Jan Freitag, National Director, Hospitality Analytics, CoStar Group, interviewed by Lan Elliott

One of hospitality’s most prolific, well-respected presenters, Jan shares his public speaking journey, including specific things to do before, during, and after your presentation to elevate your public speaking.  He also shares how raising your hand can help you to be “seen” by senior leaders, how he navigates tremendous ambiguity, and why acknowledging people’s humanity is critical.

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Lan Elliott 0:00

Welcome to its Personal Stories, a hospitality podcast. My name is Lan Elliot on behalf of its personal stories, and today I am delighted to have Jan Freitag here with us. He is the National Director, hospitality Analytics at CoStar, formerly STR I've always thought of him as the data person who provides some of the most important data in our industry. And if you're not familiar with Jan, I hope you'll go on our website and check out his many accomplishments. So Jan, welcome.

Jan Freitag 0:37

And thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you today and chat a little bit about whatever you wanna talk about. Let's

Lan Elliott 0:45

talk about you

Jan Freitag 0:47

data, all things.

Lan Elliott 0:50

I wanted to talk about your career journey because as much as I've known you for many years, I don't think I've ever had a conversation with you about. How you got to where you are today. Could you share some of the inflection points in your incredible career and what you think were the secrets to your success?

Jan Freitag 1:11

Yeah. When I read that question when you sent me the prep material, I was like this is a short conversation because I've been with the same company for 23 years, which is very unusual. So I started with STR in 2002. That was it. I've been in that role ever since. At the very beginning as you can tell by the accent, I'm not from the us, I'm from Germany. And I did after high school, an apprenticeship in a hotel. And apprenticeships are literally for three months, few. Do the dishes or you clean the room, so you check people in and out. And you do that for two and a half, three years or so. Normally a lot of my classmates went to study at university, but I just wasn't ready for that, and I always had. The hotel industry just really appealed to me and I wanted to work in that. And at the end, the sort of, the question was, what's next? And there was a GM who said we should normally progress to a hotel school. And there are a bunch of programs. You can go to Lausanne, you can go to Tout in Germany, and there's this other program up in Cornell, but nevermind that, that's in America. What you have stuff to do here in, in Germany. And I was like okay. So I ended up applying to Cornell and I thought, that's how you apply to college. You send a letter and then they accept you. So later on I realized that. That's not really how this works. So I'm standing on the shoulders of giants because they had a bunch of Germans go through the program before me, who had done very well. With work ethic and having come from the industry, having done an apprenticeship, they knew what they were getting. And I think that was that, that helped with my application. And then from there I was with Ernest and Young for a year very briefly. It just wasn't for me out in Phoenix. And then helped a friend start a company to compete. With STR, it was 1998 and he said, Hey, it's dot com. We're all gonna make a billion dollars. Come join me in Ithaca and we're gonna take on this small, sleepy company in Hendersonville, Tennessee. That didn't really quite work out. So nine 11 happened and Randy. Called Brian Ferguson, the CEO of this company which was called Real Time Hotel Reports, which to me still is the best name of any company ever. It's it says exactly what it is. It's real time hotel reports. But Randy called. Brian said, look, you have no clients. Really good ideas and I have all the clients and I need some new ideas. Let me buy you. And so STR purchased real-time hotel reports and then that facilitated a move for me to Nashville not to Hendersonville, which is where the office has been for a long time. But I stayed in Nashville the whole time and commuted out there. And yeah, that was 2002. And then through STR. I was able to just do a lot of different things very quickly. I think I was employee number 40 or so, and very quickly fell into this public speaking, writing, talking to reporters role that just a lot of people either didn't want to do or it was just exhausting. As you can know, travel and speaking can be exhausting. So the inflection points were probably just saying, Hey, I wanna do an apprenticeship and learn the nuts and bolts. Of the industry being accepted to Cornell, certainly an inflection point. And then by luck or accident being acquired by the industry leader, which was at the time, still very small in, in, in 2002. And then work my way up through the ranks there. And then obviously in 2019 we were acquired by CoStar. And CoStar pretty quickly realized that they have now access to all the data, but they didn't have a CoStar Hotel person. And so they tapped me and said, Hey, it looks like you're doing a lot of writing and speaking. Can you do that a little bit more focused on the CoStar clients? And the sort of the demarcation line between SGR and CoStar is. STR deals with data providers, so the Hilton Heights, merit of the World, and CoStar deals with all the people who don't have data. So the banks, the lenders some of the the large PE funds or consulting shops and so forth.

