Adam Robinson planned to teach high school history until a friend pulled him into recruiting during the Y2K frenzy, and a later stint installing software in hotels showed him firsthand how staff turnover was hurting properties. That insight led him to found Hireology, where he has spent two decades helping hospitality employers find and keep frontline workers. Susan and Adam talk about shrinking labor pools, AI-powered pipelines, and recruiting as a profit center.

What You'll Learn

- How curling fax paper led Adam into hospitality
- Why hotel turnover is a solvable problem
- Why last year's high school class is the biggest we'll ever see
- How the talent pond is about to shrink by half
- Why half of all job applicants never get opened
- How AI turned job seekers into resume cannons
- Why 80% of candidates pick the robot interviewer
- What you'll learn by applying to your own hotel on your phone
- When half of all hospitality turnover happens
- What agent vs. agent combat means for hiring
- What senior living knows about hiring that hotels don't

Key takeaway: With the labor pool shrinking, hotels that move fast, clear bottlenecks with AI, and treat hiring as a revenue driver will win the talent race.

Thank you to Lodgify for sponsoring Top Floor! Access 20% off with code TOPFLOOR20 here. [https://www.lodgify.com/]

Adam Robinson on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamrobinson1/

Hireology
https://www.hireology.com

Join the Top Floor Mail Club
https://www.topfloorpodcast.com/mail-club

Damon Lawrence caught the hotel bug at the front desk while he was a student at Howard University, and he co-founded Homage Hospitality to celebrate Black culture through boutique hotel ownership. After the pandemic wrecked his deal pipeline, he moved into consulting and hotel capital markets brokerage, where weeks of spreadsheet-heavy underwriting pushed him to build Underwrote, an AI underwriting platform made just for hospitality real estate. Susan and Damon talk about tax credits, terminology tests, and too many hotels.

What You'll Learn

- Why watching Thompson Hotels' founders live like rock stars sold Damon on ownership
- What his name spelled backwards says about his hotel dreams
- Why a million dollars impresses Silicon Valley but barely moves a hotel deal
- Why hotels are the hardest asset in commercial real estate to model
- What FF&E has to do with your property tax bill
- Why the industry guards information nobody is trying to steal
- How soft costs can supersize a historic tax credit package
- Why so many hotel deals only work with incentives, and whether they should happen at all
- What a tired Quality Inn in Fort Wayne can teach developers

Key takeaway: Hotel deals reward people who learn the language, model the details generic tools miss, and spot value in buildings everyone else has written off.

Damon Lawrence on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hauspitality/

Underwrote
https://www.underwrote.ai/

Join the Top Floor Mail Club
https://www.topfloorpodcast.com/mail-club

Genna Panagopoulos grew up in her family's restaurant, studied hospitality at Michigan State, and cut her teeth on feasibility work at Davidson Hotels before moving into development and eventually brand strategy at IHG. Now she leads U.S. and Canada development for Minor Hotels, the Bangkok-based company behind Anantara and the newly launched Wolseley, and she's the only member of her team based in North America, building the brand's presence here from scratch. Susan and Genna talk about brand building, luxury's limits, and late nights across time zones.

What You'll Learn

- What it takes to trade feasibility spreadsheets for brand dreaming
- Why Genna calls Minor Hotels a "beautiful medium-sized company" (not about hotel count)
- How brand language gets lost in translation between Bangkok, Madrid, and the US
- Why Genna says no to more deals than she says yes to
- What "vanilla luxury" looks like, and why Anantara refuses to be it
- Why luxury hotels keep shrugging off downturns other segments can't escape
- How ultra-remote luxury hotels skip the competition entirely
- What Anantara's Miami project is quietly building toward
- Where hotel wellness is headed next, and it's not another spa menu
- Why Genna thinks the hotel industry has too many brands

Key takeaway:

The brands that win the next decade of luxury hospitality will be the ones disciplined enough to say no, stay distinct, and resist adding just one more lookalike to the shelf.

Thank you to Lodgify for sponsoring Top Floor! Access 20% off with code TOPFLOOR20 here. [https://www.lodgify.com/]

Genna Panagopoulos on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/genna-panagopoulos-726a7525/

Minor Hotels
https://www.minorhotels.com/en

Join the Top Floor Mail Club
https://www.topfloorpodcast.com/mail-club