Mitch Patel is an artist. Not in the literal sense—although he’s always had aspirations to be a painter. As a developer, the founder/president/CEO of Vision Hospitality Group is an artist of hotels, taking a piece of dirt that’s a blank canvas and creating buildings where, as he put it, people get engaged, married, celebrate milestones and do business transactions.
Working in the hotel industry as a developer, owner and operator has become his passion, and that passion has enabled him to lead Vision Hospitality Group for 25 years—where his company has grown from one Homewood Suites in Chattanooga, TN, to a portfolio of more than 40 hotels in eight states, with more to come in the pipeline.
The Patel family—Arjun, Aleyna, Parul, Mitch and Ishani—at the event celebrating Vision’s 25th anniversary
His love for the industry didn’t come immediately. His family emigrated to California from India in the late 1960s chasing the American Dream. His father, Ish Patel, came to the U.S. with only $8 in his pocket before becoming the first person in his family to graduate high school and go on to college. Today, he serves as chairman of Vision Hospitality Group.
Shortly after earning his master’s degree from the University of California-Davis, Ish Patel decided to lease the 11-room Steven’s Motel in Stockton, CA. It was his son’s introduction to the lodging industry.
“We moved into an apartment behind the motel office, and I remember helping out in the family business—cleaning rooms, doing laundry, checking in guests—as an eight-year-old kid,” Mitch Patel said. “That was the last thing I wanted to do for a career.”
Soon after, his family moved to Cleveland, TN, where Ish Patel bought a larger motel, a Scottish Inn. At 10 years old, Mitch Patel once again was called on to help out in his family business.
“When my friends were taking vacations for spring break and summer, the motels were busier, so they needed help even more,” he said. “So, even as I was a teenager, my family relied on me for more help during those times. We didn’t take vacations. We didn’t go hardly anywhere because the business was busier.”
It was at this motel where the younger Patel had his first lesson in business. He explained, “I was in charge of the vending machines. When I got a driver’s license at 16, my dad said, ‘I want you to shop around for the best deals for Coke and [other]soft drinks, and I want you to stock our machines. If you buy something at 10 cents and you sell it at 25 cents, there is a profit there right in our machine.’”
When it was time to go to college, he had yet to catch the hotel industry bug, so he studied civil engineering at the University of Tennessee. “My parents would always tell me to be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer,” Patel said. “They’d say, ‘We are working hard in this business so you can have a better life than we have.’ If you think about it, that’s every parent’s dream. So, I became a transportation engineer.”
After graduating, he got a job in Atlanta designing bridges and highways and doing traffic plans. But, something wasn’t right.
“My best friend, I would often say, was my watch,” he exclaimed. “I couldn’t wait until noon, or five o’clock to go home, and that was no way to live a life. I thought there has to be something more. I just didn’t love it.”
TOP AND ABOVE: The Edwin hotel features more than 200 pieces of art commissioned by Mitch Patel.
The hotel industry comes calling
It was 1997 at the age of 27 when he really got his start in the industry as a managing partner of the Homewood Suites by Hilton Chattanooga-Hamilton Place in Chattanooga, TN.
“My uncle had this opportunity to build and manage [the hotel],” he said. “I had saved up $3,000 in three years working as an engineer, and I needed significantly more than that for my share of the equity. I borrowed from friends and family, with interest. I had to convince some partners to be in the deal and then had to convince a lender.”
He continued, “After all that, my uncle said, ‘You’re a civil engineer. Why do we need to hire a contractor? The numbers are coming in really high. Why don’t you go build it as a contractor?’ I took on that challenge at zero salary and no development fees. When we opened the hotel, I literally took off my hard hat and learned how to put on a tie. I became the general manager of this hotel at the age of 27.”
The hotel didn’t perform well at the start—10% occupancy the first month, 15% the second month, according to Patel, who added, “So, I said, ‘We can’t give up. We have to dig in.’ And, we did. In 18 months of hard work and dedication, we became the number-one hotel in the market.”