Lan Elliott 5:12

There were a few different points during your career with STR and then ko. You could have decided to take a left or a right turn and say, I'm gonna go do something else. I'm curious, was there ever a point in time where you thought about that or were you always very determined in doing what you love, which is what you're doing now?

Jan Freitag 5:37

It started in 2002 and thought. No way. Like why? What Nashville Hendersonville this isn't it. Let me get an MBA and get out of here. Luckily Mark Laman, the president at the time, allowed me to get an executive MBA, so I was able to work and then go to school every other weekend, full-time Friday, Saturday. Not full-time, sorry for, but for both days. So I got an executive MBA at Vanderbilt University absolutely with the idea that I would jump from there to. Wall Street or some other company that did something more interesting. But while that was happening, I got a lot more opportunity to speak and that really resonated with me and I really enjoyed that a lot. And I think I was able to convey our data in a way that people said, oh, let's invite that guy back with the accent, who can talk to us for 20 minutes? And we find it interesting when he leaves. So I was able to make this niche out of speaking and writing and talking to reporters and commenting on the major trends in the industry because we obviously had the data and as you can imagine, there's always a hotel angle. It's like in almost any story, if you open up the Wall Street Journal of the New York Times, you can. Take almost any story and say, oh, I wonder what that does to tourism, what that does to travel, what that does to hotels. And then eventually that reporter ends up calling SDR or CoStar and I'm often on the other side of that conversation. So the inflection point was, yeah, I don't want to do this. But then the opportunity presented itself that I was like, oh, this is actually, I really enjoy this and this is a need in the company and let's just do that.

Lan Elliott 7:26

I love the idea of finding something new and a job that you've been doing that could actually be fulfilling. I wanted to ask about career development specifically. Were there certain skills that you decided to hone to increase your opportunities for advancement?

Jan Freitag 7:47

I think the most important thing. Is to raise your hand. And I don't know that sort of speaking him naturally, but it was something that when I, the few times I had done it, I was like, oh, this is interesting. And so when more opportunities arose, I just said, yeah, I want to do it. And I think that is if anything, if there's any takeaway, you know that in any moment in your specific. Career where you sit, there are always other opportunities within the company. You just have to raise your hand and say, Hey, if this ever comes up, I'm very interested. So the latest example right now, today, and I think this is true for all your listeners, is around ai, right? Every company is saying, oh, we need to do something. We're not quite sure what to do. And I've said, for a year and a half. To my boss and my boss's boss and whoever wants to listen. I wanna be involved. I don't know what it looks like, but if this ever is something that CoStar wants to do, I'm here. And now we are knee deep. We are all using copilot. So every one of our 6,800 associates has a co-pilot license. So we're using copilot right and center. So it was like, okay, good. Let's do it. So there are task forces and small groups and people trying to see how can we use ai. So I think we're in this super interesting moment in time where some of your listeners who may be younger in their career, just raise your hand, and say, Hey, I want to do this. Because there, there are always inflection points and you could say, I want to do more. I wanna do something different. I want to be, I wanna be counted. I wanna be seen. And I think I did that with speaking, and I'm, again, I'm doing it now with ai.

Lan Elliott 9:36

I love that. I wanted to unpack that because a lot of times. We talk on this show about saying yes when people present you with opportunities, but you're really talking about proactively looking forward and seeing what could be next, and then going to your bosses or whoever might be the person to let them know if this becomes a thing, I would love to be involved. And it's proactively bringing opportunities and suggesting things to. People who might be able to give you that opportunity in the future rather than waiting for someone to come to you and offer you something.

Jan Freitag 10:14

Yeah, and it means scanning the environment, seeing what the company needs. I know that later on we'll talk a little bit more about public speaking. But it's something that you are always in a forum. There's a high likelihood that the company that you're in will have a department head meeting or will have a, some sort of meeting with more than 10 people. You can go to your manager and say, Hey, next time there's a chance, I would love to present. I would love to be that person who speaks about whatever the topic is, and I would love to hone my skill with that. And it's super uncomfortable, and yes, your boss may say no, but at least they may say, oh, okay, you're interested in that. Let's see, maybe not this time, but maybe there's an opportunity. Down the road. I the example for my own career is when, so I was early with STR and Mark and Randy were asked to speak a lot. It was, 2002, data was becoming more important. Computing power was getting less expensive and people wanted data more quickly. Mark and Randy were traveling all the time to present Mark Liano and the president, Randy Smith, the founder of SDR R. And they had young kids and they were exhausted. So then they said, Hey, would you like to go to, I'm like, yes. And they're like, don't you wanna know where? I'm like, no, I just wanna go because this speaking thing is like really cool. And so I was fortunate that they were like, okay. Knock yourself out, buddy. And I was like, young and single and it was all good.

