Despite never working in a hotel, 33-year-old Sloan Dean has been in the hospitality industry for the majority of his career. Dallas-based Ashford Hospitality Trust’s young vice president of revenue optimization is the mastermind behind revenue management, distribution-channel maximization and yield optimization for a large portfolio of full-service and select-service assets. However, the Georgia Tech-trained industrial engineer was a seemingly unlikely match for the hospitality industry.
“If you would have asked me 10 years ago if I would have a successful career in hotel-revenue management, I probably would have said it sounded exciting, but wondered how a guy with an engineering and finance background would get into the industry,” Dean reflects.
Upon graduating from the top-ranked engineering school, Dean worked as a consultant with Mercer Management (now Oliver Wyman). After several years of constant travel plus starting a family of his own, Dean was looking for a lifestyle change and secured a position on the distribution marketing team at IHG, where he was soon promoted to revenue manager with a dedicated portfolio of extended-stay hotels.
“Hotel revenue management soon turned into something that my skill set aligned with well,” he says. “People sometimes consider revenue management as voodoo math, and it’s really not.”
But Dean also had a lot to learn. He admits that he didn’t know much about the hotel business before his first position at IHG. “I basically had to learn everything,” Dean says. “Right before I first interviewed at IHG, I was looking up a bunch of key metrics and terms. I didn’t even know what RevPAR was. Once I was at IHG, there was a lot of on-the-job training, and that is where I probably learned most of the hotel business.”
In addition to his time at IHG, Dean has held revenue-management positions at Noble Investment Group and Interstate Hotels & Resorts before joining Ashford in 2013. Despite working with many of the industry’s best minds, he credits his wife, an elementary school teacher by trade, as one of the biggest influences on his career success and public-speaking abilities.
“We are drawn to charisma, and I think having my wife as a sounding board to make sure that I am being practical with what I am trying to communicate has been and still is invaluable,” he says. “People who are successful at a young age are usually very good at public speaking.”
Dean emphasizes that breaking into the revenue-management field comes down to the details. A successful revenue manager must be the “most detail-oriented person that you have ever met,” he says. “If you enter the wrong rate for a hotel, then a hotel may be selling something for $1 opposed to $1,000 — the implications are huge.”
Unfortunately, this extreme attention to detail may lead to the demise of a revenue-management executive as he climbs up the ranks. Dean explains being a leader requires moving from practitioner to strategist by trusting fellow managers to correctly compute important figures. “I have seen a lot of my peers who aren’t able to let go of being in the minutia who either burn themselves out or their employees hated working for them because they are micro-managers.”
In a relatively short time, Dean seems to have balanced both.
Editor’s note: This profile is part of HOTELS’ first People Issue, which highlights a dozen up-and-coming hoteliers.