YouSaid · the spoken record

Francis Davidson

lines on the record: 53
first: 2021-11-30
most recent: 2021-11-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It was the number one trip advisor rated property in New York City, like a huge accomplishment. But I think they'd spent someone like $40,000 of their own capital per unit in order to make that happen. We decided to go with a model where we source directly from factories overseas and optimize the cost structure such that it costs some like 10,000 per key. And it was small enough so that we can convince owners to actually foot the bill for it. And so we had a model where basically our payback periods are in a single digit months on a new property, whereas this competitor, we're talking about potentially multiple years in order to pay back the investment. Their customer experience was a little bit better than ours. Ours, though, was still way better than other hotels and better than most of our comps. So it was a beloved customer experience. It just wasn't the number one. But because of our unit economic advantage, we could then generate substantially more growth with less capital invested in the business. And then economies of scale start kicking in. And the flywheels start spinning in a way where we're just so far and above.”
2021-11-30 · Invest Like the Best · Francis Davidson - Design-led Hospitality - [Invest Like the Best, EP.253] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saunder is a modern hospitality company, beautifully designed spaces that we manage and run our own cells. So we built quite a lot of technology that allows us to offer some hotels and apartments that look really great, especially to millennials in Gen Z. And we build a lot of tech to basically manage those spaces far more effectively so that we can cut the fat in the industry and offer some really incredible guest experiences. But at price points that are affordable. So, I mean, it's really for visual business as well. So going on our site and checking out some spaces brings it to life more than how I can explain it. And maybe one example in which that occurs is, for example, we work with some property owners and sometimes they're building property from scratch for us. The other times it's an existing hotel that we'll convert into a Sonder asset. There's quite a lot of investments that need to be made in order to bring it up to brand standard and to make the spaces really looking incredible. And so, for example, one of our competitors' approach has been to really go balls to the wall and customer experience and require that the level of investment is really extraordinary. And frankly, one of our”
2021-11-30 · Invest Like the Best · Francis Davidson - Design-led Hospitality - [Invest Like the Best, EP.253] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This topic, and I'm generally not a believer in absolutes. Oftentimes, a team will ask me to come up with what's the most important company goal or what is the thing that we're going to prioritize. So the way I see it is that there's obviously customer experience is valuable for it to be good, but not at all cost. So if we were to plot both the value on growth and customer experience, there's a very simple trade-off. Suppose that it costs me one unit of customer experience to get 10 units of growth. I'm getting a 10 to 1 return and the next day I'm going to do a decision that has 10 units of customer experience in exchange for one unit of growth. The sum of these vectors gives me a really nice advancement of nine points on both customer experience and growth will forego the really great trade-off that they could have in other dimensions of the business that are equally valuable to be successful.”
2021-11-30 · Invest Like the Best · Francis Davidson - Design-led Hospitality - [Invest Like the Best, EP.253] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source