Lan Elliott 11:46

That is a perfect segue. I'm gonna jump over to public speaking because as you mentioned, you started by raising your hand and volunteering to get on a plane wherever it was going. You regularly speak at some of the biggest conferences in our industry, often thousands of people. Could you talk a bit to the importance of the skill of public speaking and elevating one's career, and what was your journey to get to those large stages? Because when I was younger, I thought as long as you knew your material, that was enough. But there are things that you can do beyond that, and you do it beautifully. So I'm curious what skills you use to prepare, just so you feel more confident, and I know you ensure you get feedback afterwards, so I'd love to hear about some of your tips for public speaking.

Jan Freitag 12:46

Yeah, so knowing your material is table stakes. You can't just not be on stage and say. I don't really know how, what this slide says, like that's not how it works. So a couple of things come to mind when I think about preparing, and a couple of things come to mind when I think about tips or tricks I do while I speak. So I have, let me be very clear. If you saw me 15 years ago, I was not that great. I was okay. But this is a journey and you just, I'm very fortunate that I was able to do a lot of speaking, so you then just try out things and see what sticks and see what works, and see what resonates with the audience. The one thing I'm a firm believer in is rehearsing out loud, and I say this too when I do speaker training here at Coast Guard, STR, be in the room. With the light, with the mic on, with the clicker and hand on the stage and run through your presentation the way you would tomorrow or in a couple of hours, depending on if that means that you talk to the people who invite you to speak and they're like, yeah, man. But that's gonna be like seven 30 the night before. That's right. That's the only time when people are having dinner. It's the only time we have the ballroom like. I'll be there. Or if they say, sorry, this is has to be between five 30 and 6:00 AM because we need the ballroom for breakfast set up. That's fine too. Whatever it is, but you need to be in the environment. Rehearsing in your room is fine. It's critical, but you need to see it because sometimes the slides don't quite work or the light is just weird or the mic doesn't work or whatever. You need to prepare in the actual. Theater in the actual way that you will do it tomorrow or so. That to me is absolutely critical. Rehearsing out loud, absolutely mandatory. Don't just think about it, say it out loud, because sometimes you stumble over your words and you realize, oh, this sentence actually doesn't make any sense. I need shorter sentences. You write out your script. I don't, but some people write out their script, but you don't speak the way you write. Your sentences when you speak have six words to it. Your sentences have 14 words to it. You, nobody speaks like the way you write. So Carl Wilson, who's now giving who used to be with SDR r who's now giving speaker training with Ali Hoyt. And they had this great thing on, on, on LinkedIn where they were talking about, rehearsing out loud, or maybe Ali maybe posted it. But that to me is so critical, so rehearsing it out loud, I make my own slides. I don't let anybody else touch my slides because I'm in charge of what's on it. And then that helps me obviously understand what and what is very easy with data slides is to put too much on it. And then you only really wanna make one point. You wanna say RevPAR forecast is down minus 0.1%, but you show the whole progression of the history back in time from 1989 and you show a DR and occupancy and it's totally overwhelming and your comment is. RevPAR projected to be down. Good. And put that on the slide, right? Don't overwhelm your audience because when you put your slide up, they're saying, okay, I'm looking. This is time. This is a DR and the whole time I'm speaking. And they can't follow that. So just be kind to the audience. The other thing that I firmly believe in is rehearsing your opening lines, your opening three lines. Not 10, not 50, not a hundred, but 500 times. Hello, my name is Jan. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you today. Hello, my name is Jan. Thank you so much for your time over and over when you're at the red light in a car, when you're taking a shower, whatever it is, so that when the time comes and you are on stage and you're nervous and I get nervous, absolutely 100%. If you don't get nervous. You're not doing it right. You can hit play and your mouth starts moving and you're like, I'm speaking. I'm speaking. Okay, I got this. And then you kick into your presentation. But the first three or four sentences, they have to be complete muscle memory. The worst thing I think presenters can do is they get on stage, the lights are up and they're like, here's Jan. And the first thing out of my mouth is, no, that's terrible. Say get your opening tight and then roll from there. And then we can talk about transitions. I use a lot of rhetorical questions, so when I go from one slide to the next, I say, so some of you're probably wondering what that means for a DR now that I showed you. Demand is down. You're wondering what does it do to a DR? And then the next slide shows a DR, right? So I'm connecting one slide to the next, with the vehicle of a rhetorical question where. I assume the audience wants to know something and I'm just putting that out there. I have no idea if they want to know that, but they might say, oh yeah, I was wondering about that. And then, you move. And then, lastly just wear what's comfortable. I used to spend a ton of money on very expensive ties. We don't wear ties anymore, but that was like my uniform and I put that tie on. I'm like, ready? That's my armor. That's I'm ready for business. You may have something different, but there's something that makes you feel good about how you look, and that also builds confidence.

