Harmeet Mann, CEO, Mehr Consultancy, interviewed by Lan Elliott

Harmeet’s insights reinforce that success is built through systems, support, and a commitment to continuous improvement. Her approach encourages leaders to empower others by providing structure and guidance rather than relying solely on motivation. She reminds us that respect and strong relationships are foundational to sustainable growth. Her perspective on learning highlights the importance of staying curious and adaptable in a changing world. Ultimately, her message is clear: with the right mindset and support, challenges can always be worked through and transformed into progress.

Transcript

Lan Elliott 0:01

Hello and welcome to its Personal Stories, the Hospitality podcast dedicated to empowering personal success. Today I am delighted to have Harmit Mann with us. Welcome, Harmit.

Harmeet Mann 0:14

Thank you so much for having me.

Lan Elliott 0:16

I've been wanting to have this conversation with you for a while, so I am excited. I wanted to start with your incredible journey to hospitality because you actually started in the healthcare industry. And five years ago you moved into hospitality and now you co-lead a management company with almost 40 hotels across the US working with all the major brands. I'm curious, how did you move to hospitality and were there some key inflection points in your career or. Are there factors that you think contributed to your success?

Harmeet Mann 0:52

The plan was never to go into hospitality, and I like to think that's true for most people. My husband and I both had gone to graduate school in healthcare related fields, so he has a doctorate of pharmacy. I have my Master's in healthcare administration. When we were newly married, his parents had two hotels that we were helping with. Operationally a little bit here and there. My mother-in-law was acting general manager and we would help digitalize the new hire packet or help make an email template for responding to group booking inquiries taking that paper group, booking form that front desk would fill out and turning it into a Google form. And then later, more, more advanced kind of solutions. I had my first child, my daughter and I resigned from my healthcare analyst position and I wanted to be a stay at home mom for the foreseeable future, but I also couldn't sit still. So I thought of creating a consulting firm named it after my daughter, because I'm not very creative. So it was mayor Consultancy. And the idea was to help other owner operators, like my mother-in-law, just digitalize, make sure they're compliant with local laws, make sure they're doing all they can to tap into revenue opportunities. So it was really meant to just consult other owner operators. It organically turned into friends and family saying, Hey, your hotels are doing well. When you guys buy your third one, please let us know. We'd like to have a share. And so we just started growing the portfolio, kept the management in-house did a good job of protecting profitability and. And having lean operations and reducing expenses in addition to improving top line. And it just grew into about eight hotels under management and then we started doing third party. And that's the space we've grown in ever since then. And that's the space we like being in. And I think factors that contributed to our success growing from two to eight to 36 hotels is. We used the owner operator mindset, but had systems and organization in place, had a team in place to support us, and we grew because of our results. And we grew organically until now. Now we do a little bit of marketing here and there, but for the first five years it was all word of mouth growth.

Lan Elliott 3:26

I do think one of the things that I've already learned about you is this idea of processes. You touched on it, but I think one of your keys to success is anytime you see something that could be done better, it becomes a process, and then you make that a thing that, okay, in the future, we're gonna do it this way so that we don't run into that again. And I think that continuous improvement that you have, always thinking strategically, how can I better the company in the future?

Harmeet Mann 3:56

Yeah. It's exciting. I get to work with my husband and we are growing this company and raising our family together. In the early stages of the company, even though in a sense I was the founder, I, it was something I wanted to do. I came up with a logo, a name, a website for my little consulting firm. When it came to growing the portfolio, it was more him sourcing deals, raising capital, buying hotels, and working full time while I was busy with our six month old baby at the time, from the early stages of the company. I got to work part-time and I got to work on the business while he was working in the business, so I would see him doing stuff and see inefficiencies in it. And because I wasn't burnt out, because I wasn't. Dealing with day-to-day operations, I was able to work on the business and that kind of model stuck for the way we handled the company. Now I work a lot more full-time probably putting in eight to 10 hour days, but the idea is still the same. I see inefficiencies or I see mistakes and I get with a team, we soundboard together. What can we do to make this better so we don't make this mistake again? Once is enough for us to create a quick little process about it. Is it a tracker? If we're paying property taxes for all of our hotels, is it a tracker we need to make? Is it automated reminders we need to have? A lot of, also what we like to do is we like to take softwares we're already paying for and make them work for us in interesting ways or hacking into stuff we're already paying for and making it work for us. And then anything we do, any solution we do, we document it on train. So train.com is our training platform, but it's also our SOP documentation for our corporate team. You put in a key word and you see what's already written about something and then you see where the gaps are.

