomes.  On the return flight, I couldn’t shake the last question I was asked:  “What are your thoughts on community impact?”  In the conversation I didn’t even process the question fully before I started talking.  Full disclosure- this is my toxic interview trait.  I’m often halfway through my “answer” by the time I decide what my answer is going to be. I’m just out here talking.  Then I have to figure out a seamless pivot from hollow babble to the actual information.

It was an interesting question for a job interview and the first time I’d been asked this in any setting.  I had heard that this was a thing at this hotel.  But, candidly, I didn’t fully trust it.  Let me clarify. In my experience, this conversation usually leads down a path of projects and initiatives that stop short of accomplishing anything truly impactful.  Low priority, minimal investment, and constantly monetized is typically the order of the day.  But, I’m at that weird stage of the game where honesty and candor always win out over diplomacy and I’ve stumbled enough times along the way to be okay with the risk baked into having “controversial” ideas.  Envelope pushers and line-steppers are my kind of people.  When I arrived at the hotel there were a lot of great things in place on the impact front.  The team was partnering with extraordinary workforce development organizations to source talent.  We also had some programming in place that incorporated local partners who added real value to the guest experience.  By all accounts, it was a solid foundation.

I Don’t Go Outside In December

In December 2019, less than a week before our annual budget meeting, I was taking in the majesty of my first ever Mount Vernon Place Monument Lighting…from Revival’s restaurant, Topside….indoors.  It was frigid outside and Jason Bass, an entrepreneur and event promoter who we’d partnered with for Fright Brunch [a Halloween-themed Night Brunch party], stopped by to invite me outside to check something out.  Night Brunch was a very successful event series that Jason and cofounder Ryan “DJ Impulse” Rhodes started in 2018.  A month after the party at Revival and we hadn’t yet paid Jason’s invoice.  I definitely assumed this was the purpose of the surprise visit. After my initial resistance to leaving the building, we walked across the street where he showed me two food trucks that he had converted to mobile bars.  “I’ve got the beverage contract for the Monument Lighting.” To which I replied “But, you don’t make drinks.”  Jason shot me a smirk that I knew meant “yeah, that’s what’s so dope about it.”  And it was.  The creativity and entrepreneurship was inspiring.  I’d been thinking about programming as the key to elevating the visibility of the Revival mission.  But, I was having trouble connecting the dots. Ultimately, we want to create a very public conversation about how businesses can reimagine the way they participate in their communities and the best way to do that is to be more conspicuous with our efforts.  “Music, Visual Art, Culture, and Community…these are the pillars that I have in mind…can you put a deck together with your initial ideas on that?”  When he asked how soon…”Tomorrow.”

Our Handshake Brings All The Guests to The Yard

We met again on January 2nd, 2020.  It hadn’t even been a full week since all of our laptops were stolen out of my car while we headed to a team happy hour to celebrate a full day offsite meeting in DC, of all places.  As the only person present who wasn’t technically employed (and thereby covered) by the hotel, Jason was the only one who would have to foot the bill for his own replacement.  A few days after we questioned random strangers on that street in DC together about our missing property, here we were sitting in Topside trying to pin down how we would define success for this new partnership.  Knowing it would take a little while to get a contract pulled together for this atypical arrangement, I told Jason we should agree on the framework and get to it.  “Trust me.  We’ll get you compensated for your work.”  Why he had any faith in what I was saying while he was working from a replacement laptop that he had laying around the house, is a story for him to tell. But, we shook on it and off we went.

My wife is a whole Administrative Judge and I was out here “memorializing the conversation via email” like I don’t know how this story almost always ends.  I could hear her voice in the back of my mind on my way home…”I mean…I guess.”  It’s the household equivalent of “If you like it, I love it.”  I know what she’s saying.  As a self-proclaimed paralegal, I know better.  But, we didn’t have time for formalities.  We had work to do and we didn’t have much time.  As fate would have it, we had even less time than I thought.  Much less.