It was then that he found his passion for the business. “When you have a deep passion for something, you will work harder, overcome obstacles and find success,” Patel said. “When I was an engineer, I was working. When I got into the hotel business, I didn’t feel like I was working. We say this often: Put the squirrel in the tree and the fish in the sea. So, I was a squirrel in the water when I was an engineer and now I get to climb every single day.”
While he began looking to add a second and third hotel, he decided to come up with a company name. A mallard duck sign became part of the story.
“When we opened [the first]hotel, I was Mitch Patel, Homewood Suites general manager,” he offered. “A couple of years later, I was looking at a second hotel venture in Nashville, and potentially even a third one. When I would talk to landowners, partners, lenders and even brand companies, I didn’t want to say I was a general manager. So, there was a boardroom on the second floor of the Homewood, and I went up and took that space. I took down the mallard duck sign that said ‘Boardroom,’ and I came up with a company name—Vision Hospitality Group. I was the only employee of Vision Hospitality Group, but I was a proud owner of a management and development company.”
Company culture and Vision Values
From the start, Patel began thinking about company culture and what it would be. “Early on, as I was the general manager of this hotel, I realized that this business is not necessarily about the bricks and mortar, and it’s not necessarily about the location or the brand,” he said. “All those things are important, but what’s most important is the people. This business is about people at the end of the day. I learned that, first of all, you have to surround yourself with great people with great positive attitudes. I could teach people a lot of things, but I couldn’t teach the willingness to want to learn and that positive attitude.”
The Grady hotel is an adaptive-reuse of a 140-year-old building in downtown Louisville.
So, the company’s value system, Vision Values, was created. “They weren’t all flushed out early on, but there was dedication, integrity, respect and these kinds of things that were coming to me,” Patel said. “As I was looking for people, I wanted to make sure that they fit the value system, they fit our culture and then we could figure everything out from there.”
Patel shared that during the process of crafting each of the Vision Values, he learned that there are two ways to lead. “One is leading out of fear,” he explained. “I can have someone move a box from one to another place and demand it. But, that can’t be sustainable. Or, I can lead out of mutual admiration and respect. Now, with that box, I’m going to tell them, ‘Let me help you with that,’ and at some point they’re going to say, ‘Mitch, I’ve got it, I can do it. I appreciate all the support and guidance, but I’ve got it.’”
Today, the CEO said, Vision Hospitality Group is doubling down on its culture and investing more into it than ever before. He added, “Think of it as a tree. You have to have a strong foundation and deep roots. You have to prune it and fertilize it, and you have to water it every single day to have a strong foundation. And, then, the outcomes are market share, guest satisfaction, profitability and those things. So, we focus on that trunk every single day.”
Community is one of the tenets of Vision Values, and Patel and the rest of the company are strong proponents of giving back.
“We found out a while ago that almost everyone wants to be a part of something bigger, and if they share our values and beliefs, then they have a heart and want to contribute in the way they think they could contribute,” said Patel. “It’s very difficult for people to contribute money and time when they’re already spending a lot of time working hard for a company like ours and being at home with their families. So, we want to give our team opportunities to give back through us. We have partnered with 75 to 100 organizations over the years. It’s very important to us and has become part of our DNA. We incentivize our associates to volunteer in their communities. We almost make it a requirement. First of all, I think it’s the right thing to do. Second, it builds associate engagement. There’s more of a purpose in their lives.”
Vision Hospitality Group’s first property.
Silver anniversary
One of the company’s philanthropic efforts was donating $25,000 to The Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga. A fitting gift considering Patel’s love of art.
“I love to take a piece of paper and just draw and color and paint—and create something that I could be proud of,” he said. “Fast forward to when I had the opportunity to develop a few hotels. One particular hotel, The Edwin, is right across the street from the art museum. The hotel had to be centered around art, so I personally commissioned over 200 pieces of art by probably 75 to 80 local artists. We put QR codes next to every piece of art because in order to appreciate something, you have to be educated on it.”