Lan Elliott 5:59

I love that and I love institutionalizing When you see a mistake, let's not do that again and having a solution for it going forward and an easy tool for your team. And I also love the idea that you and your husband split up the work, how he focuses on the day to day and you get to be more. Strategic. And I think a lot of times when everyone's working in the day-to-day, everyone's just busy and running around fixing whatever fire is coming up, and I think the ability for you to be strategic has been really valuable. I wanted to talk about embedding values because you've mentioned ensuring your values are reflected in your company's operations and wanting like-minded clients, and I'm curious how this ethos impacts the way you build teams or how you choose which owners you work with.

Harmeet Mann 6:58

So one of the things we kind of value is we respect what it took for people to build these assets. Everybody has a different path to ownership, but the one we saw growing up is a common one where families will migrate here from. We're, our family is Indian, so we saw our parents migrate here from India and work laborist jobs like in gas stations, farms, factories, and they usually came in the seventies, eighties, and just saved, lived well below their means and bought a smaller business like a. Gas station or a subway or a liquor store or a trucking business. And then eventually, depending on exit strategy, depending on luck, they were able to convert that into a motel and then convert that into a hotel. This is 35, 40 years of blood, sweat, and tears, and creating American jobs along the way. Supporting American communities along the way, and some of these hotels is their entire life savings. And so we respect that and we teach that stewardship to our team as well. Another value we have is we have fun doing what we do, and our team has fun doing what they do. And we are not a perfect management company. Nobody is. We're not robots. Occasionally we may have a misstep, we may have a mistake. We go above and beyond for our owners. So if there is ever. You know something, there was an oversight. We appreciate when owners are able to bring it up respectfully. We acknowledge our mistake, we find a solution to it. In the same breadth. If I've made a mistake for an owner, I've also saved them lots and lots of money. I've helped'em refinance. I've helped'em find a cheaper FFF and e company. I've helped them project manage their renovation for no extra cost. I've looked into cost segregation for them. I've handled lawsuits for them from before our management. So we just want to be appreciated and to have a respectful, kind of relationship with the owners, and it's really important that owners are not disrespectful to my team. As soon as that starts happening we cut the ties with the owner and we lose that stream of revenue and that relationship and that client, I think that mutual respect is really important and that's what drives us to go above and beyond for the owners naturally. We're not gonna go above and beyond for free, for somebody who is mean to us or rude to us and to my team as well. So I think both of those things are top values. I think top of at that come to mind is one, everyone. Is doing this, having fun, respect is important. And it'll motivate us to keep going and to then protect that asset that we know they worked hard to make.

Lan Elliott 10:01

Yeah. I love the theme of mutual respect, treating everybody with respect and having some grace. People aren't perfect. Like you said, we're not robots and there are things that happen both ways and trying to give the other person grace if something happens unintentionally.

Harmeet Mann 10:19

Yeah, it's a small industry, so even when I catch myself feeling frustrated with a vendor or even somebody on my team you have to treat everybody the way you want to be treated. So we try our very best also to. Have good relationships with people in the industry with, maybe the software vendors that we partner with, maybe the loan brokers, the hotel brokers, the insurance brokers, lawyers. I've had my lawyers make mistakes. So I think it creates a good ecosystem, a good working relationship for all parties involved. When you treat each other with respect and you realize that yes, everyone's doing this for a paycheck. I'm doing this for a paycheck, but it's such a big part of your day that it shouldn't be miserable.

Lan Elliott 11:07

I agree. I wanted to talk about motivating versus supporting, because you think about these two things very differently, especially when it comes to your general managers. So what's the difference between motivating versus supporting them, and how does support become a strategy? Why is that reframing even important?

