In an industry comprised of outgoing personalities, Barry Sternlicht, chairman/CEO, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, has stood out for his low profile. Over the past three years, Sternlicht has gone about his business of leading one of the world’s largest hotel companies— which includes the Westin, Sheraton, St. Regis, Luxury Collection, W and Four Points brands— in the least gregarious manner possible, making selective appearances at industry conferences and promotional events for Starwood itself. Seemingly even less frequent were interviews with the press, despite the fact that Starwood was quietly nurturing a balance sheet that by year’s end 2000 provided record earnings for the fledgling company, reporting the highest EPS growth, highest EBITDA growth and highest RevPAR growth of the major hotel companies. Fueling even more desire for an inside look at Starwood was the fact that for a spate of time in 1999, top-echelon executives were exiting the company at a clipped pace, with the most public departures being those of President/COO Richard Nanula and Hotel Group CEO Juergen Bartels. Handling those departures with little comment, Sternlicht had the public wondering what was going on internally at Starwood. A possible reason for Sternlicht’s taciturn behavior may have been that he had launched Starwood with much more humble plans than chairing a global hotel company with 725 hotels with some of the world’s most well-known brands. In fact, his original intention was to launch W Hotels as a mere means of solving some of the most basic problems in hotels: by providing a good bed in which to sleep; a television well-positioned and big enough to ensure comfortable viewing; and cordless phones to allow guests to move freely about their rooms. “Buying ITT and buying Westin was an opportunistic thing,” said Sternlicht. “The original plan was to buy big, urban assets and ‘boutique-ize’ them, to make them into a design statement and try to appeal to a different customer base than was going to the Hiltons and the Marriotts, and for that matter, even the Sheratons.” But while Sternlicht may have faced criticism for not serving up a high-profile image, he has not been penalized for a lack of innovation. The braintrust behind the enormously successful Westin Heavenly Bed campaign, as well as the hip W brand which gave the boutique hotel concept absolute credence, Sternlicht, in almost rebel-hotelier fashion, has turned the industry on its ear, forcing it to re-examine how it looks at its most basic services and provisions. In an exclusive interview with HOTEL BUSINESS® at Starwood’s global headquarters in White Plains, NY, Sternlicht, with candor and with humor, reflected back on his days of evolving Starwood, discussing the successes and missteps that occurred as he tackled the mammoth task of bringing together disparate brands and corporate cultures under one roof. Personnel Issues “We were a start-up,” said Sternlicht of the conglomerate’s early days. “It’s funny, I was reading about when somebody took over a company, and they let go of about 15 of the 22 direct reports they had. That was the way it should have been done here. I knew when I looked around that we had issues. And that people, as good as they were or they weren’t… we had an issue of scale, we were a giant company on a global basis, operating in 80 countries. “There were core competency issues,” noted Sternlicht. As for the image he himself projected, or did not project, to the public during this time, Sternlicht was frank. “One thing I didn’t know, having not been public— I was a fairly successful private investor— was, that CEOs have a public relations person. I didn’t do that. I had done what I did in the past, I had spoken to shareholders.” Carefully selecting h
