In a number of ways, Laura Lee Blake, president and CEO of AAHOA, is the perfect person to lead the hotel owners association. Blake grew up in a small town in Iowa, part of a “strong and loving family” in a close-knit, very religious community. That mirrors the upbringing and current lifestyle of many of the group’s nearly 20,000 members and provides a common frame of reference for Blake and the members to start from.
“It was just a perfect upbringing,” Blake said. “I see a lot of that in the AAHOA community and how they interact. They have these discussions about how their parents grew up in villages next to each other and I can relate, growing up in a small town in Iowa like that, where we have a lot of similar kinds of connections.”
Another major connection Blake has with AAHOA’s members is being inspired by a parent’s experience in business—often that parent’s feeling of not having a voice or not being heard. In Blake’s case, it was her father, who owned a General Motors franchise in rural Iowa.
“As a small dealer, I remember him coming home and telling stories about different requirements and different restrictions they would have, and the heaviness that that would put on the business to try to comply with these issues,” she said. “And I remember he would always take the family to these big car conventions and at every car convention, there would be a meeting of the National Automobile Dealers Association. The officers of the NADA would be on the stage talking about what they were doing for the members, of course, and I remember sitting there thinking that they’re not addressing the issues that I know my dad has. One time, I leaned over to him and I said, ‘Dad, why don’t you get involved?’ And he shook his head and he said, ‘No, they’d never listen to me. I’m just a small dealer from Iowa.’ And as I sat there, I thought, ‘OK, I want to be on that stage, representing small dealers from Iowa.’
“All these years later, I think that’s where my heart is, to represent the AAHOA members that have the smaller hotels that don’t have the resources that some of these bigger ones have and that need a voice and are looking to AAHOA to be that voice.”
Blake took on the role of president and CEO last May, coming from law firm Connor, Fletcher & Hedenkamp in Irvine, Calif., where she had been partner. She previously worked for AAHOA for nearly 10 years, from 2005 to 2014.
Gaining Experience
But before Blake joined AAHOA, even before she decided on a career in law, there was the news. She’d already decided law and medicine weren’t for her—in fact, law was the last thing she wanted to do. She thought television reporter and anchor were her calling ,so she interned at the ABC TV station in Chicago during college.
“I love the news. I was following the news reporters around,” she recalled of those days. “Just amazing stories, of course, in Chicago. I ended up deciding to stay in Chicago [and] went to Columbia College for a semester to learn television and production from the actual people working in the industry, which was a bit unusual. I took, for example, a camera class from a guy that shot the Cubs game. It was truly an amazing experience.”
Blake returned to the University of Iowa to complete her degree and took a job at the TV station in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where she covered “fluff stories,” such as new baby animals at the zoo.
“I finally went to the general manager and I said, ‘Can’t I just get behind the news desk? You know, I don’t care if it’s 4 in the morning.’ And he said, ‘Oh, honey, just give it some time and you will be allowed, you will achieve that at some point in the future.’ They were not taking me seriously so I decided to go to law school because I wanted to then be a legal correspondent. I figured I could cover the legal side of the news.”
Going to law school led to opportunities to clerk for two law firms in Dallas, and Blake “absolutely fell in love with the law.”
Blake was a business litigator during her law career, which meant big lawsuits and trials between companies. The skills required for those kinds of in-depth, intense cases come in handy during her role at AAHOA, especially with the group’s discussions with various hotel brands about the issues regarding fair franchising.
“[It helps] to not be fearful or not be concerned [about] a healthy debate, and that’s what I would call this—it’s a healthy debate about the future of franchising, what is necessary to sustain the business model,” she said. “I feel very comfortable that there [are] also the similarities with representing a client in many ways. I kind of internally think of our members as clients, that they need a voice before these franchisors to speak on their behalf, to advocate on their behalf, to address some unfair principles. And so I’m very comfortable with healthy debates. I love great discussions. Professionally, we can agree to disagree and learn from each other and hopefully, at some point, come together. I learned a lot of that in litigation.”