Harmeet Mann 11:31

So I think this is another one of the things that happened organically with us. So I would like to say it's all intentional. In a way it probably was. But what happened when we were first growing when we were first starting is we were in very remote locations, like a hotel in Blythe, California on the border of California and Arizona. Small town a hotel in Lebec, California. Pass by town with like just a hotel and a gas station and a mountain community further up. Pecos, Texas, Dumas, Texas. We had to learn to get really scrappy with the talent base that we had in those areas. We had really hard workers, really smart people who may not have had the college degree. Great f oms, great AGMs that we had to promote into the general manager role and train. Now, because I like to systemize everything, we have eventually built a really robust training role on general manager training. We can take an FOM and an Ag GM and promote them to general manager, support them and guide them and really help launchpad their career too. It started that way. Then on the flip side, we ran into general managers that were untrustworthy stealing cars from the parking lots writing, meeting room checks in their own names, things that we were able to nip in the bud really early because of the kind of oversight SOPs we have in place because of those two things there was. Hardworking GMs that need more support and kind of GMs we couldn't trust because of those two things. We took a lot of things into our corporate office. So we handle our all chargebacks in our corporate office. We handle all procurement in our corporate office. We handle sending out all new hire packets for hotel line staff in our corporate office to better protect the owner's liability wise. We have systems in place for when a hotel is going to expect a QA and doing a Zoom call with them to do a walkthrough qa, and if it's IHG checking if the dates are written on the bottom of the shower amenity bottles. Just helping set the GMs up for success for a QA rather than just being a. Absentee management company, letting the GM fill the QA and then saying, Hey, what happened here? How could you let this happen? If one of our general managers fails a qa, we think it's our fault. So that's where supporting our general managers really came from. We offer them so many resources, checklists. Training. And then another thing we do is we have director of operations oversee only five to seven hotels at a time. We have Slack channels for every single hotel in every hotel. Slack channel, the general manager and my entire corporate team is in there. So they have a point of contact their DOO who is not overburdened'cause they're only seeing five. Overseeing five to seven hotels. General Manager asks a question, DOO can answer it. Provide a training link, provide a brand link loop in hr, loop in accounting. All into one spot. And GMs are empowered to ask questions. There's a transcript of everything they asked in that Slack channel. It's searchable. And then we do another thing in Slack where we put all of our IHG GMs in a channel together, all our Marriott GMs in a channel together, all GMs in a channel together, they can ask each other questions. So I think support is so much more important than motivation. The motivation side of it, we do a lot less. A couple things we do for motivation is through Slack we have tacos. So if somebody helps you out, you just give'em a taco emoji. If you wanna thank them. And then Slack tallies it. And every month there's a winner. The person that received the most tacos, this person gets a$50 gift card and a shout out on social media and a shout out. Slack. And then we have GM of the quarter where, there's only four winners in a year. This is a general manager who has had good QA prep preparation. They have motivated their team within hotel circumstances. They have good guest satisfaction scores, all of that good stuff, and they get an interview, a blog post a much higher remuneration gift card or award. So there are a few things we do for motivation. We love housekeeping appreciation week. We do woohoo boards, which was an idea from my vice president on our team, Melissa Garcia. She used to do this when she was a general manager back of house. There's a woohoo board in every hotel, so you get a good review. Somebody's name is mentioned on it. You highlight it, you put it on the woohoo board. Birthdays can go there. Pass a QA can go there. Anything exciting awards like TripAdvisor Award, it all goes on the woohoo board. Small wins get celebrated. So yeah, motivation is definitely important. Your paycheck motivates you. Beyond that, if you feel supported and heard at your job, you're gonna do better. You're gonna show up and you're not gonna get burnt out.

Lan Elliott 16:45

I love having that two-sided coin of this support and the motivation. Wanted to go to public speaking because this is something you do particularly well and, but it can be speaking on the stage at Alice, which you did this past year with Jeff bti, which was wonderful. But it can also be speaking at a meeting, presenting to a group, talking to an owner. Can you share a bit about your public speaking journey and what skills do you use to feel more prepared or make yourself feel more confident?

Harmeet Mann 17:26

So I always feel like I, I need to do a better job. I'll like. Let record my, if I'm on a panel I'll set my phone to record and then I'll listen to it after and I'll say, ah, I said Too many ums. I stretched this answer out too much. We're always our biggest critics, right? So that's one of the things I do is I give my own self feedback. I did, we were talking about earlier, I did participate in mock trial and forensics, public speaking in high school, but then never did much with it in college or beyond. So I would say I've never been shy. I've been confident speaking in front of people. I've always been opinionated. I love to talk. So I feel like all of those things help. But I know you said what skills help me, but I actually want to talk about something that kind of holds me back and that is. My need for perfection, and I feel like a lot of women have this. I was on stage at Hunter Conference a month ago and I wanted to share an example of something that happened hotel operations wise about around the time I was so at Hunter. I'm talking about my lodging conference experience. Because I was talking about my hotel stay. I stayed at a hotel that was offsite and it didn't go particularly well, and it was something I learned from operationally. So I saw Harry Haver in the room and on stage I said, oh, and Henry Haber's in the room. I went to lodging conference and here's my story. And then a minute later I realized I said his name wrong, and it bugged me the whole panel. And it bugged me after for two days, and so I feel like other people may not have even picked up on it or cared. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has. Miss the slip of the tongue or a detail correctly. What's important is you show up and you share authentically and you recognize that you are a human. And if you are saying ums like I am right now, or you're making mistakes, as long as you have the expertise and the experience to back up what you're saying, people do wanna listen, and it's important to remind yourself of that.

