Jens Heitland speaks with Glenn Turner, CEO of RBS, a hospitality software company that has grown from around 140 properties in 2020 to nearly five thousand today. Glenn has spent decades inside hospitality and technology businesses, and the conversation moves through delegation, incentives, artificial intelligence and the question of what a business owes the people inside it.

Glenn opens with a habit he keeps returning to. If a leader still has a to-do list, something has gone wrong somewhere in how work is being delegated. He replaces lists with regular conversations about where the business is going and why, a story he finds himself repeating constantly as RBS grows through acquisition.

The two talk about incentives beyond salary, and how recognition and attention often outlast money as a source of motivation. Glenn walks through the Profits First framework that shapes how a hospitality business has to reserve capital before it spends, since guests stop coming the moment a property looks tired. From there the conversation turns to artificial intelligence, where Glenn describes managing AI agents that watch reviews, invoices and guest communication around the clock, and compares using AI to riding a bicycle with your hands still on the handlebars.

Glenn also shares what he learned about trust and succession after a plane crash kept him out of his previous company for months, and the business ran without him regardless. Jens brings in his own experience mentoring young entrepreneurs from across Europe, and the two find the same gap in different generations: the instinct to reach for a solution before the problem itself is understood. Glenn tells a story from early in his career about a workplace argument over smoking breaks, and how the data ended up proving the opposite of what everyone assumed about productivity.

Toward the end, Glenn explains a question he asks people on his team that has nothing to do with business at all: how has your faith shaped what is happening for you. It is a question built to get past a rehearsed answer and toward the background that actually explains how someone thinks, which matters in a team spread across cultures and geographies. The two also talk about why hospitality, at its core, will always depend on physical presence, even as digital tools take over everything around it.

The conversation closes on where RBS and the hospitality industry are heading, and why Glenn believes real human connection is the one thing technology will never be able to disrupt.

Timecode:

00:00 Ep.259_Podcast_Glenn Turner

01:14 The To-Do List Trap

08:48 Building a Profitable Hospitality Business

33:54 AI: Opportunities and Risks

42:58 The Faith Question

Guest links:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jglennturner/

Business: https://rbsgo.com/

Jens Links:

https://www.jensheitland.com/links