Ben Perelmuter Built the New Remington Team—Now It’s Time to Execute

Glenn: [00:00:00] Everybody. It’s your hospitality friend. Glen. I’m at Remington Hospitality’s annual leadership conference. How did you catch up with our friends? Ben Perlmutter over here, CEO, first one as CEO here at Remington. We’re recording this in the JFK suite. How are you, man? I’m doing great, thanks. That’s pretty cool. Well, thanks for allowing me to stay to interview you in a room where our president has stayed before. But what? I want to talk a little creepy, though. A little sleeping in that room last night, I gotta be honest. So when I opened. All right, so, like, literally, we were not gonna say this, but this is where President Kennedy shot the the night before. But anyway I would like to I would like to talk to you about this event. It’s great to see everybody coming together and in and seeing like the excitement about the humanity of hospitality, which is I like, and I know you’re very focused on the five drivers and stuff like that. And I’m curious about how you’re seeing it as your first CEO here at Remington, your first event as CEO. I think it’s I think the response has been fantastic. It’s been. Look, it’s been Just this is our first day. And so last night was great. We had a welcome reception. We had a sponsors luncheon where, you know, we had a huge turnout there. Today we had Marcus Buckingham, author of you know, he started with Gallup long time ago, wrote some great books and had him up here not too long ago, just picking his brain. So I think it’s been fantastic so far. Just the beginning. We’ve got a little off site tonight. We have Emmitt Smith coming tomorrow. I know, looking forward to to spending some time with him.

Ben: [00:01:31] So yeah. So tonight I’ll be practicing pretending I know stuff about football. So by tomorrow, I’ll be. I’ll be I’ll be a pro.

Glenn: [00:01:40] Well, I mean, my room is littered with Cowboys gear right now.

Ben: [00:01:44] I’m just.

Glenn: [00:01:44] Gonna sign. So y’all can’t see this right now. But I’m a Giants fan, so I don’t know how that’s going to go. I might end up with like a black eye after this. I don’t know.

Ben: [00:01:52] That’s right. Or you could be like me, a Jets fan, and just suffer quietly your entire life. But I want to talk about you. I want to talk about your company. I want to talk about how you’re seeing where we’re, where we’re coming from. The last time we spoke on camera was the lodging conference. Right? You were talking about putting together an all star team. You are now accomplishing that goal. How is that setting you up for success and what’s what’s the state of things? I think it’s.

Glenn: [00:02:15] Doing we’re doing great. Yeah, absolutely. Jason Krull is our chief operating officer and he’s hit the ground running. He started shortly after we had that conversation. We hired Corey Chambers as a chief commercial officer. So he’s bringing our three swim lanes and revenue together digital marketing, revenue management and direct sales. We’ve got we just have a great team, really fantastic team. And you know, they’re, they’re hiring some great people that they’ve worked with before and also some, a lot of great folks that have been at Remington for a very long time are getting to know them and we’re getting to know them. And they’re just some absolutely some of the best leaders I’ve ever seen in the entire industry here. So I’m, I’m really, really, really pumped. Honestly, it’s been almost a year right now. And and you know, I can feel the energy at the conference. And when it’s your first conference, you don’t really know how that’s going to resonate because they don’t know your personality. You don’t know them. And, and so we’re just kind of getting to know each other here. But the chemistry has been really good. And, you know, just the beginning.

Ben: [00:03:10] So how do you like, how do you set it up? So people know that you’re on their side, but you also need to implement change?

Glenn: [00:03:17] Well, I mean, look, you talk about if it comes from the heart and you talk about stuff that’s real and you don’t have to make up a bunch of things, then it rolls right off your tongue. It’s easy to talk about. Yeah. So the things that we’re talking about are real things. They’re, you know, we’re looking at the news every day and we’re concerned, right? We’re concerned about 2026 in general. We don’t know which way the pendulum is going to spin, right. But generally speaking, the fundamentals are pretty strong in hospitality. So we have very good stuff here. We’ve got good owners. We’ve got a good baseline of a company, good infrastructure to work with, great support and great people. So you put all that together and we’ve got a we’ve got a good story. So we tell that story. Yeah. There’s some things that aren’t great that are out there. And you know, whether it’s assets that we have to sell or some of our retail partners are selling or some of our other owners, and you don’t hide behind that. You say, hey, look, this is part of the industry. We’re selling some hotels. We’re also acquiring a whole bunch of hotels, and we’ve got a lot of stuff going on in the first quarter as well. Really, our pipeline and some of the stuff that we’re going to close in the first quarter is more than I’ve seen in several years in some companies, so I couldn’t be more excited about our growth. I couldn’t be more excited about our people. And yeah, there’s stuff that we have to do that, you know, that it’s not going to be easy along the way. So I think you just tell them that and they’re like, okay, well, this is real.

Ben: [00:04:34] And it’s funny because I’ve been talking to a lot of your associates here. I’ve been doing, I’ve been shooting a lot of social content with them for Remington channels. And one of the messages I keep hearing is explain the why. And you’re really implementing that vibe across everything that you’re doing. Because the more that everyone understands, the more that the associates understand why things are happening, the better I think everyone can be empowered for success.

Glenn: [00:04:56] Absolutely. Marcus Buckingham was absolutely fantastic. I hope you got to see him or not. But but I mean, he really got us to open our eyes about customer service a little bit more. For example, he said, don’t focus on the force. Focus on the fives. Forget the fours, fours, early threes, threes, early twos, twos are really ones. Focus on the fives. Deliver an exceptional experience for the customer at your property. And don’t worry about anything less than exceptional. And that’s what you focus on. So we’re going to take that approach. A lot of time in hospitality we tend to focus on the problems. We tend to focus on why did this, why did this guest rate us a one or a two? And we drill into that. We try to fix what’s broken. But instead of that, we’re going to focus more on the great and capitalize on that and, you know, exemplify on people’s strengths.

Ben: [00:05:38] Well, it sounds to me like I’m going to have to do a follow up with with this guy over here next time. Meanwhile, I’m going to wrap it up because he’s got work to do and I don’t know, I gotta go lie around and think about being a Kennedy or something. All right. Thanks so much. Appreciate you. Like share subscribe. Bye everybody.