Investors are constantly clamouring for public companies capable of telling a good story.

Well, Ed Pitoniak is one CEO who knows a thing or two about the art of fashioning a winning script. The English major may even brighten up a board meeting with a Robert Frost quote.

The well-read CEO of Canadian Hotel Income Properties (CHIP), a real estate investment trust (REIT), spent 17 years in the magazine business as a writer and editor before making a career U-turn from a post as editor of SKI Magazine to the mountain resort business with Intrawest Corp. nine years ago.

The American-born Pitoniak flourished during an eight-year stint at Intrawest, where he was instrumental in a huge growth story with the world’s largest operator of mountain resorts.

Bayne Stanley photo, Business Edge
Former travel editor Ed Pitoniak has found new challenges in his role as CEO of Canadian Hotel Income Properties.

Now, as the rookie CEO of a company that owns or operates properties comprising 7,500 rooms, Pitoniak relishes the challenge of making the story sing.

1. To what career did you aspire as a youngster growing up in Massachusetts?

“Take your pick – pro athlete, cowboy, rock star. I can’t say that I had any specific ambition most of the way through school. But when I did get out of college (Amherst College) my aspiration at that point was to get into the writing business, which I did. Oddly enough, the first magazine I worked for was Cosmopolitan where I was an editorial assistant. When I went for the job interview, I think the editor who hired me was so struck by the novelty of having a male assistant that she pretty much offered me the job on the spot.”

2. After spending 17 years in the magazine business, including 10 years with SKI Magazine, how did you wind up in the resort and hospitality industry?

“I’d attended a couple of Intrawest meetings as a guest speaker and the next thing I knew a job offer came along. I think I was at a point in my career where I was looking down the road of journalism and thinking, ‘You know, I’m not sure this is a career or job I want to grow really old in.’ There was also another part of me that was saying, ‘Gee, it’d be really interesting to see if I could actually do it as opposed to editing a magazine that writes about it.’ There was also the fact that Intrawest then, as now, was such a dynamic company on the cusp of really growing. It was an exciting opportunity to hitch my wagon to a horse that was about to start running very fast down the track.”

3. How did your magazine experience lend itself to that new career?

“I think the main thing I was able to do was use what I’d learned – the art and science of communicating clearly. Communicating clearly is something that most people think they do. Yet when you really delve into what people are communicating and how well they’re being understood, you don’t have to hang around the schoolyard too long to realize that most are not understood nearly as well as they think. If they were, most businesses and organizations would perform way better than they do. I came into my work at Intrawest with a real sensitivity for not only the need to communicate clearly but the need to constantly check on whether I or anyone else was being truly understood. What that really drove home was the need to really use good, simple, clear concepts communicated in good, simple, clear language that was as free of business jargon as it could possibly be.”

4. After eight years at Intrawest, why did you jump to Canadian Hotel Income Properties (CHIP) five months ago?

“It was essentially the opportunity to lead a company, one that, like the one I came from, is in the business of creating hospitality experiences all across Canada. I came in with the sense that CHIP has a culture built around people with lots of energy, goodwill and a great desire to succeed. That hunch has been proven. My new teammates are the best kind anyone could want.”

5. What has the transition to being the head of a company been like for you?

“It has been a learning experience in the necessity of taking care. As a leader of a company, what you say stands a very good chance of being listened to. Therefore, you’d better make sure you make yourself clear and you’d better make sure you really mean what you say. Which means you’d better think about what you mean before you say it. You may make a random comment or what you think is an offhand passing comment and a few weeks later you find out that someone took that comment and started going down the road with it, either to a degree or in a direction you never intended.”

6. How would you describe your management style?

“I would say it’s collegial. My natural inclination is to want to lead and participate in teams that really are engaging as teams. They’re teams that are constantly questioning each other, constantly challenging each other and constantly doing so in a spirit of really aggressive and energetic goodwill.”

