Red Roof is launching RIDE with Red Roof, a diversity and inclusion platform supporting growth and business expansion for hotel owners and franchisees.
RIDE, which stands for Road to Inclusivity and Diversity in Entrepreneurship, will expand and further diversify hotel ownership and entrepreneurial opportunities for underrepresented groups by focusing on the business needs of entrepreneurs, providing access to capital, educational resources and the connections needed to build a strong network of industry partners.
Matthew Hostetler, chief development officer, and Lina Patel, director, strategic franchise initiatives, sat down with Hotel Business during NABHOOD’s International African American Hotel Ownership & Investment Summit & Trade Show in Miami to discuss the new program.
Patel noted that RIDE with Red Roof is based on four pillars: access to capital, access to resources, access to education and access to networking.
“One of the biggest [challenges] that the underrepresented groups and women face is access to capital,” she said. “So we’re talking with banks and lenders, asking them to come on board and partner with us and provide specific packages that are particularly geared toward women and the underrepresented.”
On the other three pillars, Patel said, “I always say that I learn better when I’m surrounded by like-minded folks than when I’m sitting in a classroom. We learn the most from and get the most insights from our industry partners when we are networking.”
She added, “Our goal is to start now with these pillars, really dive into each of them and create this amazing program that will be available through our website and through our development team.”
Hostetler said that the creation of the program was “really about making a company-wide concerted effort to do the right thing,” adding, “It’s not just with people that want to buy and build hotels, but also the people that want to serve the hoteliers as well, meaning our vendor relationships. Now is the time to do it, and it should be the time for everyone.”
The CDO pointed out that Red Roof already has had success with its women’s leadership program, which, he said, “has been expounded upon” with RIDE.
“In 2016, Marina McDonald started the Red Roof Forum on Leadership for Women Entrepreneurs (whose name has been changed to SHE.],” he recalled. “She’s done a phenomenal job with that program, as 35% of our hotel ownership today is partially owned or 100% owned by women. Our senior leadership team is diverse, with 61% of it women. My development team is extremely diverse, and we’re very proud of that.”
While the company is brainstorming ideas of how to attract and engage prospective RIDE franchisees, Patel said that Red Roof with take the program on the road.
“For example, here in Miami, it’s a very diverse city, so we create a program like a development day program,” she said. “We can go to Atlanta or New York, and wherever it is, we can create this program. Instead of them coming to us, we’re going to ‘ride’ to them.”
Patel, who helped launch AAHOA’s HEROwnership program, said her experiences in the industry will help her as a leader of RIDE.
“I feel that it’ll be beneficial telling my own stories,” she said. As a woman hotel owner in the ’90s and early 2000s, we didn’t have that networking platform. It was a very male-dominated industry and, in some sense, still is that way. I remember the hurdles that I had to jump over. I used to send my husband to network for me and would say, ‘What did you guys talk about on this hotel or this deal? Let me know.'”
When asked where the two executives see the RIDE program and the diversity of the company in five years, Patel responded, “By the end of next year, we would like to see the number of women owners at 40% and have that gross increasing [every year]. The strategic plan is to diversify and get more and more diverse ownership with Black and Latino young professionals.”
Hostetler added, “If we said in 2023, we had zero owners from underserved groups, and then we had 20 five years out, that would mean you’re doing four new underserved market deals a year. That would be a great feat. It’s hard to put a number on it, but from a legacy perspective for myself, Lena and Red Roof, we want it to be one of the best platforms out there when the industry talks about diversity initiatives and underserved markets.”
