LEADERSHIP CORNER
Aston president Bloom has 'collaborative style'

Interviewed by Dan Nakaso
Advertiser Staff Writer

Cory Lum • The Honolulu Advertiser

Title: President

Company: Aston Hawai'i, based in Waikiki; Aston operates 34 hotels and resorts throughout the Islands and is the third largest operator of accommodations in Hawai'i.

Experience: Former president of Castle Resorts & Hotels; former vice president Hawai'i region for Village Resorts.

Age: 43

Personal profile

• Self portrait: "I have a collaborative style. At Aston, we have a very strong executive committee made up of (seven) executive vice presidents or senior vice presidents. ... I may set the overall direction of the company, certainly on a long-term and on a macro scale, but for the most part. ... they run the day-to-day operations of the company."

• Favorite book: "In Search of Excellence," by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman, which Bloom first read when he was the general manager of the Lakeland Village Beach and Ski Resort in South Lake Tahoe, Nev., part of Village Resorts.

"They profiled the business practices, the characteristics, the traits of many of the excellent companies as identified by the two authors. Even though it's old and some of it is outdated, the sense of the book carries over to this day and laid a foundation for me. It made a big impression on me."

"One of the tenets I recall is, 'Stick to the knitting.' What Bob and Tom were suggesting was that the most successful companies focus on what they do best, rather than venture into areas they don't have much expertise in."

• Favorite Web site: google.com. "They cover a wide breadth of topics and Web sites. No matter what it is that I may be searching for, they seem to help me."

• Most remembered mentor: Tom Moorish, the retired former president of Village Resorts.

"He had a tremendous amount of integrity. His word was his bond. He wouldn't take what he would say lightly and he wouldn't quickly make promises. But any promises that he did make, he kept. ... What's most important is the person who lies beneath the management style. Mr. Moorish was golden inside."

• Best part of the job: "There's never a dull moment. Unlike where a factory may make widgets day in and day out, every day presents a series of different challenge. ... Unlike some pure hotel companies, we manage over 3,000 resort condominiums, made up of 3,000 individual owners. You have 3,000 bosses suggesting to you what to do and suggesting that they have the answer."

• Worst part of the job: "Not having enough time in the day to do everything that needs to be done."

• Trademark expression: "He that tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted."

"Essentially what it means is that whenever there's an opportunity to promote the company, one should seize that, create that opportunity. If you don't toot your own horn, somebody else will use it as a spittoon."

• Best decision as a leader: "Certainly the choice to join Aston was exactly the right decision. ... I had a couple of choices to stay in Hawai'i or go to the Mainland. But Hawai'i has been home for over 25 years."

• Worst decision as a leader: "To be quite honest, I've made a number of wrong decisions in my career, no question. Most of us do."

While renegotiating a management contract before Sept. 11, "I probably wasn't as flexible as I should have been. As a result, we lost that contract. In being honest with myself, in retrospect I should have been a little more flexible than I was."

• What I worry about most is: "Sales and marketing. We never know exactly which marketing programs, what sales programs, which programs may be the most effective. ... It's sometimes very difficult to measure the effectiveness of any single program and we may be devoting considerable human and financial resources to the tune of many millions of dollars a year. Certain other disciplines, such as accounting, are much more black and white. You're either wrong or you're right and you know it right then and there. In the sales and marketing discipline, there's a whole lot of gray."

• Most difficult challenge: "A full recovery following 9/11. It ties in very closely with sales and marketing. ... Internet sales have been increasing quite significantly and now make up 10 percent of total sales. Just a few years ago, it didn't even measure on the radar. The growth we've experienced over the last three years has been 200 to 300-plus percent annual growth. Will we continue to see that over the next couple of years? Maybe. But one would think that it can't continue with that growth indefinitely."

• Leadership tip: "As a company, and especially, as a service company in the hospitality industry, all one has when you boil it down is your reputation as both a company and as a person. What's important then is to always keep that in mind. Although there may be opportunities for some short-term gain, if it comes at the expense of potential long-term effect on one's integrity and one's reputation, it's never worth it."

Taking on... Responding to 9/11

After 9/11, Aston officials renegotiated about a dozen property management contracts. Under normal circumstances, Bloom said, "it's not unusual to enter into the discussions with some trepidation. But after 9/11 there was a higher level of sensitivity and concern."

"We placed ourselves in our clients' shoes and arrived at several alternative solutions that we felt would work for them. We entered the dialogue with an open mind and communicated honestly and had everything out on the table. To be quite frank, we had to practice a fair amount of patience as well. ... It was all successfully executed because we had a strong foundation with our clients to begin with. Whenever there's a challenge, it's always helpful to have a strong foundation."