Ruby’s Inn

Lance Syrett

Family Business Steward

Family as the Foundation of the Business

I am a 4th-generation hotelier, and my family has been hosting visitors at “Ruby’s Inn,” a small family-run resort on the doorstep to Bryce Canyon National Park, for over 110 years. Having grown up in a family business, the last thing I wanted to do was come back and work at the family business.  While growing up, my dad was the F&B manager, so I worked everything from dishwashing to line cooking to fast food.  I went off to college and achieved a degree in Economics and Finance, and was planning on going to law school, but my wife was pregnant, and we decided to take a year off and come back and work at the family business. With a fresh degree in hand, I decided to get some business experience by working in hotel operations and sales.  That was in 2003, and I still joke around that “I’m just on a temporary break before going off to law school.”

When the decision was made by my wife and me to stay with the family business, the last thing I wanted to do was to be “dead wood” in the family tree.  If you are part of a large family business, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  When you work at a family business, the pressure is different.  If you do a bad job, you are not letting down your board of directors, or your stakeholders, or your management company; you are letting down your family.  You are letting down your retired parents who rely on the business to fund their retirement. The last three generations of the family built this business, and I’m not going to screw it up.

Balancing Innovation with a Steady Hand

The number one question I ask myself each day is “How do we balance current trends, innovation, things like AI and changing customer expectations, with the ‘steady hand’ that has made us into what we are over the past 110 years?  Quite often, maintaining that balance results in decisions that might be different than what the current textbook definition of efficiency and profitability might say. Where another company might see pressure to meet a quarterly profit goal so that the management team might get a bonus, an old family business like ours quite often asks, “What long-term consequences do those short-term decisions make?”

Quite often in this day and age of optimization and maximizing quarterly profit, decisions can be made that can hurt in the long run.  What happens when the current cycle turns? How did you make that quarterly profit goal? Did you alienate a tour operator that has been loyal for years just because the net rate wasn’t what you were looking for at the time?  What happens when the current demand trends change, and you go and try to win that tour operator back?  Did you change vendors to save a few cents even though you’ve been with that vendor for twenty years and they have always delivered on time?  

Choosing the Long-Term Best Interest

I have a saying that I use with my staff sometimes when I feel that they are making this perspective mistake.  It goes like this: Don’t destroy our best interest by thinking you're protecting our best interest. Of course, most of the time they roll their eyes at me, but I’ve said it enough that they understand my point.  Depending on the horizon you are looking at, what is the right decision today, is not the right decision in the long run. Fighting with a no-show guest for a refund on a night we didn’t sell out because the principal of the thing might get you a few bucks on the revenue report for last night, but it makes no sense in the long term.  Most of the time, to make what I feel like is the better decision just takes a little higher vantage point, like standing on the shoulders of 110 years of experience to see that next horizon.

In hospitality, the best decision isn’t always the one that produces the best result this quarter. Family businesses have an advantage because they can measure decisions in decades rather than quarters.  This recipe for success has served myself and my family well for over 110 years, and we hope it will continue for 110 more.