Barry Lall is the founder, president, and chief executive officer of Pinnacle Hotels USA, a national hotel investment company. Born in East Africa to Indian immigrant parents, Lall pursued a medical degree in Scotland and England before settling into practicing family medicine on the West Coast of the United States. However, a deep-seated passion for business and inspired by the opportunities presented in America Lall decided to pursue life as an entrepreneur.
Starting his hotel portfolio with the purchase of a 12-room motor lodge in 1989, today Lall’s company has grown to 1,800 rooms and seven restaurants across nine properties in California and Texas. With over 650 employees and annual revenues of over $ 70 million Lall has managed to achieve the elusive American dream, through hard work, sacrifice and tenacity.
Please tell us a little bit about your business. What is Pinnacle Hotels USA all about?
Pinnacle Hotels USA is a hotel ownership and management company focused on the premium brand and full-service markets. Our portfolio consists of nine hotels located in San Diego and Riverside, CA, and Dallas and Austin, TX, and we work with national brands such as Marriott and Hilton. One of the reasons I named the company Pinnacle is because I wanted to ensure that as a business we are never satisfied with where we are and always strive for the best in everything that we do.
We may be content and proud of what we have achieved, but we are always seeking to improve and get better results in every aspect of the business, always striving for the pinnacle. As a leader I seek to ensure that equal attention is paid to caring for our guests, our associates, and our assets, therefore ensuring the highest quality of service and exceeding the expectations of all who interact with Pinnacle.
If you started your business again, what things would you do differently?
Overall, I am very grateful for all the success that I have had over the past three decades of building this business, because each step along the way has taught me invaluable lessons. However, in hindsight, I do wish that I had focused more on networking in my earlier days. When I purchased my first property, I had behind me a lot of passion and absolutely no know-how –– I didn’t even know how to balance a cash drawer. My family pitched in to help me run the dozen rooms the motel had, but we were all essentially going in blind. It was my cousin who worked the front desk during the day who first came to me with the wastebasket after my night shift and told me I couldn’t keep throwing away my receipts because they were needed for tax records. That is how naive I was to the ins and outs of running a business, let alone a hotel.
While I am eternally grateful for everybody who has gone along on this crazy journey with me from the beginning, I believe I could have saved myself quite a few pains if I had devoted more time to developing stronger networking skills –– I would have been able to hire people much more capable than myself at an earlier level. I now understand that networking is crucial to building out the best team possible for your business.
Can you recommend one book, one podcast, and one online course for entrepreneurs?
To be quite frank I’m not one to venture very far from traditional forms of media, so I am lacking in terms of recommendations for podcasts or online courses. However, one book I recommend to anybody who is interested in becoming an entrepreneur is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike. It details his career journey of starting Nike and building it into the massive empire it is today.
There are many many lessons that can be learned from the book and I highly recommend reading it, but one of the biggest things that has stuck with me is his hiring process. In the 1960’s when Phil first founded the company the athletic shoe industry was tiny when compared with where it stands today, meaning that hiring people with relevant experience would have created a very small pool. Rather than limit himself to this pool he simply looked for the sharpest minds he could find, and that is something I have carried into my own strategy when finding talent.
The book is an inspiring look at how difficult yet rewarding the entrepreneurial journey can be.
What is your favorite quote?
I love this quote from Shoe Dog — it captures quite well how I feel about being a ‘businessman.’
“Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They may call it Tao or Jnana or Dharma. Or spirit. Or God.”
– Phil Knight
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
Develop the ability to have focus. This applies to both your everyday actions and the decisions you make for your business. In your everyday operations as a leader, it is crucial to have the skill of good focus, as you are often being pulled in a “thousand” different directions at once. One of the best things you can learn to do in these situations is say “no.” Understand that you can’t do it all means identifying where your focus is most needed, and ensure that your attention is fully there. In order to have success as an entrepreneur, you must be absolutely good with your time management, opportunity management, and resource allocation.