After launching the Zero Proof Zero Judgment (ZPZJ, as we call it) non-alcoholic cocktail program in January 2020, we had a month to get things going.  ZPZJ was getting lots of love from local media and Anna Welker, the bartender leading the program, was doing one or two televised interviews a week about her sobriety journey and her mission to blow up the nonsense that patrons often endure while socializing at a bar while declining to consume alcohol.  Black History Month created some really meaningful programming opportunities.  We did a Black artist installation throughout the building with 5 local artists to start the month.  We then punctuated it by flying up Hue Society Founder, Tahiirah Habibi, to moderate a panel discussion with 4 Black wine companies about their insights on the industry.  The media response was strong once again.  But, even more, it felt great to create space for these very real conversations to take place.  As natural as it felt to lean into these activations that we’re uniquely positioned to create, it wasn’t lost on us that the two of us doing storytelling around this partnership and then doing 4 consecutive programs rooted in the Black experience might lead some folks to dismiss this as “Black folks doing Black things.”  And honestly, that’s what it was or at least that part of the calendar.  It wasn’t so important for us to be fully understood that we were going to back off the game plan.  But, we didn’t want to exclude part of the audience before we even got started.  We ultimately made the decision to trust that the folks who we would be able to reach were not the people who were going to disengage because we focused on uplifting Black people during BHM.

March was going to be the month when we REALLY got to stretch our legs creatively.  We had a retail pop up with the Georgetown Billy Reid store teed up and a seminar on the books with designer, author, stylist and all around plant god, Hilton Carter.  We were in talks with Maketto in DC and Jameson about partnership opportunities and takeovers in our outlets in the month.  We planned to close out with a talk honoring The International Day of Transgender Visibility with Ava Pipitone.  This was the March we had in mind.  The best-laid plans of mice and men.  You all know what happened next.

The Teachers Never Got to Lounge

In the first couple of months of 2020, while introducing the new reality of Revival as what we call “a heavily programmed hotel” to our team, Jason and I were also working through a visioning exercise with the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University.  This was led by one of my favorite people in the biz, Jen Collins.  This was our second crossing of paths and she was always someone who I enjoyed chatting with. Along with her team, she led us through a handful of workshops and calls where we reviewed Baltimore’s strengths and weaknesses.  We talked through some of the historical context that still shapes how the city behaves today and we looked at data about everything from affordable housing to employment and access to healthy food.  We wanted to learn as much as possible while constantly challenging ourselves to pick our spots based upon where we could add the most value for the community by doing things that were most natural for a team like ours.  This would be the foundational starting point for our impact strategy.

When the pandemic set in, the first big news story in Baltimore was the closing of schools.  Fresh off the Beeck Center work, we got in the lab and asked ourselves “What can we do?”  Jason threw out “What if we did something for teachers?” Thinking that this will be really hard on them, especially during the day, his thought was a daytime event in Topside where teachers would be treated like royalty to take their minds off schools being closed for a couple weeks.  As I type, we’ve burned through almost an entire Greek alphabet’s worth of variants and the cumulative number of cases is damn near Biblical.  Our hearts were in the right place.  But, hindsight being 20/20 (I know. Don’t block me.), a day party to kick off the pandemic maybe wasn’t the strongest idea we’ve ever come up with.  Ironically, by the time we finished stress testing the concept it was a moot point because indoor dining was also shut down.  We needed to recalibrate.  “What if we reached out to the produce folks and got them to give us the food that’s going to be wasted now that all of these restaurants have to close?  We can break it down into lunches and do a community day for the service industry folks who are going to be out of work.  We can also do care packages.”  And just like that, Revival Community Day was born.  Like everything back in those days, it was going to be “just a few weeks” and then everything would be back to normal and COVID would be no more. “They’re saying it’ll be gone by Easter at the latest.”  We hadn’t even cracked the seal on the Greek alphabet yet.  Those were simpler times, weren’t they?

Community Day became a thing.  In fact, it became so much of a thing that we reached out to our friends over at Baltimore-based Currency Studio to design Revival + Currency co-branded Community Day tee shirts.  With all of the people coming and going during the care package distribution and the leadership team dressed in their best assembly line gear, it became increasingly valuable that people were able to quickly identify who we were.  The shirts also elevated our IG game immediately!  With the exception of running out to grab groceries and Lysol wipes, people were pretty much shut in by mid summer.  So we started to deploy virtual yoga, fitness, conversations, and DJ happy hours (before D-Nice broke the internet).  It was incredible.  People at home enjoyed it and it gave the partners that we were working with a chance to stay active while we all did our best to wait this thing out.   Our social impact game plan had two tracks.  We set out to support family stability by working with young people and to pour into local entrepreneurship.  The thought was if we created a strong group of local partners, they can help us with our work with the young people.

Who’s Rob?

At the same time that all of this was happening, somewhere someone in Baltimore was playing Six Degrees of Jason Bass  and a friend of a friend introduced him to Nnadagi Issa, cofounder of Lor Tush.  Jason came into the office excited to share that he has a new friend who’s a Black woman who founded a bamboo toilet paper company in Baltimore with her sister. They offered to give away toilet paper with our care packages.  This was during that wild point in the COVID-19 narrative arc when people were trading family heirlooms for rolls of Charmin.  The tp aisle at Target looked like Nat-Geo footage of Aleppo.   I was 20 minutes late the day we added coffee and toilet paper to the care packages. Every single package was given away by the time I arrived. Good news travels fast on Instagram.

