What does your role involve?
IHG is a British company that owns brands such as InterContinental, Holiday Inn and Crowne Plaza. IHG grew out of the brewer Bass and now focuses exclusively on managing and franchising hotels. This was before it became a conglomerate through acquisitions in the 1980s and 1990s.

I’ve been in the role for a year and it’s my responsibility to not only drive the performance of our hotels (revenue, profit and quality), but also to build the value of the brand.

That’s important for us because our business model is primarily fee-based, and the strength of our brands is a fundamental part of what attracts investors and hotel owners to do business with us, in addition to our management capability.

Balancing the demands of profit while maintaining quality and long-term value is one of the biggest challenges in my role. You can drive short-term performance relatively easily, but if you do it without sensitivity you risk undermining the brand in the long term.

The “asset-light” model is becoming more common with the big international hoteliers, although we were certainly among the first to focus on a fee-based model.

Back in 2003, we owned a significant number of hotels, but disposing of the majority of these assets allowed us to focus our capability on brand management and operational excellence, rather than on managing real estate. It also enabled us to grow more quickly because we don’t have such a significant capital burden compared to some of our peers.

How did you move from finance to general management?
My background was in internal audit. I wanted to move into a role that had a more direct impact on the company’s performance, but found that to move into operations or a general management role you need to satisfy the view of risk in people’s minds because you haven’t had profit and loss accountability, and probably haven’t led large teams in a commercially pressured environment.

So I moved from internal audit to an operational finance role as CFO, where I worked very closely with the COO in running the business as a commercial enterprise, without worrying too much about functional boundaries. As a result, I spent the last three of my 11 years in IHG as CFO in the group’s Middle East and Africa division, based in Dubai.

That gave me international exposure and P&L exposure, and that was my stepping stone into an operational role.

People will either take a risk on you, or you have to prove yourself in an operational role.

What’s your advice to today’s CIMA students?
The important thing is to make this kind of move earlier in your career rather than later because the further you go down the road of a specific specialism the more expensive you get and the less transferable your skills appear.

So the trick for a CIMA student is to get as much experience across as wide a range of disciplines as possible, and if you want to eventually move into a management role you need to consider taking an operationally focused finance role.

Think seriously about taking an international assignment (and before your kids get too old...).

Emerging markets, for example, give you fantastic insight into new cultures and different ways of doing business – often in exciting, high-growth environments. Emerging markets in particular are often based more on relationships than in the West, which is a skill that we underestimate, even in the UK, where people think it’s all commercial.

It is, to a great extent, but relationships are hugely important and it’s easy to forget that. In the Middle East some of the most valuable and lucrative deals we signed were on the back of a strong business relationship rather than pure financials.

What aspects of business life are unique to the hotel industry?
The first is the nature of the product, which is perishable. If you don’t sell a room one night, it’s gone.

People don’t always think of it like that. So emerging disciplines, particularly revenue management and yield management, which airlines excel at, have become increasingly important in hospitality, as has balancing price and occupancy.

So how full do you want to be, at what rate can you fill your hotel, and will you take less occupancy for a better rate?

These things all have a significant impact on profit. The other thing is the complexity of the product. It’s not one product, it’s a place to eat, to sleep, to meet, to work.

They’re multi-faceted products, therefore they’re complex. Ultimately though, it’s a service business, it’s about people, and for better or worse people can be unpredictable so it’s a very dynamic environment.

We are in the business of engaging with emotion and people’s perception of our product – our brands set up a promise we have to deliver, and that’s a promise I take very seriously because if you fail to deliver you’ll never get the trust of your guests back – so it’s a big responsibility.

Who are your role models?
We tend to look mostly at service businesses to understand how different companies engage with their consumers. I’m a big fan of Virgin Atlantic, which has very distinctive customer service and consistent delivery, and that’s the trick.

It’s about understanding what your brand means to people and delivering on that expectation.

The hotel industry has changed a lot in recent years, with the influence of the internet on booking behaviour and marketing, and a clearer recognition of the importance of brands in driving guest preference.

Technology is also a big driver of change. For example, we’re looking at how mobile phone technology might replace room keys.

We are also constantly innovating around our websites and loyalty programmes. We want people to book directly with us because we can then look after their booking experience. So we offer them a best price guarantee offering them the cheapest room they can get anywhere on the web.

What effect is the ongoing downturn having on your business?
As a global business, IHG has the advantage of having a diversified basket so when market conditions become more challenging in one area, it’s generally not the case across the board.

If we look at growth in hotels, China in particular is a great success story for us. You have to balance it out – we have areas of greater or lesser growth at any one time, so it tends to even out.

For the UK it has certainly been a more challenging environment than we’ve ever seen previously, although the hospitality business does tend to be quite cyclical, so we are well rehearsed in responding to changes in market conditions.

It’s a robust business model because it’s predominantly fee-based – other people own the asset. People still need to stay in hotels, and the majority of hotels in my market are mid-scale, and that tends to be very resilient when the market weakens because people will often trade down a little bit, or companies will become more value-conscious, and that plays well for mid-scale hotels.

Mid-scale hotels also tend to have a more domestic business so again, they are more resilient to international events that can impact overseas travel.

One of the biggest challenges at the moment is that financing remains very restricted, which limits the pool of capital available for hotel investment, and therefore growth. However, strong brands deliver attractive ROIs and this helps us to compete for the capital that is out there.

What are you doing to address the negative environment?
We are better insulated than other hotel groups to the extent that some of our peers are more in property than we are. With our fee-based model, when times are great we may not be able to make the best of it in the way someone who owns a hotel would, but what investors look for is predictable growth and earnings, and less volatility.

It’s a challenging environment and won’t become suddenly better overnight so we have adjusted to thinking this is the way things are now. It’s much more a case of understanding how to respond.

Holiday Inn is the official provider of hotel rooms to the Olympics and Paralympics, so we’re very excited about that sponsorship. The majority of hotel rooms in London are pre-contracted through the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) through a pre-agreed rate, which is actually less than most hotels groups would charge in a normal year for a London summer.

LOCOG will sell them on at a pre-defined rate so the argument of excessive profit-taking by hoteliers is something of a misnomer.

How has CIMA helped you in your role to date?
I was always a big fan of CIMA because it gave you intelligence across a wide variety of subjects, areas and disciplines to run a commercial business.

There’s so much required of business leaders these days in operations – you need to be great with people, display financial acumen, be able to understand the commercial drivers of the business, negotiate, understand sales and market forces, and understand branding and distribution.

It’s so much more than a financial discipline, it’s the discipline for business. It was always my immediate hurdle to get CIMA under my belt. My mentor said “don’t worry about anything until you do that”.

What has been the most significant milestone in your career to date?
I think the move from finance into general management would be the biggest milestone, and most of that came off the back of my international posting.

I arrived in Dubai on the back of 10 years of unparalleled growth just before the downturn so I saw a region that had never seen decline before in economic terms go into that for the first time.

It was fascinating. I left just before the beginning of the Arab Spring, so I’ve seen a huge amount of change in a turbulent marketplace in a very different place to do business.

I had to move my family out there, so I had all sorts of life experiences. I’m glad to be back in the UK and left at the right time as three years is quite a long time in an emerging market – you can risk losing your frame of reference with the rest of the world.

From a career milestone perspective P&L accountability and international exposure are the keystones of a senior career, but they’re not always easy to get. If you’re not in a global business, these opportunities are harder to access. It’s not always easy.

Certainly, if you work in a multinational business or have aspirations in that direction, you’ve got to get overseas at some time.