7. Are you trying to take CHIP in a new direction or looking to put your stamp on the organization?

“I’d be reluctant to say that after five months I’m ready or able to take the company in a significantly new direction, simply because the first five months by necessity have really had to be about learning – learning about the company, its marketplace and its potential. I think what I have seen already indicates that I have an opportunity to help the people in this company become more focused in their priorities. This is a company of energetic people full of great intentions and ambitions. And, as so often happens with people like that, they tend to want to try to do a lot – as some people like to put it, people who tend to want to try to boil the ocean. And that usually doesn’t take you very far. In this case, it’s a matter of helping people really identify the two or three things that if they were to focus their greatest energies on, will have the biggest impact on the organization.”

8. What would those things be?

“The ones really going to move the dial are those that will add value to our work experience, to our guest experience and to our financial results. The real art of it comes in having a way of evaluating the potential impact and relative feasibility of creating that impact in a way that makes it easier to identify the things you should do or shouldn’t do.

“One thing I’ve found here, which I also found at Intrawest and which I think you’ll tend to find at any operationally intense business, is that because most people come up through the operation, they feel a natural pull back to the operation every day almost regardless of what management level they’re serving at. As a result, you get a situation that is a bit like kids’ soccer where everybody swarms the ball. What you end up seeing is everybody swarming over opportunities to make small improvements in short periods of time. While we obviously do want to have people doing that, we also need people, especially at more senior management levels, who are willing and able to focus on making larger-scale improvements or changes in the business over longer periods of time.”

9. What’s your strategy in growing your revenue?

“I think we’ve got the opportunity to further develop our food and beverage businesses. We do over $100 million in revenue currently on food and beverage, which is a very strong and disproportionately high percentage of our revenue. Yet I think there’s more growth there. The other area of growth I think we have the opportunity to address is maximizing the use of and return on real estate. The question we have to ask is whether we have opportunities where, with either our external acreage or our internal square footage, we have higher and better uses for that space.”

10. Are you looking to expand your network of hotels through acquisitions?

“No, our focus is mainly on growing same-hotel sales. The hotel acquisition market right now is one in which most sellers are asking prices that are very hard to make work, especially within a real estate investment trust model.”

11. What’s your vision for CHIP?

“I would like for us to be known five years from now as the owners and operators of the liveliest hotels in Canada, with each of those hotels offering its own unique sense of place.”

12. And what will it take to achieve that?

“It obviously involves offering a good hotel experience in and around the fundamentals of the hotel experience, which is to say a great bed, a great bathroom and really good service. Above and beyond that, I think what really good hotels do to make their guests feel at home is give them a very strong and clear sense of where they are. You can wake up or walk around many hotels and you have no idea where you are. You could be in Calgary or you could be in Chattanooga. And I think any of us who have been business travellers for a long period of time, as I have, have had varied experiences. Sometimes, you’re saying, ‘Gawd, where the hell am I today? The hotel ain’t tellin’ me anything about where I am.’ I think that while you obviously need to operate a hotel to certain consistent standards, you’ve also got to leave room for the creativity of your staff to invest some local culture into the experience. I think the key at this point is to discuss that idea with the CHIP team both at the corporate level and at the hotel level to see if we share that understanding. If we do, then we have to see how we can pursue it in the best way possible.”

13. How has the challenge of running hotels changed in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks?

“After 9/11 and with the economic downturn in the past few years, I think a lot of people have questioned the need to leave their home or office. The development of technologies and the imposition of ‘cost discipline’ has led to a lot of people not leaving home. And we’re in a business where if people do not leave home, we don’t make any money. They’re either going to leave home for business or leisure reasons, and we along with other travel businesses have to be part of the process of giving people reasons to do that.

“Our hotels are about 60 per cent business travel and about 40 per cent leisure travel. I think we have to be mindful of the fact that business travel has been under some pressure with companies managing travel costs more tightly, and the development of technologies of conference-calling and webcasting that has seemingly lessened the need for people to be face to face.”

14. What’s the single most important thing you need to do to encourage business people to travel more?

“We have to provide an experience so that when they’re staying or meeting in our hotels, they’re seeing incremental value way beyond the value they would have realized staying at home or doing it by phone. If they’re going to come to our hotels for meetings, we’ve got to do everything we can to make sure their meetings are the richest and most productive possible. At the end, we’ve got to have them saying to each other, ‘Next time we’ve got to do this again, we’ve got to meet face to face again, we can’t go back to the phone or the webcast.’ ” 15. What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned since joining CHIP?

