Ted Ent | Focus on the people first, and product will follow

Dive into the wisdom of Ted Ent, a hospitality virtuoso with over three decades in the industry, who climbed the ladder from a pot washer at a state park to the CEO and President of Innisfree Hotels. Ted's philosophy "focus on the people first, and product will follow" resonates through his work, from his hands-on beginnings to executive roles in preeminent destinations. He's shaped experiences at renowned venues like Canyon Ranch and Hilton Worldwide, always with the belief that true hospitality can change lives. Join us as Ted shares insights from his illustrious career and his dedication to philanthropy, offering a blueprint for leadership that transcends business, emphasizing that by nurturing transformative moments in people, we craft a legacy of success.

Transcript

Tim Kinsella: Hello and welcome to the Leader’s Podcast! I’m here with Rick Fountain, the Dean of The College of Business at the University of West Florida. And we’re sitting down today with Ted Ent. Ted is the President and CEO of Innisfree Hotel Group. Ted’s got a pretty remarkable story of how he grew up in the Hospitality Industry for the past 30 years. He started washing pots at a State Park and now runs a major Hotel Group. Ted, it’s great to have you here. So why don’t we just get right into it and you tell us a little bit about your journey.

Ted Ent: Yeah. So, I'm a lifelong hotelier. I got in the hospitality business when I was a late teenager and ended up becoming an executive chef when I was in college and started my own catering business and graduated and started my post college days in the restaurant business developing and opening restaurants and always wanted to get back into the resort side of things and ultimately got back in with Canyon Ranch Resort's and Health Spas in Tucson and became their Corporate Food and Beverage Director and then moved on to Hyatt and then to Hilton and then started my own Hotel Development Company and then was tapped about five and a half years ago by my good friend Julian McQueen to come in and take over Innisfree and take it into the future and create a legacy company that is a for profit company that behaves a lot like a profit company where we give a large portion of our free cash flow back to the communities where we do business. So, Julian and I share the same belief that being in business has to be more than just making money, that we need to be able to create and leave a legacy behind that benefits everybody involved.

Tim Kinsella: That's a pretty unique concept in today's world, in today's market. What is it about the hospitality industry that drew you to it and drew you to stay in it? You've been in a long time now.

Ted Ent: So, I've been in the industry for over 35 years. When I graduated college, my focus in business school was production management. And of course, at that time and the late 1980s, early 1990s, it was a tech driven thing. So, most of my interviews were with tech companies. And I did get an offer with a telephone chip manufacturing company out of Austin to be an entry level plant manager. And I actually turned that job down at the shock and awe of my parents to go work for a restaurant company, primarily because I wanted to be in the people business. And when I did two weeks with the chip company, it was a lot of clip boards and robotics not a lot of interaction with people throughout the day other than during the lunch hour and having hospitality experience and knowing that it's literally interpersonal interaction every minute of every day, if not every second. I missed it so much that that's the path I chose that's the person I wanted to be. And that's where I wanted to influence people as much as I could.
Tim Kinsella: I grew up in the industry myself, my folks in a small hotel in Ireland. And I like to say that everything I learned about leadership, I learned in pub business I understand that completely, because where else do you see the human condition laid bare other than at 2:00 in the morning in an Irish pub? Yeah, but it was, a fascinating childhood and growing up around there. But correct me if I'm wrong, I think two things about hospitality that I would think attracts you is that number one, like you said it's about people but it's about problem solving, It's always new. There's always new issues. It's always new problems coming up. And you've got to be agile. You've got to be able to create a culture within the organization that everybody's a problem solver in there. And you said that’s something that attracted you to it.

