MENTOR: PAT M c CANN PERSON PEOPLE

Retired Chief Executive O icer of Ireland’s largest hotel operator Dalata Hotel Group Pat McCann believes good leadership is about playing to your strengths while encouraging others to do the same, writes SORCHA CORCORAN.

Re ecting on his attitude to leadership throughout his career, Pat McCann is reminded of the story of President John F Kennedy’s visit to Cape Canaveral in 1962 where he came across a janitor mopping the oor and asked him what he did for NASA. His reply was: “I am helping to put a man on the moon.”

“I have always felt it is important to have a deep understanding of what each person in the organisation does and to build a relationship with all of your people. At one stage pre-Covid-19 in Dalata there was the guts of 5,000 employees, so it wasn’t easy, but I made a point of treating everyone with the utmost respect, regardless of what they did. A kitchen porter is as important as anyone else because the whole kitchen system would collapse without his input,” says McCann.

“There wasn’t a part of the business I wasn’t involved in but I allowed myself not to be very structured in terms of allocat-

PAT MCCANN ON… SUCCESSION PLANNING

“I spent five or six years thinking about who my successor as CEO of Dalata would be and always clearly said it would be an internal appointment and a seamless transition.”

Emotional Intelligence

“You should never make assumptions that somebody better educated is somehow better. When you give people self-belief you can see them transform before your eyes.”

Hotel Management

“My view on hotels is that you’re selling time in a limited number of rooms. It is a terribly perishable product so I always put a big emphasis on maximising revenue on any given day.” ing so much time for this and that. I had an open-door policy and wanted anyone on the staff to feel welcome to have a conversation with me. This can be distracting, but I always felt that these were the people doing the job for me and I needed to make sure they could perform at their best.

“The secret to the success of Dalata is its people. One of my legacies I hope is that I changed people’s lives for the better by giving them the opportunity to grow as I did myself. Since my time at Jurys, I was very focused on training and growing people internally. Dalata didn’t go outside to employ senior people, down to my own successor Dermot Crowley. What that did was keep the culture intact. I believe if you start making senior appointments from outside, the culture starts to diminish.”

McCann’s conviction about the merits of encouraging people to work their way up in hospitality didn’t come out of nowhere. In all, he spent 52 years in the hospitality sector, first getting the bug as a 16-year old working during school holidays in the Yeats Country Hotel in Rosses Point, Co Sligo. When Ryan’s acquired the hotel in 1969, he was approached to do a trainee management course with the group.

He stayed with the Ryan hotel chain until 1989 when he joined the Jurys group and went on to become Chief Executive Officer of Jurys Doyle, before helping to establish Dalata Hotel Group in 2007.

Renewed vigour

“When I left Jurys in 2006 I was in my mid50s and thought I might retire. I had a lovely little consultancy business, which did well, but was never going to be enough. Then one beautiful February day I met Rory Quirke and Gavin Burke of TVC Holdings in the Radisson in Stillorgan to talk about an idea they wanted to invest in and we decided to put a hotel group together – it was as simple as that,” says McCann.

Since then, Dalata has grown to be Ireland’s largest hotel operator, managing 50 properties under the Clayton and Maldron brands both here and in the UK, as well as managing a portfolio of partner hotels. In 2022, it made its first foray into continental Europe, taking on the leasehold of the Nikko Hotel in Dusseldorf, Germany.

“I am delighted to see Dalata prospering since I left over a year ago; that is my joy as it is my baby. Some people moved with me from Jurys when Dalata started and so never had a different boss for 25 years. It was so important to me to maintain the culture of growing people from within,” says McCann.

“Because it was clear that Dalata offered such opportunities, recruitment became far easier. For example, there would be 1,000 applications for 55 places on our graduate programme each year.”

The hotel group’s dedicated training arm Dalata Academy covers all types of training from basic skills up to senior management capabilities in association with the Irish Management Institute. “During Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021, 95,000 online training and development courses were delivered through Dalata Academy. We kept all of our senior management teams on, which paid off in spades, and kept all of our people – even if they were laid off –engaged with online courses,” notes McCann.