Lan Elliott 18:25

I love that there's so much great information in there. I love the practicing again and again. I do find once you have your first few sentences down, because you practiced it out loud so much that the rest of it then flows a little bit easier, but you do need to nail the first few pieces and the transitions. Because you're transitioning to a slide you may not be looking at, so you do need to know what's coming next. And that's always a bit interesting to remember everything I wanted to talk about getting feedback because a lot of people, who speak often don't usually get a chance to get feedback. There are people who speak all the time that may not actually be that good at speaking, but they get the opportunity a lot because they have a important title or an important company. I'm curious about feedback because you do something very specific that I think is interesting.

Jan Freitag 19:20

Yeah. So Professor Craig Snow at the hotel school taught this. When after you're done with your presentation, you ask three questions. Or you, ideally you ask part of your audience members three questions, but you have to ask yourself as well, what went right, what went wrong, and what would you change? And it's super critical to start with what went right, because we are all so self-critical. And I see this all the time when I do speakers training, that I say, what went right? And people are like I stammered and my arms were crossed. And I'm like no. Time out. What went right? Let's celebrate what you did. Correctly so that you can remember it. So you can do it again next time. And the time after that. The time after that. Let's focus on what went right, because a lot of things went right. Okay, good. Now what will you think went wrong? Let me stand. Whatever. Okay. What will you change? My arms were all over the place, so maybe next time I just put a hand in my pocket. It's okay, good. That's totally fair. So that this critical the request for critical feedback. Starts with what went right, because otherwise you get lost in, oh my God, there's 17 things I did incorrectly and that's fine. Maybe you did 17 things incorrectly, but you probably did 20 things that were good. So let's just focus on that first, and give yourself a little bit yang and yang, a little bit of balance, so I think that's that has helped me tremendously.

Lan Elliott 20:46

One other thing you said before when we were talking is you go up to someone before you speak and you tell them, I'm going to ask you afterwards these three specific questions, and then you go and talk to them afterwards. And I've asked people for feedback after I've done public speaking and they go, oh, you were great. But I love the specificity of telling someone you're gonna ask them afterwards and asking. For them to think about these three things so they can actually give you specific feedback, which is so important to get better. Yeah,

Jan Freitag 21:16

I was very fortunate. My last big presentation was here at the hotel data conference in, in, in Nashville. And Ali Hoyt, my former coworker, who's now a ING coach, was in the audience. And I said, by the way, afterwards, I'm gonna ask you what went wrong, and what would you change? And so it was super helpful for her to say, yeah, clearly you got the transitions down. Well done. But man, you gotta pause. Gimme a minute, like gimme a second so I can digest what you just said. I'm like, oh, fair enough. Thank you. That's helpful. Like I need to pace myself a little bit more,

Lan Elliott 21:48

there was a point in your career where you decided that you preferred to be an individual contributor, even though you were getting much more senior and you preferred that to taking on responsibility for managing direct reports. And I'm curious how you came to that conclusion and. If there were risks that you thought about when you were very upfront about it with the people you work with?