Ted Ent: Yeah, that's absolutely true. You know because it is a people business, essentially people serving people and we see serving at Innisfree as a requirement, a social requirement. We see the act of service and think of it very highly and the hierarchy of wants and needs in community. And obviously we're all people and we're all different and as much as you want to create a corporate culture that by definition would be the same or very alike, because we're all individuals, it makes that challenging just right out of the gate, you know, how you would react to a hostile guest and how I would react to a hostile guest would be completely different. So, one of the first challenges we have is pairing personalities in the right positions throughout the hotel. You know, some people do great back in the house. I like to use restaurants as an example. And being from an old pub business you'll probably resonate with this. People who work in the kitchen have no interest whatsoever in talking to any of the guests and people who work out on the floor in service positions that deal with the guests could never survive back in the kitchen. It's as much more of kind of a closed production environment. And I use the restaurant scenario often when we're training young leaders. Because you have two very different groups of people, a pure dichotomy in the sense, but they have to come together in resonance every meal period and it has to work every meal period. And it's no secret that in the restaurant industry, oftentimes the back of the house is married to the front of the house, literally, not just figuratively, which creates sort of its own problems sometimes.

Tim Kinsella: That's fascinating, just that concept of marrying people to the right place. So, you bring out their fullest potential so they can flourish, they are. We used to have a cook she was the head chef, and they didn't call them Chefs back then just cook. Her name was Ms. Simmon. And she wielded a meat cleaver like a guillotine. And everybody was scared stiff of her. But she made the best house pate in the world, and she was legend there. But there's no way you'd want her talking to the front of house Not with customers no that would scare them to death. so that idea of putting people into the right environment so they can flourish, I think that is a core concept of leadership, of creating the environment that allows your people to reach their fullest potential. And to do that, you've got to know what your people need, what they want, what they are, what they are best at doing. But to do that, that's a skill in and of itself. Being able to read folks, because you as a leader have to be different necessarily to different people. One person might need an arm around their shoulder, one might need a kick in the butt. One might just need some guidance. So how do you know that? How do you know what it is that people need?

Ted Ent: And that's you know, unfortunately, sometimes I think leaders get that wrong. Sometimes even the very best leaders, because lots of people are good at hiding things about themselves that you don't discover until the relationship becomes a little closer, a little more intimate. But I think out of the gate it starts with trust, which is a big part of our company's culture at Innisfree and something that I've always practiced since I was taught as a very young person. And it's that 'Start with Trust' concept that allows people to be their most authentic self. People will not be authentic around you if they have any sense whatsoever, no matter how small or large it is, that there's a level of distrust there. They're going to throw up some level the boundary. So, you know, we use 'Start with Trust'. We have Ten Commandments at history. And the first one is 'Starts with Trust'. We chose that very specifically because without trust you don't have anything else. So, when we're evaluating people's skill set and what might be best for them, it oftentimes starts with a conversation about their past, about where they want to go in the future. You know, what were the influences in their life? In the interview process, I ask all the time, you know, who was the biggest influencer in your life? Nine times out of ten people say, my grandparent or my aunt or my uncle. Every once in  a while people say a parent, a mom, or a dad or both or a sibling. But it's almost unanimously a grandparent every time. And that creates conversations because the memories that people have of their grandparents are much different than the memories they have with a lot of other people in their life. And you're able to pull out things about these people that you find out, whether they're creative, whether they're analytic. A lot of times people think they want something. And then when you really talk to them about the jobs requirements and what it's going to be, it turns out a completely different way. And it's also kind of a space and time question, too. I remember back in 1995, I guess I was hiring some dishwashers in Tucson, Arizona, and this fellow comes in and he was probably about 50 years old. He was about five foot tall. He was from Bangladesh, and he was a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona in Quantum Mechanics. And I didn't even know what that was. And he comes in, speaks some broken English, says he wants to wash dishes. I thought this is odd because he had like five master's degrees, two already existing PhDs and other physics roles, and his name was Kreisler. And we got to know him very well. He worked for us for four years and basically he said, "What I'm studying is so difficult, that I just need a job where I can come and do one thing all day. And I promise you, I'll work hard." And he came in every day at 2:00 and wash dishes till 10:00 every day and became like the star of the show. Everybody in the kitchen loved him. Everybody in the restaurant loved him. He helped me start a program for some of our other employees where we taught them how to start bank accounts and do checking accounts. And he really got involved with the culture of the restaurant. You know, in hindsight, had I used my normal hiring practices, I would have never hired him on a bet. He didn't meet the profile of what I was generally hiring for that position. But we took a chance and we had four of the best years the Kitchen had ever seen, and he was part of that. He influenced a heck of a lot of people, talked people into going to college that thought that was out of their reach. And he proved to them that I came here with nothing on an immigrant boat, and I've got multiple degrees and I teach during the day, and I come here at night to earn money. And so, there's a lot of different ways you can back into, the responsibility of a leader and be nimble. And it goes back to that: there's challenges every day and you've got to problem solve every day.