In addition to this, I believe it is also necessary to have focus on a macro level –– i.e. developing a clear and defined business strategy and not straying from it. At one point in time Pinnacle Hotels USA had over 25 properties it was managing, but I soon realized that I could run a better business if I instead focused on few larger properties that had the most potential and truly represented our brand. Having focus also means not being myopic: you still need to have imagination, foresight and intellectual insight to identify the best business opportunities and take advantage of them.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges was certainly my first property in its entirety. With no prior experience in purchasing property or running a motel I wasn’t an ideal candidate for a bank loan by any means, and on top of that motels are generally considered high-risk because they are both real estate and business investments. However, I demonstrated that I had done considerable research to ensure this was a sound investment, and one of my former patients from my time as a physician happened to be vice president at a bank and she personally vouched for me, so I was able to secure the loan.
Another instance I can think of is a time when I purchased a large 45-acre parcel of land to build a hotel on but soon found that the city and state would not allow it due to environmental concerns. Rather than accept the loss, I litigated against the public agencies and ensured that we were able to reach an amicable resolution. At the time the whole endeavor felt like a massive failure and I certainly wasn’t happy about having to direct funds toward litigation, but it is an important lesson for all entrepreneurs to learn that sometimes things don’t go according to plan and you must be prepared to adjust your strategy if needed.
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
My biggest advice for all entrepreneurs is to have a consistent set of values and to never compromise them. It can be easy to get distracted by the money but as an entrepreneur, your business will be an extension of yourself and should therefore reflect your own beliefs and values. While I may no longer be a practicing physician, I still carry with me the desire to serve others and try to exemplify that in every business decision I make. I developed the theory of ‘triangle of caring’ that means I treat my guests, employees, and the hotels with equal importance, and seek to make my actions reflect that. If you compromise your value system for the sake of turning a larger profit, your business will inevitably suffer as a result.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
I am constantly maintaining a balance between aggressive actions and incremental steps forward. I believe in the contrarian approach to investing, seeing times of economic distress as opportunities to make compelling business investments rather than a time to be conservative, and while I am certainly a proponent of fiscal responsibility and maintaining cash flow I believe that true growth only occurs in the presence of some risk. Conversely, while I like to be aggressive in my decision-making, I believe ‘baby steps’ can often be the best way to achieve long-term goals for a company. Rather than constantly shifting strategies, trying many things at once, and seeing what sticks, I believe in making a change then allowing time to see how the decisions made affect the business as a whole.
How do you personally overcome fear?
I’m no stranger to fear and do not fear anything or anybody. As I said previously I am a believer in contrarian investing and that certainly takes a fair amount of courage. Recessions really test your toughness, resilience, and grit because making investment decisions in those times requires a lot of courage. You can do all of the research, decide ‘yes it’s a good buy, and put a property under contract, but then you are left with the unknowns. How long will the recession last? How are you going to raise the money? Who is going to finance it? It’s easy to be defensive, but I truly believe that it is only through offensive business decisions that you are able to achieve massive results. So I suppose you could say I overcome fear by simply pushing through it and recognizing that the unknown is certainly something that should be considered but really nothing to be scared of.
What are you learning now? Why is that important?
I, like practically every other entrepreneur on the planet right now, am learning how to operate my business best in a post-Covid world. When I began my career in the hospitality industry it was the early 1990’s, right in the midst of the savings and loan crisis, and then in the late 2000’s came the Great Recession, so I have been through my own fair share of recessions and understand how to navigate through them. However, the coronavirus pandemic has been totally different. It had an absolutely massive impact on the travel industry and clearly, hospitality was one that was hit the hardest for an extremely long time. We had to figure out how to survive and adapt to a new way to serve our guests in an environment of labour and supply chain issues.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
When talking to young entrepreneurs, I always tell them that you’ve got to have an absolutely strong ambition, aspiration, and drive to want to do something. If you have a dream or desire that is consistent, where you wake up every day wanting something, not just every six months or every year, then your dream will come true.
Running a business is hard, it’s really hard, but when it’s truly what you love to do and you’re passionate about it, even those most difficult moments feel fun. Going back to my first property, there were days when my maids wouldn’t show up and I would go from working all night at the front desk to scrubbing toilets and making beds during the day. When I first purchased a large lodging property, a 117-room Days Inn in Tucson, Arizona, my family and I left our beautiful seaside home in San Diego to occupy three cramped rooms on-site so that I could oversee its transformation.
This was a huge sacrifice on the part of my family -without which I could never be successful in business. But I look back at those days as some of the happiest in my life, because I was pursuing what I had always dreamt of, and that is still true today.
