Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your current role?
A: For both properties, I continuously strive to develop corporate and association business relationships to keep our hotels thriving. As team lead, I work with a dedicated sales department to ensure all segments are getting the attention they deserve, so that we never miss an opportunity to welcome and service new business.
Q: How did you become involved with YPN?
A: My family and I moved to Fargo in 2018. While having a taste of North Dakota during my years at UND, I was still completely new to Fargo, West Fargo, and Moorhead. I needed a way to get to know the community better. YPN does a great job utilizing other Chamber business locations for their events. Diving in helped me learn about what was available around town and who some of the people were.
Q: What motivated you to choose your current career path?
A: First: freedom! Then: free food!
To elaborate — When I first started working in a hotel, I was at a small highway property with 42 rooms, no restaurant, and no meeting space. I was the sole employee from 4 – 11 p.m. It was a defiant teenager’s dream to have that little management over my head. But, boy did I grow up fast with some of the situations I encountered.
When I got to college, I started working on the banquet side of things while doing a sales and marketing internship. This sounds silly, but I stayed through the toughest days because of the leftover banquet food. When I’m able to have access to prime rib while being such a broke college student who was putting myself through school, you don’t walk away from that!
Sales in hospitality attracted me for many reasons, yet many would tell you that my ‘gift of the gab’ lets me thrive in this role, but would be a curse to get me into a lot of trouble in other types of positions. So, seemingly by default, here I am doing a job where I get to talk a lot and use my naturally extroverted nature to meet new people for a living.
Q: Can you share a significant challenge you’ve faced in your career and how you overcame it?
A: Working in the hospitality industry during the pandemic was a really trippy experience. I watched literally millions of hoteliers across the globe lose their jobs within a week. At the Holiday Inn Fargo, we had over 300 staff members on March 1, 2020. On April 1, there were 12, I was one of those 12. We who remained suddenly became every position of every department each day, working longer hours for less fruitful outcomes for months.
We somehow stayed positive through it, adopting a slogan of “be the spork” (the utensil that acts as both a spoon and a fork) which has stuck around to this day—we even make trophies for it. We said “yes” and accommodated every piece of business that we could. Turns out nothing will ever stop love or hockey. I’d work with brides who were still hearing ‘closed’ from their reception halls in MN when the ND occupancy laws were more lenient and we’d have their entire game plan recreated here with a 20-day notice. I’d listen to what I called Doug Burgum’s Wednesday “Fireside Chats” to know exactly what occupancy laws we were working with that week and set up spaces accordingly. I begged and bargained with every trucking company in town to move their business in because I knew their industry was still alive. We pleaded with offices that were no longer going to have an off-site holiday party to let us cater in their offices. These are just a few examples of the hustle that went into recovery. We did everything we could to work our way out of the shutdown and by 2023, put up record-breaking revenue numbers that this hotel has never seen in its 50 years of existence.