We were thrilled to share with the team that we were adding Lor Tush to all of our rooms and public spaces, which was met with a lot of “yea, and?” energy initially.  Then we explained the vision.  This is a really powerful and unexpected example of how we can put our dollars into our community and do it with a business that also sees the value in prioritizing social impact.  We also took from this experience the critical importance of constantly looping the team in on what we were cooking up.  We sucked at this initially.  

We set up a call with our PR Firm, Profiles.  We were adamant that we don’t push out a release about Revival.  This is to be a story about Lor Tush.  We’ll get ours when the dust settles.  But, our support of local entrepreneurs should go beyond just direct purchases and cannot be seen as a marketing tactic.  We have access to resources that are commonplace for hotels, but not always accessible for emerging businesses.  Hyatt launched Hyatt Loves Local and Lor Tush was included, which got picked up by The Robb Report.  Amazing.  Previously, prominent local journalist John-John Williams penned a cover piece for The Baltimore Sun that then ran in The Washington Post. This was three MAJOR hits in a very short window. Jason and I were in a meeting together when the Robb Report email came in and we lost it.  I remember running around the building to tell the team and having more than one person ask me who “Rob” is and what his report is about.  To date, the biggest hit for Lor Tush + Revival was the CBS Saturday Morning Show.  They ran a feature on the Issa Sisters along with an interview with Jason.  When it aired, Nnadagi, Jason, and I watched it together on FaceTime!  I was yelling so loud that I woke the entire house at 7a.  We have one of those “Who’s making all that noise this early in the morning?!” houses.  So, hooting and hollering at sunrise on a weekend is reserved solely for the most special of occasions. 

My Favorite Time I Was Wrong

Over the years at Revival, we’ve built an idea meritocracy that Ray Dalio himself would be proud of.  So, when someone tosses an “okay, hear me out” into the room we all stop what we’re doing to hear the pitch.  “What if we offered our open kitchen spaces to local restaurants who are losing their brick and mortar because of the pandemic?” The open mindedness of the meritocracy is accompanied by a level of candor that outsiders might mislabel “brutal honesty.” So, no egos were bruised when I replied to what would later become the Popup Pickup Program with a sincere “It seems a little goofy to me. Do we think that would be meaningful to people?”  We landed on putting it out on IG and reconnecting the next day to discuss the response.  23 people reached out within a few hours of the post going live.  Rumcake Kitchen, The Sporty Dog, and one of my personal favorite restaurants in Baltimore - Fuisine were among the initial grouping of operators who rotated through our kitchens with their delicious offerings. We sampled good food and met some great people. 

After a brief time at Hyatt Regency Baltimore, The Urban Oyster “popped up” at Revival.  Operating pickup and delivery out of the hotel is nothing like having a dedicated restaurant space.  But, I learned from chef/owner Jasmine Norton that the concept was born out of popups at farmer’s markets and festivals.  So, it wasn’t entirely unnatural for them.  Over the months that followed Jasmine and her team became family.  So much so, that over 6 months after their departure we still meet often to stay up to date on what’s happening with both businesses and to support the growth of her brand wherever possible. Sometimes we just check in just to check in. 

As had been the trend, we saw significant media traction around the Popup Pickup Program.  Jasmine and later Kim and Cat from another local staple, Breaking Bread became the unofficial spokespeople for the initiative.  During a window when it wasn’t feasible for us to reopen Topside, we were able to offer two options to hotel guests because of these amazing women.  And our team was very well fed during an incredibly stressful time. 

This period, when COVID restrictions meant there was almost no business to be done, is when things really started to come together for our team and the Revival brand. Hundreds of millions of media impressions monthly aside, this was easily the most compelling business case for what we’ve labeled impact hospitality. We define impact hospitality as a significant, positive influence on guests, visitors and the community created as the result of a deliberate set of activities with the goal of addressing a pressing social challenge. This can be achieved through the creation of space for conversation, connections, and cultural exchanges.  Year one on this journey was one of the most challenging that the world and our industry, in particular, had ever seen. It was becoming crystal clear to me heading into 2021 that, with a little innovation and a lot of intention, hospitality can be a transformative force for good.  As we continue down this path we’ll openly share the wins and losses, the learnings, and how this has led to extraordinary business results at Revival.