It's Personal Stories, A Hospitality Podcast

Jim Burba, Co-Founder, Burba Hayes LLC, Burba Hotel Network (BHN), interviewed by David Kong

• David Kong

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Jim Burba, well known co-founder of Burba Hotel Network (BHN) and former producer of ALIS, HICAP and other industry investment shows shares his career journey and credits mentors such as Tony Marshall, Bob Hazzard and his partner Bob Hayes for their inspiration and encouragement for co-founding BHN and Burba Hayes. He offers tips from his book ‘Smart Partners’ on relationships and speaks to how his failures led to his success. Don’t miss his quote from Olivia Newton John on self-empowerment at the end.

David:

Greetings, I'm David Kong. I'm the founder and principal of BEI Advisors. We are a non profit organization dedicated to self empowerment. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Jim Burber. He's the co founder of Burber Hotel Network, BHN, and also Burber Hayes. It's a pleasure to have you, Jim.

Jim:

Thanks, David. I must say this is a turnaround for us. I'm usually the 1 asking you questions and I'm a little worried about anything. I might have asked you. That was inappropriate over the years and payback, but I'm delighted to be here. And I'm really pleased to see what you guys are doing with the, I think it's. Long overdue and hats off to all your efforts and congrats on that.

David:

Thank you. And I love turning the table on you, Jim. We'll have a good time. Let's talk about your career journey. You started out as a consultant and you Co-founded BHN and many of us in the industry have attended ALIS, HICAP, CRIS/HOLA, HIFI and a bunch of other shows that BHN has produced and some of us are familiar with Burba Hayes, which is your production company in entertainment. Tell us about that career journey.

Jim:

I started in the hospitality industry, not unlike a lot of people probably who are watching this. I was a busboy. I spent some time in the kitchen. I spent some time in the dish room. I waited tables and went on to college from high school still working there and became assistant manager at the restaurant. And I really fell in love with the hospitality industry. I love the experiences people have when they come for dinner. I loved if I was waiting tables that I could make it a little better, make somebody smile. I loved the interaction with people. And I thought I really want to do something with this. And so I was two years in local college and I thought, Michigan State is 70 miles away and there's a hotel restaurant school there. So I applied, and went on to Michigan State and went to the hotel school. And graduated there. Too soon for me. I was only there two years and I didn't know what I wanted to do in the hotel industry. So I decided I'll just keep going to school. So I went on to get my master's, my MBA hopped on a plane to go to UCLA and carried on school so I could figure out what it was I wanted to do in the hospitality industry. I was leaning more towards hotels. My experience was restaurants, but I love hospitality. I love the experience that you get people when they're having a night out in a restaurant or in a hotel. I started to cast around for a social network because I didn't have any, I'd never been west of Peoria, Illinois before going to LA. And I found that Michigan State had an alumni association chapter there, a hotel school. And so I called the woman who was in charge of it. We chit chatted and she said when you get closer to graduating, let me know and maybe we'll have something for you. So it gave me a little bit of a connection to LA and to perhaps staying there. So I called her every month. I took a quarter out of my pocket and went to the pay phone at the school, called Susie and asked her you got any openings. And one day she said, yes. So my first year getting my MBA. She says, yes can you come in next week when you have some research we need you to do? Turned out it was the entree of Singapore Airlines to the United States service. And they were doing some market research calling travel agents. So I sat in the conference room, called travel agents all across America about a place I'd never been to or heard of before, Singapore. And just did this research and they got paid a little bit of money and, but it introduced me to PKF the consulting firm, because that's where she worked. After that, they liked it. So they brought me back for another job. I had a summer job with them. Eventually, I graduated from school and that landed me in PKF's consulting practice, which was where it all started. It was a crazy time in the hotel industry. Real estate fundamentals were changing. Everybody was adding, building hotels and franchising hotels and the brands were growing rapidly. And, other people's money was being used in the hotel industry for the first time in a major way. And so we had a really busy, good practice. I was on partner track to make partner in 1986, which was pretty quick, but in the consulting group, that was possible. In 1985, there was a meeting in our office about the possibility of starting a hotel investment conference like NYU had just started, and this was with UCLA, and I was dragged into the meeting. I joined and everybody was nodding their head. And yes, this is great. And the next thing I knew, I was the appointed chair of the conference. So this is 1985. I had never been to a conference. I didn't know what one was, but I'm the chair of what was to become the first UCLA conference, first conference. And this was the year before my partnership vote. So I had better not screw it up. As it turned out, it worked out fine. We got through it. The conference attracted 300 people. I learned a lot about what I didn't know. And we had a nice little show. I thought I was done and I made partner and that was my career path. I was going to be a consultant all my life. I thought the professor was noble. I met some wonderful people, and I thought I'm going to do this until I die. I love this job. And then the school came back a few months later and said, can we do it again? Okay. Sure. And so do it again and do it again. So that became a regular established event that I got better and better and we just learned how to do it. P. K. F. Old went away in 1991. The partnership folded. I did several other accounting firms at that point in time, so I had to go out on my own and be my own independent consultant to spend the better part of the next 15 years consulting either under my own name or for other people. Just keeping involved in consulting. In the meantime, this conference stuff starts adding. UCLA want to have a second conference in Latin America. the firm I worked for, Hotel Partners, wanted to add a conference in Berlin. The Caribbean Hotel Association wanted to hire me to help them. So I'm doing this conference stuff, not really for economic reasons, just because it was fun. And I liked it because I'm a consultant and that's what I do. And this is just something else. It was about 2000 before I finally woke up and realized we were running a business. And that's where Burba Hotel Network got formed and we parked the conference activity there. I still kept doing consulting for a few more years. that was a long winded answer to your question. There wasn't a grand plan. It just 1 thing led to another and they were compatible. The consulting business was compatible with the kind of people that came to the conference and vice versa. So it worked. The entertainment company came later. And that came partly as a result of Michael Eisler, who spoke at ALIS one year, and he made a comment about why Disney was in the hotel business, because he thought, in his mind, Hollywood and hospitality are the same thing. They're entertainment. And it was like, wow, I hadn't thought of it that way. But you think of how Disney ran hotels and the thematic features of them, they really treated it as entertainment. And so maybe it is the same thing. That led Bob, my partner, and I to think producing a conference and producing a show might not be all that different. Didn't do anything about it. About a year after Michael spoke, I got a phone call from a big TV production company in LA that wanted to launch the first hotel reality show. And they were told to call Jim Burba because he'll know some people for the show. So I get this call from this guy and he's introduced himself and asked if I knew any colorful people in the hotel industry. Yeah. Yeah. Like, where do you want to start? And so I started throwing names his way of people that could be cast for what would have been the 1st hotel reality TV show back in the early mid 2000s. Nothing ever happened. They talk to people. They tried to launch a show, but nothing ever happened with that show idea. But we got more introduced to Hollywood and as a result, we pitched an idea to him. He pitched an idea back to us about doing a show about our company producing events. So it opened the conversation that opened the awareness so that when the first movie opportunity came along in 2013, we weren't afraid. We came on board. We joined as a producer. The movie was produced. It was sold to Sony or Sony distributed it. Everybody made a little bit of money and it was fun. So the Burba Hayes business started because of something Eisner said. Producing is producing. If you're producing a movie, or producing a conference, you have to have an idea, the story you're trying to tell. You gotta put people on stage or on camera, tell the story. You're going to put it all together and you're going to sell it to people. And hopefully you'll sell more than it costs. And that's a movie. That's a Broadway show. That's a conference. They're different, of course, but they're not.

David:

You're right. There are so many similarities. What an interesting career journey you've had. So exciting. You were a trailblazer in many ways. The founding of BHN and then Burba Hayes. And Eisner is right? The hotel business in many ways is about entertainment because it's about experience. That's a great story. Let's stay on point about your becoming entrepreneur. You alluded to the fact that they fell on your lap. It just evolved into that, but nevertheless, you were a consultant. You're making a steady paycheck and living a comfortable life. And as an entrepreneur, you take on a lot of risks. Just curious what gave you the inspiration and how did you find the confidence to go down that path?