Jan Freitag 22:16

Yeah, I was with STR and was traveling, presenting, speaking, writing. But there, it wasn't like a super defined role, but it was clear that whenever there was a presentation that, that I was the people who would do it. Then CoStar bought. STR in late 19, and then the pandemic hit, hit immediately. And CoStar pretty quickly suggested, Hey, we know a lot about other co, other asset types, office, multifamily, retail, industrial, and now we have all this hotel data and we don't have a hotel person. It sounds like you are talking all the time to reporters about the hotel industry or right about the industry. Become our hotel guy, and by the way, we need you to hire. A bunch of regional market experts, local hotel people in four or five markets. And so I said, okay, sure. Happy to help. I'm, I hired them. I onboarded them. But because of the way that the cost of reporting function was, they all reported two managing directors and. I, at that point was a free agent. I was doing my own thing, talking very closely. I mean in COVID, literally every day with that team that was just starting. And I said to my manager at the time, look, one day you will realize that all these hotel people who right now report to managing directors who are not hotel experts. They all should report to me, and I just wanna let you know I'm not interested. And she said, what? Unless this is a career ending move, I just wanna let you know, I think my highest and best use for CoStar is you should let me be an individual contributor. You should let me write. And talk to reporters and give presentations and think deep thoughts about the state of the industry. But managing is just not something that comes natural to me. I think I can do it, but it's just not something that I gravitate towards. And there are certainly people in this organization who absolutely say, oh my God, managing people, this is the best thing. Giving other people the tools to succeed. That's awesome. Not that I don't appreciate that, but it just doesn't come natural to me. I'm happy to be a mentor or to be a subject matter expert. I just didn't feel like I wanted to manage people. And she said, okay, let me think about that. As then they came back and said, Hey, we thought about this and we like this idea. Of having a national subject matter expert. So now by the power vested in me, you are the National Director of hospitality Analytics, and please write down what you're doing. And now we will hire national directors, office retail, multifamily, industrial. So I was the blueprint for a job that didn't exist, that now is, a, a pretty cool group of very hardcore subject matter data experts in their specific asset class. So I asked for something that I wanted. Was there risk? Sure. They could have said, no, at your level, you have to manage people, otherwise you don't have a job. And then I would've said then I'm gonna manage people, but then I will have less time speaking, presenting and writing just FYI. But that, that, so that, that worked out. I think that wasn't really a big risk because obviously if somebody says, Hey, you have to manage people now, I'm like, okay, then I will do it. It's just given the choice. Given how I had positioned myself, I just felt my highest still today, I think is to be out in the industry and in the ULI world and in the HLA world, and at those conferences and talk to people such as yourself and get a pulse of the industry and then put that out in comments through the press or in presentation.

Lan Elliott 25:59

I think there's great things in what you just said. I wanted to unpack whether managing people comes naturally, and I think one of the things we do, at least in hospitality, is people get really good at being the technical person to do things and then we give them management of people. And most people don't ever get any guidance on how to manage people. And I have to admit, I had some rough starts. And then when I finally got an executive coach, I grew to really love it and I found it very rewarding. But more challenging than learning something on your own. Learning how to be there and to help other people succeed. But I love the idea that CoStar made space for you to have this very unique, prominent role and be able to have the deep thoughts that you wanted to take the time, and that you were very open with that. I don't know if that works in every company. There are some companies that say. If you want a certain title, you have to have people reporting to you. But I love that CoStar did that and that you became the model for the other industries within CoStar. That's incredible. And I love the idea of asking for what you want.

Jan Freitag 27:08

And we are certainly, I think amongst the national directors, we are certainly still mentors, right? We're subject matter experts. Somebody has a specific deep question. We talked about, my, my love for presenting, I still continue to do presentation trainings and tell people, Hey, if you have a big presentation come up, please come to me and I'll give you feedback, and we'll together work on it. So it doesn't mean that I'm not involved with other people. It's just that I don't, approve, PTO.

Lan Elliott 27:36

I love that I'm coming to you for feedback for my next time I'm on stage. For sure. Thank you. You had touched on COVID and talking to the team on a daily basis for COVID, I will always remember now when I look back at the pandemic just waiting for your weekly updates, because early on we were just sitting in our, in my apartment at the time, and your weekly updates when they started felt like a lifeline. But you were doing that in a moment of extreme uncertainty. We didn't even know what the supply was because so many hotel rooms had been shut down. So what is the occupancy? A percentage of? Yeah. But again, we are in uncertain times. I think that's the current theme of the economic environment. And I'm curious about some of the learnings that you took from that period of time that can help us. Going forward, how do you process when things are very uncertain? What's the first thing you do when there's tremendous ambiguity out there?

