The Freedom to Say “NO!”

Money stress, never ending days, employee problems, guest complaints, and an endless stream of “to do’s” make every hotelier wonder every now then why they got into this business in the first place. Before you owned your own hotel you dreamed of being your own boss, but what does that really mean? If you are tied to your hotel at the hip didn’t you just trade one boss for another one, one stress for another?

The truth is, that the reason most of us go into business for ourselves is to have the freedom to say, “No!”. That’s it. No clichés about the American dream or anything like that, just the freedom to say no. Think about it. Having the freedom to say no is the ultimate freedom, Shangri la, so to speak. If you are financially ok, you can say no to any booking or any group of bookings and take time off as you please. If you hire dependable help that you can rely on you become free to say no to working long hours. If you are free to fire bad employees, assign your endless stream of to-do lists to others, and tell the occasional bad customer “no”, aren’t you truly free?

I’m not at all suggesting this is easy to accomplish. It takes time, hard work, dedication, and most of all, intent to reach this goal. The next time you have to make a decision for your lodging property, ask yourself, does this decision bring me closer to having the freedom to say no? If not, you may want to think twice.