Jim:

It took a long time. What gave me the confidence to take the Burba Hotel Network idea to fruition was two or three people said things over periods of time that finally stuck. I got to know Tony Marshall really well, who you may remember from the educational Institute. I was on the board of the educational Institute. Tony was the new head of it down in Orlando. And whenever I had a chance to go through Orlando, we go have lunch. I was trying to be as involved as possible because I didn't get there that much, but, Tony got to be a good business and Tony would say to me, that's great what you're doing for that conference to that university, but why don't you do something with us and do something for the whole industry, James? And he said that for years. So Tony planted the seed and he stayed with it. At one of the conferences in L. A. I went to an after party and ran into Bob Hazzard, who is the CEO of choice at the time. And choice was a big consulting client of mine. It was at this loud mixer, before sit down dinner, he goes, Jim, I'm so glad to see you. This conference is great. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so proud of you for turning it into a great business. And it's probably so much better than consulting and I hope you're making good money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said to Bob, I'm not making that much money. I'm just doing it for the school. I get a little fee and he looked at me like my dad would have looked at me with one eyebrow that goes up. Sort of implying, are you dumb? Don't you realize what you're doing? I respected him immensely. I very expected his big business acumen immensely. And I was having a great time doing what I was doing, but obviously there was another way to do it. And then the third person who said the same thing was my husband Bob Hayes, who said, why aren't you taking this leap? Why aren't we taking this leap? You're capable. You're only stopping yourself. The only thing you're afraid of is change. Why work so hard for somebody else? And the combination of those three in that sequence Gave me the confidence just to go forward and bob sweetened it when he said I'll quit my job and i'll help you for the next five years. That gave me great comfort that things I didn't have time to do that he would be able to do and we'd be able to partner and do this together. So it took out those three Three, that's probably some others, but those three in particular come to mind as what? Kick me in the butt to just go do it.

David:

Wow. Great story.

Jim:

Oh Tony would let it go. It's like James, why aren't we working together? James

David:

It's wonderful to have those people in your life, especially your husband, Bob Hayes was so well respected too, but Tony Marshall and, Bob Hazard are two men that I respect immensely and it's wonderful that they gave you that advice. Great story. Now I'm just curious, going back to when you started in your career, when you were a grad student and you were asked to do research on Singapore Airlines coming to the United States and beginning your career in consulting, did you encounter any early challenges?

Jim:

Yeah. Yeah. It almost didn't work. This is more about me than anybody else, but. I was having a very difficult time coming outta the closet. It might've been the Polish Catholic, Midwestern kid in me that just didn't think that was something you should do. It was hard. I had a very difficult time I was slowly getting there personally. I was not there at all with my family. I'm not there at all with work. And I just thought I could live the, bifurcated life and just be gay over here and not gay over here. A friend saw that I was like getting ripped up internally and shared a poem, a poster with me by this guy named Alan Ashley Pitt. And it hung on the wall of my office for years after this. But it was basically saying, if you follow the crowd, you don't get any further than the crowd. if you're creative and different, people might not like you because you're not like them. And I'm paraphrasing, but if you're going to get ahead and you're going to make a difference, you might have to be different. And that gave me comfort that I was okay, that I was different. It wasn't written for me. It wasn't written about me. It just gave me comfort, that helped. But then I go to work at PKF every day. And as I progressed in my career, things would happen. Like somebody would be in the hallway and say, Hey, John, I've got two extra tickets to the Dodgers game on Friday. Do you want to bring your girlfriend and come to the game with us? And stuff like that. Nothing aggressive, nothing in my face, but I can see that as you've worked longer in a place, you got closer to your clients. You got closer to your work compatriots, your personal life is going to get pulled into it at some level someday. And I didn't know how to handle that. So I started looking for another job. I had applied to airlines. It took a long time. Cause again, there's no Google. You have to write and they write back. I had some friends in Hollywood that had some successful careers. I started poking around there. I hadn't acted on it, but I was ready to leave PKF because I knew that an accounting firm probably wasn't a place to be gay. I didn't know anybody else there who was. I've worked for a guy named Bruce Baltin and his wife Phyllis was a wonderful person. And they would have some of us young consultants over for dinner from time to time, because they knew we didn't have any money and it was expensive to live in LA and there were good cooks. And that was, so I got to know her a little bit. I was teaching a class at Valley college and Van Nuys and hotel management. And she asked one day if she could come watch me teach. And I said sure. I yeah, whatever. Bruce was traveling and they live nearby. So she came, sat in the back of the room, watch me teach. We went to a little Irish pub afterwards to have drinks. And I was decompressing after teaching a class and the energy that comes with that. And I made the mistake of saying, I just met a guy that I think I'm going to want to go on a date with. And Phyllis's mouth dropped to the floor, and I had just come out to my boss's wife. And I thought, Oh my God, I'm not going to be working much longer. He was out of town for a couple days. He comes back to the office. I did everything possible to avoid seeing him, but I had to walk past his office at one point. He goes, Hey, Jim. Hey, Jim, could you come here for a minute? And I thought, Oh no, this is the day, this is the day and I don't have another job. And he proceeds to tell me That Phyllis told him, which she wasn't supposed to, but it's okay. He goes, you're a great consultant. Just keep doing what you're doing and nobody's going to bother you. We don't pay you for your personal life. We pay you for your job and you just keep doing your job. He goes, Oh, and by the way, the head of the consulting practice, the chair of the whole national firms consulting practice, Eric Green, this guy in New York is gay and it doesn't matter. And all of a sudden I had a supportive infrastructure, even if it wasn't screening supportive support. And there was this guy I never met called Eric, who did what I wanted to do and it was okay. That would have been probably third or fourth year out of college. And that was about the time I was thinking of leaving. And the circumstances worked out and I wish I'd known sooner. As an aside, David, six months later, I saw Phyllis at some company event, she goes, Hey Jim, do you ever go out on weekends to like the gay discos? And I said, yeah. She goes if you've been to a place called studio one in west hollywood and I said, yeah, she goes bruce and I Like to go dancing and we'd love to go there if you would take us there. I go Okay So i'd go from like paranoid as hell To taking my boss and his wife out to the clubs on weekends and they were fun they're wonderful people. There was fun time and it was a whole different experience but I didn't really plan to be their escort. Anyway, it was Long answer to your question, but yeah, there was a period of time where I would have seen a different answer to my career path.

David:

Gosh, what a wonderful and heartwarming story.

Jim:

people, I think in their careers, look for validation, look for mentorship. Bruce was a mentor for me in that respect. Tony Marshall was a mentor because I liked him. He trusted me. Yeah. And not that anybody was a mentor during my entire career, but at points in time, people step in and they say things that they teach you things that you learn from them. And you just got to go with it. They've got a different perspective. You just got to learn from it.

David:

You were fortunate to have great mentors and a boss that really understood and supported you. 80s was really hard and you really didn't have a role model to look up to until Eric, right?

Jim:

And that's living in LA. That's in a place that would have been easier than some places.

David:

Let's move on and talk about your other challenges. People often say success go hand in hand with failures. And I was wondering if you can share some of the failures that you have suffered and some of the challenges that you had gone through that have helped shape your career.

Jim:

Yeah, there were some failures. Consulting in and of itself teaches you a lot of failures because you've been on a lot of jobs you don't get. In the early days of PKF, my early days of consulting, there was us in Laventhal 2 firms that really did pretty much all the real estate consulting for people. And you had a, depending on the client, you had a 50, 50 chance to get in the job. So you could spend a lot of time and energy chasing work and consulting that you didn't get. And, you chalk it up to just, so that's just the way it is. Or you can say, how do I listen better? How do I know if I'm just a stalking horse? Or if, I've got a chance to get this job, cause I'm going to spend time, money, resources and pitch and go meeting and blah, blah, blah. So consulting in its own way, taught a lot to me, taught me a lot about how to deal with failure. It taught you how to listen better and how to try to find the glass half full in that Lack of getting a job. The old P. K. F. Dissolution was really hard. I'm as a newly minted book. New partner. 96 the perm 2000 and one. But all the partners were liable for stuff. And it was just a mess. And it was it. It taught me to think. It taught me to think carefully about partnerships. Do you need him? Really? Nerve. Griffin's said this to me at one time, and it was I guess during that period Jim, if you don't need partners, don't have because they can get in the way. Now he had partners and he didn't mean never have a partner, but he meant just think about why you want one. I wanted to be a partner in that PKF group because I wanted the camaraderie. It was a wonderful firm, but then it went away and it went away for reasons I had nothing to do with. And it's made you think do I want to sign up and be a partner with 200 people again? And so it made me more cautious about future partnerships. We got really full of ourselves with launching events because most of the time they worked. And I was a big proponent of us getting into Japan, for example. And so we launched a conference in Japan and we couldn't make it work. We couldn't make it work. That's a big country, lots of hotels, lots of investment, but we couldn't make the investment conference model that we knew work, and we had to tuck our tail between our legs after a couple of years and just walk away because we couldn't make, we couldn't cover costs and so I learned that. Don't get too full of yourself. Because we were full of ourselves at that point. We, everything we did was just work and work to work. Now, Japan, how hard can that be? It was hard. And we hadn't done our homework. So