Lan Elliott 19:45

You're right, we're not robots. We're not all perfect. And you do have a lot to say. People have a lot to share and they should focus on that. One of the things you discussed at Alice was women not having the same opportunities, connections and networking muscle that their male colleagues have. What do you think needs to change?

Harmeet Mann 20:10

I think it's become a lot more inclusive in the past couple years. That's what I hear from people that have been in the industry for a while. So it's definitely changing in the right direction. Some of it is. Men and women are fundamentally different. There is a bro code, there is a kind of girl code. Oftentimes deals happen at late night events or at bars or offsites or on, on the golfing greens. And it's just a matter of are you even present in the space? So that is one of the structural issues is fit, having a seat at the table in a sense. And I think a solution to that is, and something I try to do is when I'm at a conference and I have, I'm invited to an opportunity like that and I'm hanging out with a couple of my female friends in the industry, I extend that invite, I bring them into the space. Not only I feel comfortable too hanging out with people I already know, walking into a space and not being a loner, walking into to an a networking event. But also because I'm paying it forward because there were a lot of kind people. In the first few years of my career, when I walked into a conference for the very first time, not knowing anybody, and they came up and said hi and introduced me to five other people, took me to the meetings and events they had scheduled and planned. So that is one oftentimes you don't even know about the after parties. You don't even know about the events if you're new to the industry. Another issue might be, I think. Maybe women sell themselves short. There is an imposter syndrome layer attached to there's all these studies of when there's a job application, a man might apply for one that he's underqualified for, but many women apply for jobs that they're overqualified for. So I wonder how much of that plays plays a role in how much we. Say yes to opportunities, vocalize what we bring to the table and sell ourselves in these spaces.

Lan Elliott 22:22

Yeah, those are all really good points. I love the call out to pay it forward and to hold your handout to the next woman to say, Hey, can I introduce you to some people? Or, I know we have a great women's champagne toast at a few of the conferences, and it's great to see that growing with more and more women being a part of it and just. Just to have a little toast together. Yes.

Harmeet Mann 22:48

Wonderful to see that. And you extended the invite to me. So I'm so appreciative. I actually brought another friend with me too. She's left corporate to do asset management for her family office. So she was there and we walked over at Hunter conference to the bar and to the toast and it's so cool to be. Toasting with those women being in a picture with those women that when I first started in the industry, I would read about and hear about. And it's so nice knowing that, they're not like untouchable or scary and they're actually really warm and welcoming and, I think that's another thing everybody should do is just ask, and the worst someone will say is no. So if there's somebody you wanna hear from, you want to connect with, just reach out. Don't be afraid.

Lan Elliott 23:35

I love that. Harm. Something that you and I share is that we both started businesses with our husbands, and I know your husband is a very supportive partner and a present parent, and I think that is one of the secret weapons of highly successful women is finding the right life partner. Whether you wanna have a career or whether you wanna stay home with your children, or you wanna do both at different points in your life. I think choosing the right partner can really enhance a women's career and enable her to better fulfill her potential. But I wonder if you could share a few thoughts on that.

