A Company of Hospitalitarians^®

My name is Aaron Hjermstad. I am the Assistant General Manager here at Corinne San Antonio. I’ve been with the company a little bit over four years now. There’s a lot of cool opportunities at White Lodging outside of your day to day. I’m lucky enough to become a part of our first inaugural cocktail council, so I oversee the agave spirit cocktails — so that’s tequila and mezcal, and a couple of other little niche spirits that aren’t too well known. I’ve been able to work pretty hand in hand with a lot of my counterparts across the country. Not only do we each represent different spirits, we also represent different parts of the country and bring our own unique twists and flair to the beverage industry. It is a really cool area to be in right now. I feel like the field is evolving really, really fast. It’s really an amazing way to express yourself. Perfecting my craft, to me, means always listening and always learning. Being passionate about what I do is the driving force behind that, and I want to become better every single day.

I’m Megan Schultz. I’m our Assistant Director of Sales at the Westin, Aloft and Element here in Austin, downtown. I’m Robert Schultz. I’m over at the Otis Hotel. I’m the Director of Engineering. We’ve been together a little over 12 years now. We just had a baby 15 months ago. With everything going on, we’re planning for a newborn. There’s so much going on that it was nice to have our HR and our benefits teams behind us. The updated policy really allowed him to be home and get paid for two weeks, without having to worry about taking money out of savings or anything like that. For me, I was able to get 12 weeks of my pay. I think with the parental leave policy, we just felt very supported, knowing that that was one less thing we had to learn as a new parent, as a hospitalitarian. Perfecting my craft means mentoring my team and allowing them to be their best selves, not just professionally, but personally as well. Perfecting my craft would be providing the best assets available to our guests and our associates.

I love axe throwing because of the sense of community that it provides and the challenge that it presents. It’s really like self-improvement — always trying to do better than I did the last time, always trying to hit that perfect score. Careers is as much a community as the axe throwing community is: we are all there all the time, working together day in and day out. The same thing goes for the time spent — people are developing in their careers, they’re developing in their positions. Every time there’s a line in the sand, I want to go so far past it. So if we’re saying here’s our budgeted revenue, we’re going to knock this out of the park, and I try to instill that in the team every single day too. It’s good to have a little bit of that competitive spirit. When I started, nobody knew I was doing this. I tried to keep it on the down low, because it’s like, hey, just a heads up, every Wednesday night this is something that I go do, and it’s not something that I’m willing to compromise. And it’s been like that for two and a half years. Overall, people are more supportive than anything else, because everybody wants you to have a life outside of work.

Mother’s Day a couple of years ago, I saw a design online. It was the word “”mom”” in a heart, and I wanted to make that for my mom — and I did. But then one of my coworkers saw it and said, I would buy that from you. And then I ended up making about seven of them that Mother’s Day. What makes me passionate about book folding would be its uniqueness. It’s just my unique way to express myself. I don’t really know how to paint, I don’t really know how to draw, but I do know how to cut a page. Book folding does require a certain attention to detail, because it’s a collection of things that all come together and make one. I think that’s what I love about being a server at Acre 41 — the attention to detail that comes with great service. We polish every single piece of glassware, every single piece of silverware. That level of detail is important to the guest for consistency, and I always tell myself, my personal motto for my books is quality and consistency. White Lodging has embraced my passion. After you’ve gone through all that and you finally fold your last page and you stand back and look at it — that’s my favorite part.

So I first started with the balloon art. I remember doing balloon columns because I saw it at the West End; I’ve seen all kinds of balloon decor there. It was my boys’ birthday, and I did their decorations. Little by little, I had friends asking me — she’s like, oh, I saw how you did your son’s birthday party. And I was like, oh, let me get into this. But then I found a passion, a real passion. The biggest reason why I want to make sure that the guests leave satisfied is that I would love for them to come back. Taking care of others goes a long way. You’d be surprised: they’ll come back to the hotel and bring 300 people next month. I give my all to the guests so that they don’t feel like, oh, this is just another hotel. No, no, no. I want you to feel just as comfortable as if you were at home. I started from something that was just fun. It was just nice to make someone smile, and now it’s getting bigger. The most amazing thing about White Lodging is the fact that they give me the flexibility to do what I love, but I can still work with them and they work with me. I’m living the best of both worlds at this point.

I joined White Lodging 10 years ago as a Director of Sales for one of our hotels downtown, and instantly was drawn to the collaboration, getting to work with our teams here on property. Currently, in my marketing role, it allows me to be creative, to work with all different areas of the hotel, and to use my creativity and my sales mind, because so much of what we do affects the revenue generation for the hotels. It’s so much fun to take it from an idea stage to working with the teams to make it happen, and then seeing whatever that is that we’re working on come to fruition. My career would not be where it is today without the attention that White Lodging has given my development, and the questions they asked along the way. It has meant so much to me that with each role, my leaders — both at the property level and the corporate level — asked what I needed to be successful in the current role, and then how they could help develop me to take on my next role. I’m so grateful to them and what they’ve invested in me over the years, and it’s so exciting to see where our company is going and I want to be a part of that.

My journey from Assistant General Manager of Porch Kitchen & Bar to hotel General Manager with the Moxy Louisville began when management saw my leadership abilities. I have been able to be successful with White Lodging because I’ve cultivated and curated teams that work well together and can all be successful together. At the end of the day, my main goal is to ensure a fun, safe and professional environment for my associates and the guests. With my direct managers, I have every-other-week one-on-ones with them to plot their development and growth. Being able, a year from now, to look back and say we promoted this person, look at the development in this person — it’s very, very fun to see everybody growing up in their profession, because that’s what happened to me. So it’s very fun to be able to see that in other people. White Lodging definitely took a chance on me, and now I am able to impact so many people’s lives positively and also have so much fun as a hotel General Manager.

My goal is to see my team be successful. Everyone has their thing; each person on my team has something different that’s important to them. They’re all in different phases of life. For Stephanie, it may be: hey, I want to move up, I want to be a Director of Sales and Marketing. For Kara, it’s: I need every Friday off at 2 o’clock so I can go to my daughter’s ballet practice. And making sure that we can capture their best and give them the opportunity to succeed and focus on something that’s really, really important to them, while we’re also winning and selling. At the end of the day, people do business with people that they like. Our company builds beautiful hotels, but when you have great people that are in the right positions, and people like doing business with them, it definitely makes my job quite a bit easier. White Lodging has allowed me to be my best self because it’s provided huge opportunity for personal and professional growth. You can start at an entry-level position; the amount of growth that the company provides you is endless.