David:

what wonderful, lessons you learned from all those failures.

Jim:

You don't learn from success. You learn from success, but you don't learn as much from success as you do from failure because they've got to go, what happened while we're wrong? Who misread what? And if you succeed, you just go, yeah, we're good. And you should learn from it. But you learn much more when you don't, when you don't succeed.

David:

Correct! Thanks for sharing those wonderful stories. You talked about relationships and you wrote a book with your partner, Smart Partners, drawing on your personal and professional experience. Can you share some highlights of the book with us?

Jim:

We were asked to write a book because we were asked the question, how do you guys live together, work together and not kill each other? How do you do that? Because, entrepreneurialism is hard enough. Jobs are hard, careers are hard. Entrepreneurial stuff is in my mind a little bit harder because it ultimately lands on your desk. And so how do you guys work together and not kill each other? And so we started to think about what did we do to make the business work and how did we minimize the conflict and stuff like that? And as a small business, we had eight people in the office, including Bob and myself. So we had this big, noisy firm. We had eight people. So that meant we had to outsource I. T. We had to outsource H. R. We had to outsource a lot of things. And so all these people that are helping you run your business big and small are all your partners, whether it's a big P or small P. And if it's a big P partner business partner in an event, Then you obviously pay attention to them and you take care of each other and you listen and all that. If it's a small P partner like your printer, um, it helps to treat them the same as a big P partner, because they may be able to help you think of something you hadn't thought about. So we tried to treat everybody like they were the most important partner possible. And that's cliche, perhaps, but we really did. I made a habit when I could to go and thank that the tech team at the end of every conference. I didn't work with the tech team. Our team worked with the tech team, but I go up and just say, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Because the tech team is part of your team and they're going to go away and you won't see them for another 362 days. But stopping for a moment and saying, thank you, you're an important partner makes a difference. So we tried to try to infuse that kind of thinking in everything we did. We talked about the partnership playbook. It's great. You and I can sit here right now and say, let's go do something in business together and get all excited about who's going to do what are you going to do? What am I going to do? Because lots of things have to be done. And in my early consulting days, we had this management survey done is by the guy's name is William Marston, I think was the author of it. It's the disk theory. D. S. and C dominant influencers, steady, stable and compliant. And every business needs a D and I and S and a C, the D being the person that maybe creates the eyes, the influencer, both you and I are influencers. And we don't want to do the other stuff. We're probably not going to make it as a partnership because somebody's going to do the other stuff. So you're trying to understand the motivations of partners and people and our own team, frankly, before we launched things, Bob filled in roles at the business that I didn't do. And I did things that he didn't do. And we didn't cross over each other because we were careful about defining the partnership playbook. So I think before you enter into relationships with anybody, you should really understand I don't know their motivations, but what are they good at? What are they going to like to do? If everybody wants to sell who's doing the work,

David:

that's great.