General Manager Mitch Patel (left) with a front-desk agent at the Homewood Suites by Hilton Chattanooga-Hamilton Place
He added, “I think that art inspires us and sometimes, there’s a piece of art that you just find or you see in a gallery or at a studio, and then you’re just mesmerized by it. I want others to be inspired by art as well. It doesn’t mean that you have to be a painter or an artist in the true sense. We’re all artists, to some degree. Our housekeepers are artists, our front desk people are artists. There’s so much more to art than just what people think art is.”
The Hunter Museum was the site of the 25th-anniversary celebration in April. Vision Hospitality Group executives and employees, as well as brand leaders, partners and vendors were on hand.
“It took a lot of people to get us to where we are today, and we wanted to celebrate with those people,” said Patel. “It was an opportunity for us to thank each and every one of the individuals that have made this journey possible. And, we’re just getting started.”
He added, ‘We have 40-plus hotels in eight states, and we have 15-16 hotels in our pipeline. We’re going to probably reach the $1-billion market cap by the end of the year because we’re buying a hotel in Celebration, FL. We’re not really buyers of hotels. We’re builders, and we’ve built over 60 hotels in our lifetime. So, that’s just one milestone, and we’ve got another half-billion dollars in development that’s taking place beyond that. So, onward and upward.”
The company’s portfolio consists of hotels primarily in the Southeast, “but we do have a hotel out west in Denver, and we are developing another hotel right now in Boulder, CO,” said Patel. “We have a hotel down in Houston, and we opened a hotel in Cincinnati [Kinley Cincinnati] a couple of years ago, which is a 120-year-old building where we did an adaptive-reuse, and it’s now an independent boutique hotel. We bought a 140-year-old building in downtown Louisville and converted it into The Grady, which is also an independent boutique hotel.
“We started with the Homewood Suites and have done a lot of Hampton Inns, Residence Inns and Courtyards, and we still do them,” he continued. “Those are great hotels for us, but we also are into the boutique and lifestyle hotel space and have over 15 food & beverage outlets now and growing—from rooftop bars to speakeasies to full-service restaurants—in our hotels, so it’s evolving.”
The company is always looking for new markets for its hotels. Patel pointed to Nashville, Raleigh, NC, and Atlanta as possibilities.
“We’re looking at high-growth cities that have a high quality of life and are where people want to move,” he said. “We love Florida, and we’re buying an Autograph Collection hotel in Orlando, and we’re looking at building a hotel near a beach that we’ll be announcing soon. We’ll probably stay in the South. There’s a lot of opportunities in the South, so we don’t need to go to California or up in Maine to necessarily grow.”
Like most hospitality companies, Vision Hospitality Group is dealing with the labor shortage plaguing most industries. Patel noted that it’s getting better with each month, but it will continue to be a challenge.
“We are getting close to coming back to where we were in terms of total employment, but turnover is a big challenge,” he said. “People will come join you and then, within days, decide that it’s not for them. The only solution that I see is immigration reform. There are people who want to come into this country and would love to take these jobs. We could create a better life for them.”
Patel is a second-generation hotelier, but would he want his children to follow in his footsteps?
“It’s a great opportunity for one of my children or all of them to get in this field, but they have to find their own path,” he said. “I definitely don’t want to push them. I want them to find their passion. If their passion is in hospitality, great. If their passion is in medicine, that’s great, too. But, if they find their passion in hospitality, then I would love it. I think that I could definitely help them, and I would be thrilled that there would be some sort of succession in this company that we’ve created.”
The growth plan for Vision Hospitality Group is simple: Keep doing what it has been doing for the last 25 years.
“Every company creates value differently, and we’ve created value through development,” said Patel. “We are developers. That’s what’s in our DNA. And, we’re obviously a fully vertically integrated company—we develop these assets, we own these assets and we operate these hotels, as well. We would love to continue to develop great hotels with great brands in great markets with multiple demand generators and are growing in population and in employment.”
And, as long as working in the hotel industry remains his passion, Patel will be running Vision Hospitality Group.
