Burt Cabanas moved to Miami from Cuba when he was 10 years old, following the death of his father. While his family planned to return to Cuba, they were unexpectedly exiled to this country in the aftermath of Castro's revolution. At 14, the young Cabanas’ took his first job was in the hospitality industry: Pool boy at a Miami Beach hotel. He never really left the industry.

Today, Cabanas leads Benchmark Hospitality International, an independent hospitality management company he founded 30 years ago. The company has a portfolio of 35 boutique hotels, resorts and conference centers, and more than 6,000 employees coast to coast, including Hawaii and Japan

We caught up with Cabanas when he was at his second home in Florida preparing for his children and grandchildren to visit during the Easter holiday.

What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in 30 years?
E-commerce and technology. You can’t get away from them. Just think of everything we used to do before. For example, in the past, 800-numbers dominated marketing for everything but groups. Now customer purchase decisions may be done online. The deck is no longer stacked against the independent hotel or resort because they lack the budget to reach potential guests. Furthermore, advanced technology enables guest history systems to implement intuitive applications and "remember" guests' preferences.

A conference room at The Heldrich, a 235-room hotel in New Brunswick, NJ operated by Benchmark Hospitality

What’s stayed the same?
E-commerce is the bursting bomb of change. Anything that’s stayed the same has still moved at least a couple of clicks. That includes marketing, not just in how we get customers to come to us, but how they perceive us.

How does today’s market compare to the best and worst you’ve seen?
This is the worst amount of time we’ve been in a downturn as far as impact. However, we’re much more knowledgeable today than we were in the downturn of the savings and loan debacle. The AIG effect has come and gone for the majority of us. It stuck around a little longer in places like Scottsdale and Hawaii. Now the problem is just the economy.

What do you hope to do next?
My intent, over a 10-year period, is to double the size of the company. We’ve spent $2 million in technology to get us ahead of the competition. We have 700 managers who mostly grew up through hourly ranks. We want to give them opportunities to grow. We want to become the independent management company of choice.

What advice would you give a conference center operator? A trade secret, if you will.
I would say it’s not a secret, but advice. Don’t get dogmatic about what a conference center is, or should be, and overlook the needs of your customer. You need to be pliable, to bend to your client—the meeting planner—especially because most meeting planners have another job in their company. They need to feel you’re not going to put them at risk in their company by not focusing on their needs.

Your website is all about people. Tell me about that.
I believe people make our industry and people’s feelings are impacted by people. For example, our guests’ feelings are impacted by our employees. Those feelings about our personal luxury hotels are very important. One of the things we work hard at in the personal luxury side of our business is not talking about the thread-count of the sheets. It’s not as important as how the employees are trained and how customers feel.

How do you train your people?
Benchmark University was formed in late 1980s to create two management training programs for every manager in the company every year. It was meant to keep our managers up to date on all of the activities that would make them more successful. It’s evolved over 20 years to include training all employees. It can now include web-based programs, which allow everyone access to training programs.

What made you so ambitious? Did you have a master plan? Or grow into it?
It’s a combination of nervous anxiety—always wanting to do better—and the immigrant mentality, except in my case the exile mentality. My family lost everything. We started from scratch. I worked hard. I put myself through school. That put a certain momentum in my step that always has me reaching for the next rung on the ladder. I was always looking for opportunities. I still have that momentum.

What advice would you give an ambitious GM?
Sometimes we worry too much about the color of drapes. At the end of the day the way the customer feels when he leaves, how the employees made them feel when they leave, are really what matters. If you have a hotel that needs renovation, but a customer feels like he’s had the best experience in the world, he’ll never notice the frayed carpet.

Do you like to travel?
I enjoy travel. I travel enormously. I have enough frequent flyer miles to fly 187 times around the world. Spain and South African fall in the places we’ve gone to more than twice.

What’s your favorite place to stay, not operated by Benchmark Hospitality?
I love anywhere where there’s a warm, clear ocean. You could put me in a pup tent on a white sandy beach. If you asked my wife she’d say we like a little place in Sausalito called Inn Above Tide. All the rooms have fireplaces and little balconies cantilever over the water.