“I’ve finally figured out that strategy is a fancy business buzzword for what it is you’ve got to get better at as a company – or more specifically, who has to get better at what for that company to be successful. In fact, the who is very important, because I think what I’ve learned is that for any strategy to be any good, it has to be about who is going to get better at what. It always comes back to the people. There’s no strategy, at least in our business, that is ever going to take you very far unless people are in the heart of it.”

16. Who’s the entrepreneur you most admire?

“Can I cheat and give you two? I’d say Joe Houssian (CEO of Intrawest) and Hugh Smythe (Intrawest’s head of resort operations). I think one of the most important things I learned from Hugh was the value and the necessity of anticipation in an operational business. The most important thing a senior leader should do in an operational business is to be thinking ahead to what the operation has to do in a day’s time, a week’s time, a year’s time or five years’ time. From Joe, I learned how you take a 360-degree view of any given business situation or opportunity.”

17. If you had to trade places with one CEO for a day, with whom would it be?

“The CEO of Procter & Gamble ( Alan Lafley). I don’t think there’s any company out there today that knows more about brand management than P&G.”

18. What’s your favourite escape from work?

“This may sound funny given that it used to be work, but it’s skiing with my family. There is no better family or escape experience than being high up in the alpine on a winter’s day.”

19. What do you see yourself doing 10 years from today?

“I hope I’ll be leading and playing on a winning team of some kind. It may very well still be CHIP because it’s been a lot of fun so far. I’ve got a great appetite for engaging with people and work is a great way to do it. There’s a wonderful Robert Frost line about work: ‘Work is play for mortal stakes.’ To consign myself too early to a life where play is only play or there is nothing other than play that doesn’t have mortal stakes, I’m not sure how interesting that would be. It may not be business forever. If this all led to running a school some day, that may not be the worst thing either.”

20. What other goals are most meaningful to you?

“The goal of making my circle of friends and loved ones grow ever larger as life goes on, as opposed to ever smaller. I think that as sobering as it is to say so, the natural path in life for many is for that circle to get smaller. And I hope that it will always get bigger.”

THE COMPANY: CANADIAN HOTEL INCOME PROPERTIES REIT
* Brass: Ed Pitoniak, president/CEO; Kevin Grayston, vice- president/chief financial officer; Robert Pratt, senior vice-president, operations.
* Profile: Canadian Hotel Income Properties is a hotel real estate investment trust (REIT) focused on the mid-market and upscale market in full-service hotels. It currently owns or manages 32 hotels spanning all 10 Canadian provinces. The properties encompass approximately 7,500 rooms.
* Key Franchise Partners: Crowne Plaza, Marriott, Radisson, Sheraton, Delta, Ramada, Quality, Best Western, Howard Johnson.
* Recent Unit Price (HOT.UN-TSX): $10.15 (52-week range, $8.56-$11.09).
* Monthly Distribution Payment: 7.5 cents per unit.
* Website: www.chipreit.com
* Headquarters: Suite 1600, 1030 West Georgia St., Vancouver, B.C., V6E 2Y3.
* Phone/Fax: 604-646-2447/646-2404.

IN PROFILE: ED PITONIAK
* Title: President/CEO, Canadian Hotel Income Properties (CHIP) REIT.
* Born/raised/age: Westfield, Mass./48.
* Lives: West Vancouver.
* Education: Amherst College (Mass.), English major.
* Family: Wife Kate.
* Career: Pitoniak was appointed president and CEO of CHIP REIT on February 1 after eight years at Intrawest Corp., the world's largest operator and developer of mountain resorts. He was senior vice-president of resort enterprises with Intrawest until his departure. During that time, Intrawest grew market share for its resorts business by almost 50 per cent. Prior to joining Intrawest, Pitoniak spent 17 years in the magazine business with Cosmopolitan and SKI Magazine. He was editor of SKI.
* Pastime: Skiing.
* Milestone: Pitoniak became a Canadian citizen in May.

(Gyle Konotopetz can be reached at gyle@businessedge.ca)