Everyone loves a good to-do list, but maybe nobody loves the concept more than Greg Juceam. The president and CEO of Extended Stay America manages a mammoth to-do list each day, but far from being overwhelmed by it, it actually helps him turn off when the day is over.
“I guess for those that have worked with me, they all know that I bite off more than I can chew,” he said. “Just as a habit my to-do list never has less than 100 things on it. My wife tells me that I only have two speeds: turbo and off. In many cases the day is fully turbocharged in our industry. So hitting the off switch in the evening is pretty easy.”
While sleep is one of Juceam’s favorite activities and the pace of the day typically makes for a restful night, he does occasionally have a night filled with restless thoughts. In his case, those thoughts revolved around the best use of his time to yield optimal results.
“None of us have yet invented the day longer than 24 hours. So when you run a big company you're always thinking about the hour you just spent on an activity,” he said. “Was that the best [use of your] time? Did it preclude you from spending that hour on something else that may turn out to be more impactful? None of us can do it all so I focus a great deal of time on effective time management. I've learned that communicating around purpose and core values is really important and to rely on the awesome leadership teams around me to carry those cultural messages back to their areas.”
Climbing the Ladder
Juceam joined those “awesome leadership teams” and the rest of the ESA organization in November 2021 as COO, rising to the president and CEO position in February. His penchant for hotels, however, started before he even realized a career in the industry was a possibility.
“We used to travel with my father on trips. It was sort of bleisure before bleisure was actually actually a term. I always loved hotels and thought about maybe, you know, staying in hotels over the course of whatever I did, but I absolutely thought about being a lawyer and I also thought about being an educator,” he said. “But my sister told me that she had a friend that was at a college that specializes in hotel management. It turned out that that was Cornell [University] and so I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, there's actually a career in hotel management.’ And so that being a passion of mine, I then basically researched it and it became my dream to get in there and somehow I was able to make that happen.”
After he was accepted: “Any thoughts of going to law school or doing anything else were no longer of interest to me.”
And although Juceam is at the top of the food chain now, he definitely trod a varied road to get there.
“I was given some advice early to not always pick the most glamorous job, to try a little bit of everything to get a sense of what you liked so essentially, that's what I did,” he said. “I had an open mind. The first job I took my junior year was a marketing internship. But I also worked, in contrast, as an activities coordinator at a low-rent timeshare in Myrtle Beach [S.C.]. Operations at its finest—I was a solo act teaching water aerobics and overseeing sand-dollar painting, among other embarrassing activities.”
It didn’t take him long to realize that sales was an easier path than operations.
“I went to work for Bristol Hotels & Resorts, which was then known as a place where young Cornell hotel grads would get opportunities that most other companies reserved for more tenured professionals and that's where I got into sales,” he said. “I discovered pretty quickly that I was a terrible salesperson but had more of a knack for strategy and administration. And so that's ultimately how I became a director of sales.”
Juceam was director of sales at age 24, then VP of sales at 28, and at 31 he transitioned to VP of operations at Interstate Hotels & Resorts: “And then really over the next nine years, I worked my way up from a new newbie VP of ops to an SVP of ops and finally, the EVP of ops were at Interstate I co-chaired their North American full-service management division.”
After Interstate, Juceam entered Blackstone Group’s orbit, joining BRE Hotels & Resorts as COO and then CEO, then in 2018 moving on to president and CEO of the group’s G6 Hospitality before joining ESA in 2021.
Defending Hospitality
In addition to his day job, Juceam also is heavily involved in issues that affect the industry at large through the American Hotel & Lodging Association and the American Hotel & Lodging Foundation, serving on the boards of both as well as chairman of the AH&LF. He said he really started paying attention to the issues and the groups about five years ago.
“I heard the then-CEO of the AHLA give a speech about all the potential threats to our business, that if not addressed could have a seriously negative impact on our industry and a light bulb went off that if everybody thought the way I did passively, that bad things would likely happen to our industry and we would have missed out on opportunities to stand up and defend the hotel business that we all know and love,” he said. “It was really one of these like epiphany-inspired moments where I decided I would get involved.”
And with his “turbocharged” personality: “When I do things I really don’t like to do them halfway. I was going to go all in.”
“I became an AH&LA board member that year and the next and saw how much of an impact even one individual can make,” he said. “In 2019 I was I was approached about joining the board of the AHLA Foundation and in that conversation, I learned that there was a vacancy for the incoming board chair. As important as AHLA is to shape the industry priorities and policies, the AHLA Foundation really resonated with me stronger than anything because it's the arm of AHLA that gives back to people. This is where we build the careers and provide educational opportunities, all things that are near and dear to my heart as a hospitality-oriented professional.”
Juceam became chair of the foundation’s board of trustees in January 2020, having no idea that 70 days into his term the industry would be hit with COVID-19 and the worst downturn in the history of the hotel business.
“I and others on the board were thrust into this position to pivot the strategy and the mission of the foundation and I'm tremendously proud of what we achieved during that time,” he said. “We ultimately pledged $5 million to advance [diversity, equity and inclusion] initiatives across the industry. We ended up giving free training to over 20,000 furloughed industry associates, something like $3.5 million worth of free training. We built and educated 600,000 people on ways to survive and prevent human trafficking. We launched the Hospitality is Working platform, which is designed to attract job seekers back to our industry to bring folks back to the hotels as they were furloughed or laid off and to expose our industry to potentially new applicants.”
Juceam credits his parents for helping him along the path to success, in terms of leading hotel companies as well as leading the industry associations. Being the son of a lawyer and an educator gives him the ability to write and digest complex documents, as his dad did, as well as teach others, as his mom did.
“It really is a good combination,” he said. “It makes you think pragmatically and be able to resolve conflict, to make arguments and articulate when you need to but also to have that heart of an educator, to be giving and to want to watch others grow and mature and develop. For me, I couldn't have asked for anything better.”
EXTENDED STAY AMERICA
Headquarters: Charlotte, N.C.
Structure: Owner, franchisor
Portfolio: About 72,000 guestrooms, more than 650 properties
Website: www.extendedstayamerica.com