Sarah Eustis, CEO of Massachusetts-based Main Street Hospitality, said she doesn't strictly define success at her company by growth, but she does take pride that entering its 10th year of operations the company is poised to double in size.
Speaking with Hotel News Now at the 2024 Americas Lodging Investment Summit, Eustis said this year will be pivotal in the history of Main Street.
"There's still a lot of hard stuff ahead, but we've done a lot of the hard work to develop our value in the marketplace, our identity in the marketplace, the special sauce and what we do," she said.
The boutique-focused hotel management company started in 2014 by managing the historic Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and has since grown its portfolio to eight properties across the Northeast U.S. and Ontario.
Eustis said Main Street Hospitality's focus remains on experience, people and keeping each of its managed properties unique. But the structure of the company is now built to be "much more scalable than it ever has been," she added.
By April, Main Street Hospitality expects to announce a pair of new partnerships that will serve to double the size of revenues. In January, the company announced several executive appointments. Eustis said the people on her team make her job and the idea of growing much more palatable.
"I have people on my team who are so much smarter than me and more capable, and they're really able to run the business in a way that is intentional," Eustis said.
She added the company's growth strategy has focused on "quality and amazing people" to the point that when it has come time to sell or walk away from their few owned properties, that's a difficult decision because of the emotional investment tied up in them.
One of the properties Eustis takes the most pride in is the Hotel Downstreet in North Adams, Massachusetts, which opened in 2023 and is an independent conversion of "an old-school '80s Holiday Inn."
"We took the flag off and turned it into a groovy, art-driven, affordable independent," she said.
Eustis said one thing that made that property work so well is Main Street Hospitality handling the conversion on "a tight budget."
"I like constraints," she said. "It makes us more creative, and it forces us to be more creative and find really cool solutions. I'd be very choosy about where the money is going."
Eustis said the company decided to go fully independent with the property at least for the first full year while analyzing what benefit there might be to adding the hotel to one of the various soft-brand collections. She added brands obviously have benefits in terms of marketing and distribution, but she's hoping to boost Main Street Hospitality's internal sales efforts with the next wave of growth.
"By the time we get to 20 hotels, we'll have more leverage, especially in the regions where we really know the migratory patterns and can sort of target our marketing efforts in a way that's pretty effective geographically," she said.
A big part of establishing a growth platform for the company has been proving it's able to operate different types of hotels within the independent space. Hotel Downstreet represents one end of the spectrum she described as "funky, fun, clean, design driven and affordable." The other end is in the "bespoke luxury space," with such properties as the Canoe Place Inn in Hampton Bays, New York. And between those two extremes is "a sort of middle range of upper-upscale, boutique, high character destinations that are iconic."
As the company grows, Eustis said, it's vital to remain "hospitality-focused," particularly by keying in on the "empathic and emotional qualities of hospitality."
She said ingrained in that thinking is finding ways to tie the hotel into the communities around hotels.
"We work deeply there to built those relationships and give the hotel more of an identity and a soul," she said.