Tim Kinsella: This is a great story because it gets to the next question I was going to ask you. Trust I couldn't agree with you more about trust. But it's a difficult concept, I think, for some folks in leadership positions to really understand and grasp because trust requires risk. If I trust you, I'm giving up some control.

Ted Ent: That's right.
Tim Kinsella: And that risk or control. It's something that a lot of leaders are unwilling to give up. As a leader, you have to be willing to sometimes allow your people to almost fail and then pull them back, because that's how they learn.

Ted Ent: That's right
Tim Kinsella: And giving them that trust to be able to do that, to allow them to go out there by themselves and make decisions themselves knowing that you've got their back but that that's the scary sometimes

Ted Ent: Yeah it is very scary because you know from the leader’s perspective, the leaders really burying their belly, so to speak Yeah. To create that environment of trust and has to tell open and honest stories about their journey as well and admit to the people around them that they've made some pretty big mistakes. And what were the results of those mistakes? And, you know, I've always defined challenge as opportunity, and I've always defined crisis moments as opportunity. And when we sit down as a management team and we talk about a crisis, and we have crises all the time. All businesses and all people do. The first thing that I try to get the team to focus on is we're going to resolve the crisis because all crises get resolved as your parents and your grandparents told you "This too shall pass", right? So, what are we going to do with this? What's the learning experience? How are we going to take advantage of the gaps that we saw? And how are we going to put something in place so that this specific crisis, if it does happen again, doesn't have the kind of negative impact on us. So, we immediately try to turn things into a positive. And when your team sees that you're willing to take sometimes some very, very difficult situations that could be very expensive, and spin those into positive momentum, it helps them realize if I take some chances, I'm not just going to get thrown to the wolves. Yeah. And the hardest challenge that we've had probably for the last five or six years is getting people to take chances. You know, the concept of risk assessment is completely different today than it was in the past. And I think with the emergence of things like A.I. and other problem-solving tools, which we're still figuring out. People are going to defer to things to try to help them assess their risk taking. But at the end of the day, risk taking is still only within you. Because if you take the easy route because you found data somewhere else, it's no longer risk. And, you know, I had a conversation with our CFO two days ago at lunch and we were talking about a business decision we made five years ago that's likely costing us way more at this point than we'll ever make. So, we're going to have to change course. And he said, hey, at the end of the day, if we don't take these kinds of risks, we're never going to make any money. So that's a quick assessment of, okay, we gave it a shot. You know, I'm going to have to report to the board back on this failure, but had we not done it, we probably wouldn't have discovered these three or four other things along the way that we discovered. We wouldn't have grown from it. We wouldn't have had the learning experience. So, we really try to incorporate that at all levels of the organization. Because I also believe that some of your very best ideas - and this isn't just mantra - come from people who are not in leadership roles. The people who are there every day, day in and day out doing tasks for the success of the organization. They see things that management doesn't see.

Tim Kinsella: Yeah. We're too busy sitting in our ivory tower and pulling the strings, look at everybody. And oftentimes they're the ones that small, small, microscopic changes can have huge effects. That's right. Maybe just listening to them. Just listening to the things that they see that are wrong can have huge effects. There's so much that I'd like to unpack in this because we talk about crises and trust in crises. You don't build trust while you're in the crisis. How do you prepare for crises? You prepare for crises because of the trust that you build before that. So, when you get to the crisis, you've got money in the bank, and you can withdraw it when you're going through the crisis. And how do you create that trust so people feel when they're in a crisis that they can take risks, that they can do what's required? Because you hit something else there about learning. Any conflict, any change, any crisis is an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to capitalize and learn and get better. But you're never going to do that if you're not willing to really dig into it and take risk where necessary to get the best possible outcome. But creating a culture is kind of hard. And I know you said you put trust at the top of the list for employees to earn. Is there something that you learned through these years? You were in this business for a long time. What, 35 years?