Eye on efficiency

One of the people McCann has witnessed progressing over the years is Ronan McAuley, CEO and Founder of tech company Alkimii. He was Group IT Manager at Jurys Doyle Group from 1999 to 2003 during McCann’s tenure as Chief Executive there.

Founded by McAuley in 2015 with a mobile-first approach, Alkimii provides a platform for hotel managers and their people with various apps focused on HR management, productivity and property management. Over 300 properties in Ireland and the UK have installed the Alkimii platform.

Continuous Innovation

When Pat McCann started out in hospitality over 50 years ago, everything was done manually and written out by hand. “I remember the first time we got a photocopier, it was so exciting, then a fax machine, which was a huge innovation when it started. We have come so far in such a short space of time with technology. People tend to forget that. The simplest little technologies changed our lives in the industry. When you have that mindset of using technology well, you can change your business dramatically,” he says. “The use of technology in Dalata meant we achieved world-beating margins. In the hotel business you can’t stand still; you have to keep innovating and moving the dial with consistent customer care high on the agenda. We had everything down to a fine art at Dalata, from design templates to beds specifically designed for us by Kaymed in Co Kildare that were used right across Ireland and in the UK.”

Dalata Hotel Group was its first customer and McCann is now an investor in the company.

“I’ve known Ronan for 30 years and knew the insight he had into what drives the hotel business. Being a first adopter of Alkimii allowed Dalata to be world-beating in terms of operational efficiency. While we had a consistent strategy, we were always reviewing it and adapting it,” says McCann.

“A lot of communication was needed to take people through why things were changing and what the outcomes should be. Al- kimii was great for that, allowing us to update every employee in an instant through an app on their mobile device. It is a powerful tool.”

Alkimii is one of three technology companies McCann has invested in since he stepped down as Chief Executive Officer of Dalata in December 2021. The other two are UK furniture retailer aggregator Unfurnish.com and Irish food-tech company Nutritics. McCann has also committed to investing in Irish investment house Elkstone, where he joined as Chairman in February.

Involved investor

When it comes to choosing where to invest, McCann says it is very simple for him: “The key for me essentially is investing in people. So far, if I liked the people and the product, I wanted to get involved – and very actively so too, rather than being a silent investor.

“Start-ups often have a lot of good ingredients and a great idea but probably lack the ability to build a business and structure. They can struggle with building a structure too quickly or too slowly or being in the right place at the right time and hiring the right people.

“I spend a lot of time with the CEOs helping them to think about the management skills they need to make sure the business actually works – making sure they are working on the business rather than just in the business. If you focus on the latter, the rest goes to pot.”

Founded by Ciarán and Damian O’Kelly, Nutritics’ software helps businesses unlock the hidden value of food data to manage recipes, create labels, plan meals, publish menus and measure environmental impact in real time. With offices in London, Dublin and Sydney, it has around 135,000 customers across 150 countries.

McCann is particularly enthusiastic about the potential of this business in the sustainability space. Last July, Nutritics launched Foodprint, a fully-automated, easy-to-use carbon footprint scoring, display and Scope 3 reporting system for all food businesses. This proprietary, patented technology provides operators with metrics and insights into the impact of the food they serve.

“Contract caterers and restaurants need to get to grips with new EU ESG reporting structures coming on stream this year and figure out how they’re going to verify that what they’re doing is correct. This means a big market will open up for Foodprint, mainly among large caterers, distributors and suppliers,” notes McCann.

In addition to his chairmanship of Elkstone and involvement with the three tech companies, McCann is a non-executive director of Glenveagh Homes, Deputy Chairman of the National Maternity Hospital and is on the board of Ibec. He is also still involved with liquidator Kieran Wallace on the Sean Quinn receivership.

“I have eight jobs now. I don’t do things by halves,” he says.