Jim:

One other thing that we believe strongly in tell the truth, be honest with people. When one of my first consulting jobs I had, I was traveling on a plane. to Denver with this guy named Don Noonan, who was a senior partner. And he said to me, he's like in his sixties and I'm in college and he goes, James, Jim, if you never tell a lie, you'll never need your memory, which is a play on what Mark Twain said some years earlier, obviously. But what he was saying is be honest with everything you do, because it's a small industry. If I tell David something different than I tell Bob, somebody's going to find out someday and your reputation and your integrity goes to hell. So just don't tell a lie. Tell the truth all the time. We were asked all the time for my sponsors. Could I get a better deal? It's 20, 000. Can I pay 18? And I said, no, the price is 20. We didn't want our people to lie to say The price is 20, but they give you 18 because then they're telling a lie. And why would you want your people to normalize telling lies? Why would you want to be personally telling lies? So we lost a lot of business probably because we wouldn't do that. We just didn't want to be in the business to tell lies.

David:

That's great. Those are wonderful insights from your book, from the small P and the little P they are all partners and you have to treat everyone equally and with respect and dignity.

Jim:

Well, you know this as well. It's a big industry seemingly, but it's not. It's not. And if I don't know you, but I want to know something about you, I can make one phone call. I figured it out. It doesn't it just doesn't take much. So just being truthful, being honest, doing what you say goes a long way to help him build a good career.

David:

Oh yeah. I totally agree. Being honest is probably the most important quality that we can all have. Talk about your partner, Bob Hayes, he's so well respected. What's the best advice you've ever received from him?

Jim:

Oh, he has lots of advice. He used to say listen, don't talk, be interested, not interesting. And he was right. If you get to know him, even though you're in charge of this interview, he'd be interviewing you right now He's curious. And he asks a lot of questions. You ask questions, you learn. If you talk, you stop learning because you're talking. Of all the keynotes we've had over the years and all the big name speakers we've got over the years Most of them were one phone call away from somebody we knew. Somebody knew magic johnson. Somebody knew Arnold schwarzenegger. I didn't know arnold. I didn't know magic, but I knew somebody who did. So everybody you know knows somebody you should know and that's may sound cliche, But there's a lot of truth to that And the only way you're gonna know that is if you actually listen to what they're saying and not do all the talking.

David:

That's great advice. Thanks for sharing that. I see we're coming to the end of the show. I have two more questions to ask. One is, given all that you've learned and experienced, what's your advice to your younger self?

Jim:

I would say, I was told this and I did it. I would advise myself the same. Give 110%, not a hundred percent. If you and three people are doing a similar job and you're 110 percent and the other two are 100 percent and David Kong is your boss, David's going to pay attention to the 110 percent person and you're going to get a little bit better job next time, a little bit better raise or a little bit more acknowledgement because you did 110%. So don't be afraid to stand out from the crowd by giving it as best you can. Give it 110%. And I would say, be careful whom you associate with high quality because it'll rub off. If you had 2 job opportunities, and 1 is a company that has a superb reputation, but pays less. 1 has reputation, but pays more, I'd take the less money and take the shoulder rub with the quality.

David:

I totally agree with you. Giving the 110% is similar to the advice my dad gave me when I left from

Jim:

Your dad must know my dad because that's what he told me. I watched that happen at work. The person who comes in a little bit earlier, not that you have to kill yourself, but it gets noticed. And if you're the boss and you have somebody who's given a little extra effort you notice that.

David:

Yeah, all right. Our show is about self empowerment. I wonder if you can share one last piece of advice on self empowerment.

Jim:

Rachel at the BHN office asked this question of Olivia Newton John when we were interviewing her, and Olivia gave an answer. I'm going to quote her because that's the answer that I would have given you, but she actually brought it to bear. Should be yourself because everybody else has already taken. And I would add to that, just trust your gut. Just to be yourself, because that's all you can do, because I can't be David Kong, because David Kong is already David Kong. So I have to be myself and just trust myself. And I, I think that's hard to do when you're starting out, because you don't have the confidence, but you just got to ultimately fall back to that place. And you'll be okay.

David:

That's right. That's so true! Be yourself because everybody else has taken

Jim:

Olivia said that and that's brilliant. I'm stealing it from her.

David:

Thanks for sharing so much great advice with us, Jim. And thanks for taking the time.

Jim:

Fun. So where's the Zinger question you're going to ask me? I can't ask you a question. It's great seeing you and keep up the good work. I really appreciate what you guys are doing.