Ted Ent: Over 35 years. Yeah.
Tim Kinsella: Yeah. So, are there things that stand out to you that helped to create the leader that you are today? Are there seminal events that happened in your leadership journey that helped you to formulate them?

Ted Ent: Yeah, many, many things. And I've been very fortunate throughout my career. I've always taken the approach of I've never taken a job for the money, and I've always tried to pick my boss and not let my boss pick me. Because I believe there's a place for everybody out there and my place might not be the right place for you and vice versa. And because of that, I've had some great mentorship along the way, and I guess I would say in the first ten years of my career was about learning humility. I was fortunate and really good at what I did, and I could have let that get out of control and had good leadership above me that kind of kept my ego in check. And I, by the way, believe that the biggest mistakes and failures are created because of ego, particularly in the leadership world. People tend to believe that they're more important than the mission or the organization, and it results in failure almost 100% of the time. And, you know, if you follow business press at all and you see some of these big CEOs that get taken down and several have had to abscond themselves out of countries to escape to other countries. And you look at the story behind that, it's almost 100% of the time their ego. And so, you know, in the first ten years, I learned a lot about that, about managing ego and leading with purpose and not with personal gain. I'd say in my next ten years, I learned about the value of integrity. Of course, in those next ten years, I was at a much higher level in my career and dealing with bigger problems and bigger individuals and bigger egos. And in that time, unfortunately, I was put in a position where I had to essentially engineer the termination of my boss for many reasons we won't go into today. But it was a real defining point for me in my life and my career, because I had a young family knew that this might end my time at this specific company. Of course, the company got behind it when they saw the fax and said, oh my gosh, we have to do something here. And they did. I was then told that essentially my career was over because nobody wanted the guy who got his boss fired. And that single moment is why we're sitting here today. I can backtrack how I ended up in Pensacola to the day I made that decision. To the day that I met Julian McQueen, the founder of Innisfree, which was in 2005, and here we are today. So that was a moment in time where I was actually up for a really big promotion that got pulled out from under me. And had I just waited two or three more months, I would have gotten promoted on and, had a different career path had a different timeline, a different group of people, a different group of leaders. And my integrity wouldn't let me do it. I could no longer permit some things that were happening to happen because they were harming other people. And so, I made a choice, and my family was behind me. I got a lot of support and it's worked out for me. So, I think the moral of that story is you've got to be true to yourself as a leader. You've got to recognize when you're in an environment that's unhealthy for you or the people around you. You've got to recognize when you may have to have a really hard discussion with somebody, even if they're your boss or your boss's boss. Because you only get one shot at this depending on your belief system, I guess. In mine I believe I only get one crack at this, and I'm committed to trying to do it as well and as right as I possibly can.

Tim Kinsella: You hit on something good 'Leading with Purpose'. I believe very strongly that when you understand your 'why'. When every decision that you make, when it's made through the lens of what's better for the people in the organization, it's empowering because you can then become the leader that they need rather than trying to fit some image that you think you should be. You're just you're not concerned with that. You're only concerned about what do they need? What does your organization need? And integrity is so connected to that. You spoke about integrity there. What does integrity mean to you in leadership?