Harmeet Mann 24:19

I wholeheartedly agree. I wish it was something we didn't have to talk about, but we do because there still needs more change. In this aspect. Women are still expected to be the primary homemakers, even if they're working in a paid position outside of the home. A lot of the mental load and burden of the house and the kids is on the women. I had one of my best friends, she recently had a baby and they went on vacation and international vacation, and she came home and she was, we were having one of our little girl rant sessions that we have once a week, and she was saying. My husband and I were both on vacation and it didn't feel like I was on vacation because she's responsible for the baby bottles and the nap schedule and all of that stuff. And the baby just naturally was more soothed by the mom, as was the case with me too when I had my kids. So it's something we definitely have to talk about. How do professional couples navigate? Their careers and their home and their children if they have kids, to where both partners can be successful and one is not sacrificing more than the other. It can look like different stages of life. When I had my firstborn. I didn't think I would be ever become a stay at home mom, but when I had my first born, I had severe postpartum anxiety to where I would not trust anybody else to settle her, change her diaper, give her a bath. It was debilitating anxiety, and I couldn't go back to work. So I resigned from my position, stayed home and was a full-time stay at home mom until I went stir crazy and started a consultancy. I did that with both kids. I was nursing my kids, I was doing all of the naps, all of the baths, and I fully enjoyed it. As soon as they both turned about a year old, dad was able to help more. Do diaper changes, do baths, do naps, do feedings. And what men need to realize, couples need to realize is. If you're both earning and you're both running the household and you're both raising the kids, if one steps up to help the other in any department, both benefit from it. So if my husband is helping me raise the kids, he and I both benefit from it.'cause there are kids, we want them to be healthy and grow up to be good individuals. If I help him in the business because he's stressed. A lot of times, so I handle crisis better than my husband does. So a lot of times when a kind of scary situation comes up, I get excited about it and I'm like, okay, tell me the details. Let me solution, let's figure this out. And I take that off his shoulders and then he's able to be a happier individual. And I would want that because. We live in a home together, and he is the father to my kids, and I want them to be around happy adults. So what I'm trying to say is there, it's not competition. It's not who does more or who does less. If both partners can be adults and have integrity and both show up as much as they can every single day in each part of their life, whether that be professional work, home, or kids, it's gonna benefit. Them only. If I'm a happier fulfilled mom, it benefits my husband and our kids. If he is has enough breaks from work and quality time with the kids, it benefits our household. Now, I wanna take this one step further and extend it to, to the individuals doing unpaid work in the home as well. If I am working full-time, I have to outsource certain things. When I was doing my master's program, one of my professors explained this and it really stayed with me. We were all very young and she wanted to give us life advice and she said, your day or your. Kind of capacity is like a pizza. And if one piece is bigger, that means other pieces are gonna have to be smaller. It's a finite pizza. So if your slice where you're working is very big, the time you have to take care of your house or your health or cooking meal prep, groceries is all gonna be smaller. You make one slice bigger, other slices are naturally going to suffer. My husband and I, if we're both working professionally, we do have somebody to help us with meal prep. We pay them. We have a nanny, we pay her, we have a house cleaner. We pay them. So for all of the people doing unpaid work, they are still contributing to the household, even financially, because you're saving all of that outsourced work and you're doing it for free. A stay at home mom is. The chef, the nanny, the tutor, the the chauffeur. So every household, what I wish for every woman in every household is that couples treat it like a true partnership. If everybody is supported, it's only gonna make the household thrive that much more.

Lan Elliott 29:38

I love that. Very well said. Harmit, we're coming to the end of our time and I wanted to ask you two last questions. The first one is my favorite question for its personal stories, and it is, what advice would you give to your younger self? What would you want 22-year-old hermit to know?

Harmeet Mann 29:59

It's something that I figured out now and I firmly believe in it, but I didn't until recently. It's that everything is figureoutable, so I. It was an anxious mess, and I think it was for physiological reasons such as not sleeping enough, scrolling my phone too much, eating too much sugar, and all of these things. I had really bad anxiety. Started around college and got worse after I had my daughter. Advice I would give my younger self is there's nothing, a few deep breaths and a good amount of sleep and a paper and a pen. Can't fix.

Lan Elliott 30:38

Harmit, I am learning from you that you can figure out just about anything and then create a process around it so that other people can learn from what you've figured out. So Harmit, for our last question, I am wondering if there is a final nugget of advice that you'd like to offer for our audience who are looking to. Grow their careers. Is there anything we haven't covered that you'd want them to know?

Harmeet Mann 31:04

I think it's important to. Keep learning and be a student of life. There's a lot of times where I myself encounter learning fatigue, especially today with the changing landscape. There's, all this talk about tech and ai. There's a lot of jobs that may go obsolete over the next few years or next couple decades. And then just beyond that learning, even just to understand and empower yourself and overcome imposter syndrome is so important. I have this management firm, I manage 38 or so hotels, and it seems like I may know what I'm doing and what I'm saying, but I actually don't know much about lending or capital stacks or any of that stuff. So I was talking to a broker at a conference and they were throwing around words that I was not familiar with because anytime we had done investments, my husband would take care of those. And naturally there's gonna be. Other people on your team that are subject matter experts in other things, but just having a base level of understanding to connect the dots, whole picture, big picture overview. Just keep up a conversation in whatever industry you're in with whatever the jargon is. I think it's important to, to distill it. It's just important to keep learning where you can, when you can.

Lan Elliott 32:33

I love that. Great advice. And I think we do see that in a lot of senior leaders in our industry, this desire to continue learning curiosity to understand more areas of the industry, and I think that is wonderful advice. So thank you so much Harmit, for being on with us and sharing your wisdom. And I love a woman with a can-do attitude. I was really excited to have you on our show. So thank you for being here.

Harmeet Mann 33:02

Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity and I appreciate getting to know you. And I can't wait to see you at the next conference.

Lan Elliott 33:10

Absolutely. And for our audience, if you enjoyed this conversation with Hermit, I hope you'll go to our website, it's personal stories.com, where you can find many more interviews with hospitality industry leaders.