Jan Freitag 28:43

Maybe this comes with a territory for me, but the first thing is you gotta trust the data. You gotta just see how does it lay out for you? Huge shout out to Jamie Lang, who at the time was with CBRE, and he, I think in one of his podcasts, or in one of his writings, made a throwaway comment about China. Being a little bit earlier in the recovery and I was like, oh. And so from then on I focused on China every week, right? And if you remember those charts, I said, look, China is, has 12% occupancy and we're 10, and next week they were at 20 and we were at 10, at 12. And so slowly but surely we do could pattern recognize what was going on. So number one is look for the data and don't let that. Don't let your preconceived notion give you the answer and pick cherry pick the data sets, right? You just have to say, look, here's what the data is. In this instance, every week or every month. And say, okay, what does this really mean? If I know nothing, if I just have this data set, how do I interpret this currently? I have always said the beginning of this year that I thought group demand would continue to be strong. We are now four months, consecutive months of group in group demand to clients. I'm like, okay, wow. That narrative that I had is totally out the window. So what's the new narrative? And so what does the data teach us? Teach me. About how to communicate that new perspective. So continually looking at the data, number one, I think number two is just read a lot, right? Have your radar way open and continue to look for other industries data points for other people who you respect their perspective, be it blogs or podcasts. Then synthesize that all into the message that you have for your hotel or for your company or for your industry. So I think between those two things, that has worked really well for me on the data side and then having a really wide net and get more insights.

Lan Elliott 30:44

Yeah, and I think you bring up a good point. It is about the data, but it's also about casting a wide enough net to figure out which is the right data. To follow what are the ones that are leading indicators that I should be thinking about that will be helpful versus there can be a lot of noise and a lot of data, so thank you. That's wonderful. One of our favorite questions at its personal stories is what advice would you give to your younger self, let's say 22-year-old Jan, what would you want to give him as advice or things that you wish he had known? About how things were gonna turn out.

Jan Freitag 31:24

So two things come to mind. One is when I lecture, when I get to let guest lecture at universities, I get this question what would you have done when you were a student? And I always say, oh, I should have partied more. And the crowd erupt and the students are like, ah, that's funny. We should party most. It's no. You all need to study more. I should have part more because I was just heads down three and a half years. I was never out. I overdid it, I did not get a full university experience because I was so paranoid that I would make it a different country, different culture, different language. I was so nose to the grindstone that I just. Didn't stop to quote unquote smell the roses. I didn't really go out a lot and I should have to just get a maybe more broad social network, so that's what I would tell my students of, but my younger self at STR very clearly, and thanks to an executive coach who called me on it, maybe too late, but called me on it nonetheless, to say, Jan, you just need to chill and you just need to say, hey. How are you? How was your weekend? You can't just come into every conversation guns blazing and saying, hi, I need you to do X. That's just not how people work. They're humans and you need to first acknowledge the humanity and then you can say, can you do X for me? So that is something that didn't come supernatural to me, and I hope I, I'm better at it now. But that's definitely that I would tell my younger self is to just look at the human first. Then try to get something done.

Lan Elliott 33:01

Absolutely. Great advice. And Jan, as we come to the end of our discussion, you have offered a lot of really incredible advice, some of which I'm really looking forward to implementing. Do you have one final nugget of advice to offer to our audience? Keeping in mind that the mission of its personal stories is around empowering personal success.

Jan Freitag 33:31

The most important decision you can make I think, in your life is to find your right life partner. From that, everything follows. I'm very fortunate. I'm married way up as I like to say. But with Emily by my side, nothing's I possible, like we can do hard things. She's an entrepreneur. I don't have an entrepreneur bone in my body, but she's a hardcore entrepreneur. It's super fun and interesting to see that side of an industry that I'm not normally used to, but together, we can do hard things and I think that's been the most important decision that I made, and I think that's what's continued to make things all right.

Lan Elliott 34:11

I love that because I think with the right support at home, it gives you that great foundation to be able to go out and try things and know that there's still the support at home if everything doesn't go perfect. It's a wonderful way to think about it and I couldn't agree more that having the right life partner is such an important. Part of being successful. So thank you so much, Jan. I appreciate you coming on and you've given us so much great advice and I am so appreciative of all you do for our industry and people in our industry and for our audience today.

Jan Freitag 34:46

I appreciate you having me. And if you're out there, if you're interested in talking more about presenting hotel data, just pick me up on LinkedIn. Thank you.

Lan Elliott 34:54

If you've enjoyed this interview with Jan, I hope you'll go on our website, it's personal stories.com to find more great interviews with hospitality industry leaders. Thank you.