Ted Ent: So integrity means to me that people around you know what they're going to get every day when they come to work, that you're going to be consistent and fair, that you're going to set the guidelines as the leader as to how we're going to conduct business, what the results of that business are going to be, how we're going to behave in the communities where we do business, and that people can rely on that and that you're also going to support that same behavior in them. That it's not just a one person show This is something that everybody can participate in. And this consistency issue is a really big issue because it's the one thing I think most leaders get wrong. It's really easy to play favorites in the workplace and in the home place. You know, siblings battle all the time because mom likes you more than me. That's times ten in the workforce, especially when you're in a people business, in a hotel like the Hilton on Pensacola Beach, has in high seasons 600 employees. There's a lot of moving parts that need to be paid attention to and the minute you violate that, then you become that leader who they only like the day shift or they like so-and-so, or this person always gets the best job assignment. And so, you've got to show that consistency and consistency is backed up oftentimes by hard conversations. Right. Being consistent doesn't mean everybody gets to do the same thing every day. Being consistent means that you have an open enough relationship with the employee who may think you're not consistent to explain to them 'No, I actually am. And this is why you might not have earned this position yet. So, let's work on that piece. You know, authenticity is something you mentioned early on in the conversation. And being authentic at work is a real key part of our corporate culture at Innisfree right now. We have a saying that we're trying to create an environment where people can come to work and be the same person at work that they are at home. And we've done the research and most people go to work and they're a different person at work than they are at home. And that's schizophrenia by definition. So, a lot of our culture tools at industry are designed around helping you be your authentic self. Because again, that goes back to the trust factor. And trust and integrity are intertwined, right? And when people feel like they can trust their leaders, that their leaders have integrity and have fairness and are really looking out for everybody's best interests and not just their own, then you start to create this environment where you hear the communication in the workplace change. It's no longer just surface conversation. People are having real conversations with each other about things that matter to them in their lives, and they're making connections with each other. And then you start getting a different level of performance. And this is where it gets really touchy because you can focus too much on having an open, authentic culture and forget about the other side of this, which is the performance culture. And people can get way too much kumbaya about this is how we are with each other. And forget the fact that we're still a for profit business trying to make money servicing guests and selling hotel rooms.

Tim Kinsella: Just to anchor on that for a second, because I think that there's a vein going through leadership training right now that is focused on that. It's focused on the platitudes and giving you a list of 'Man you got to do these things to be a leader', but it leads you down a path that is the path of least resistance. When leadership is hard

Ted Ent: Leadership is very hard

Tim Kinsella: It's the hardest thing that I've ever done in my life. The most rewarding thing but the hardest thing ever. Because you have to face a lot of uncomfortable truths and tackle them a lot of times. So, everything that you have talked about today are some of the difficult truths of leadership. The difficult things that you've got to do. And so often when I hear folks talking about leadership, it is that kumbaya type of stuff without a recognition of what leadership really takes, what it requires. And if you're going to be a leader, it's going to take a lot out of you. You've got to give yourself to it. It's a difficult proposition.

Ted Ent: There's that saying out there, oh, that person is a born leader. And I've never really bought off on that statement 'born leader'. I think that people have certain personality traits that lend them to strong leadership. But you have to learn how to be the right leader. And some people have the benefit of coming out of the gate and finding their path quickly and appear to be the born leader. And it works for them. And their organizations do well. And some people have to go through the hard knocks and the hard truths, as you put it, to learn from their mistakes. I mean, I certainly had plenty along the way. And again, as I said earlier, I was fortunate enough to have strong mentors who guided me through it instead of judging me for it. And I think that's another really great trait leaders need to understand the hammer isn't always the answer. And really good leaders try to dissect the situations and then make sure everybody gets to learn from those situations. I say all the time, we can make mistakes if we make the same mistake five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten times. Now we have a problem. But the mistake is generally not the problem.

Tim Kinsella: It goes back to the understanding what you people need. That's right. What is it that  they need? Rick?

Rick Fountain: Ted, I think what I wanted to talk about was why you were so willing to step up and be a leader for the College Business Advisory Council You answered that for me early on by saying you work for a company where it's a for profit company with a nonprofit bet. But I like defining moments when I listen to these podcasts about leadership. And I think that my takeaway is the dishwasher from your background because you looked at him coming in as not a right person, but I think he did something that is so integral to leadership. Because you listened to him in the interview, and you heard something that said 'He can do this job. It may not be what I thought he would be looking for, but what a powerful story that you listened to him. You can't build trust with someone that knows you're not listening to them. So, my takeaway today is if you want to reflect on that a minute, but the listening to that person and he became a part not just of washing the dishes, but he was a big part of the kitchen. You described that. So, I thank you for sharing that. That has an impact on me, to try to remember to be a good listener.

Ted Ent: Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks. That was, you know, those early years of my career were, maybe the funnest I've told my kids several times I've never really felt like I had a job and I've never really felt like I had to go to work today. But, in those early days, of course, I was a lot younger, a lot less gray, a lot more energy. But, back to one of the things that Tim said, too, about problem solving, when I got to Canyon Ranch, we didn't have any dishwashers. And my first job there was executive steward and Purchasing Manager. And so, I was ordering all the food for the entire resort and washing pots and washing dishes and thought, this isn't going to last, so I've got to go find some employees. And Tucson is one of those towns that there's two sides of the tracks. The resort was up on the northeast side of town and the employees were way down on the southwest side of town. There was no public transportation. So, I started driving down to the barrio in Tucson and introduced myself to people and told everybody to meet me out in front of a restaurant. And every morning I picked them up at 6 a.m. and drove them to work in my pickup truck. And what we did is we ended up creating a community, and then one of the people saved up enough money to buy a car and they could drive some people most of the days. And then I was only plugging the gaps on the days off, and I made a deal with the resort owner. I said, look, if I can go for a year with zero turnover in the dishwasher pool. You need to use your resources and your political power, and you need to get the public transportation to drop a bus just right down at the bottom of the hill and we'll get them over the hill down to the resort. A year went by, and we had zero turnover. Chrysler was part of this. What we did to create a community is, you know, I realized really quick that there were deficiencies that these people had. And, you know, we've talked about deficiencies here in our own community that we at this table talked about trying to solve. Tucson had the same deficiencies. So, I started classes. This is how you start a bank account This is how you start a checking account. If you get good enough. You can get a credit card. And that's how you do this and a lot these people were not bankable. And I got the owner of the resort to put a bond up at the bank to back checking accounts because they didn't want to give them checking accounts. They'd only give them savings accounts. And not a single check bounced in five years. And eventually he got the bond back and the rest is history. But, you know, creating a sense of community in the workplace is really critical at all levels. And I think it really gets lost at the executive level because executive level work teams tend to become shark tanks a little bit sometimes. I work really hard with my team not to let that happen. We all exercise an open-door policy where anybody in the company at any time can come see any one of us on the executive leadership team. And I get people from all over the place showing up in my office sometimes and I'll hear them ask my assistant, Is Mr. Ted there?

Tim Kinsella: So open door is not just lip service?

Ted Ent: It's not just lip service. And you can call me any time of the day at our company. My cell phone is on our website and on my business card. I don't hide.

Tim Kinsella: That's rare Lots of people say that, but very few actually do it.
Ted Ent: Well, you know, at the end of the day, you're nothing without your people in business. And we're going to have technology and it's going to disrupt things like many things do. And I've been tracking this technological revolution because it's been around pretty much my entire career and a lot of correlations between what we're going through now with the technological revolution, as we did with the Industrial Revolution 100 years or almost exactly 100 years earlier. But without your people, you're failing right out of the gate. So, focus on your people first. Your product will follow every time.

Tim Kinsella: But there's something you're missing and you're humble so you're not going to say it, but people aren't going to come to your office. I don't care how open your door is. They're not going to come to you if they don't trust you. They're not going to come if they don't feel that they can be vulnerable in your presence. And that's the difficult part. So, you've created something special within your organization where people feel that they have a voice.

Rick Fountain: I think it came full cycle for me that if they go into your office, the door can be wide open. But if you don't listen to them and that's how you built up the trust. Because they come to you with something, you listen to it. Your boss listened to you about. If I have zero turnover, what we need is a bus route. Someone in leadership listened to you and gave you an opportunity to expand your leadership capacity. So how fascinating to hear that story. So, thank you for it.

Ted Ent: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me y'all this has been great. Thank you.