Episode 7
From Muffin Maker to Inn Keeper with Robert Blood
I'd love to hear, you know, why Lark, how you started, your founder journey. Because I'm a founder and I just love founder stories, so yeah.
Rob Blood (00:53)
Yeah, we all have a little bit of a screw loose, right? Founders. We all set out to do something that we are passionate about. It's not a totally unique story to me. It's a fun story. In college, I was an English major on the heels of… figuring out that I couldn't do calculus, so I couldn't be an economics major. You know, might as well figure it out earlier, right? So I took like four E-comm classes freshman year and then couldn't get past statistics or some shit like that in the math department. And so I was like, I found a really inspirational English professor. Da-da-da, long story short, ended up working in higher education administration and teaching a bit. And I found there's a magazine in New England called Yankee Magazine. I don't even know if it's still around, but there was a contest in Yankee Magazine back in the late 90s. No, it was early 2000s. It was Win an Inn. And so you wrote an essay and send in a hundred bucks. And if they got enough entries, they would choose the one who, wrote the best essay, pulled on their heartstrings enough. And short circuit, the story, I did not win. It wasn't a viable contest. They didn't get enough. So there's no, Hallmark movie here, but it was what got my like juices stirring on, on the idea of getting into inn keeping and hospitality. And so that summer I took a trip out to Nantucket and paid 25 bucks and stayed at the youth hostel out there. I went to see a band that I liked and I came back and was like, I gotta move there. Just gotta go. And there was a couple advertising for an innkeeper couple for the Sherburn Inn on Nantucket. Eight rooms, typical bed and breakfast. I said to my girlfriend, I was like, you wanna do this together? She said, all right.
And so we wrote letters, went for the interview. We were hired with no experience. And by June, we were living in the basement of the Sherbourne Inn, baking muffins. And that's where I found my calling Doug. I was like, I just loved it. I loved creating experiences for people. I loved the actual work of doing it. Like I found great joy in folding sheets and doing the manual work. The first morning the muffins didn't come out of the muffin pan so everyone had English muffins for breakfast. But that's where it kind of got going for me and where I started to I guess write my thesis, right? And so the best thing that happened in that experience, there were many, but one of the partners in this inn was a graduate of Harvard Business School and he helped me write my first business plan, which led to me and my girlfriend at the time buying the Captain Fairfield Inn in Kennebunkport.
Fully leveraged, like 100 % leverage, not one dollar of equity in that thing. My mom was kind enough to lend us the down payment at 6 % interest, 10 year payback. So not a gift. We did SBA, conventional financing, and we closed on June 1st of 2004. Which is the beginning of the busy season in New England. So it started making money and spinning off cash and like, could eventually afford a bed for the room that we were sleeping in. So we got off the floor, and just bootstrapped it, right? Learned everything. Like we flipped the pancakes. We had one housekeeper and no other staff. And so really learned it by doing it. And I found that it resonated with me in a really meaningful way, both the business side and the creative side and the actual like operational side I loved. And the community around it like shared purpose in Kennybunkport was awesome. My girlfriend turns out she was an introvert and didn't love the threat of someone knocking on your door looking for extra towels at 10:30 at night. So we moved out after three years and hired someone else to run the inn with our close supervision and we had invested in another property on Nantucket with our bosses that made it a little portfolio of two. So we started learning how to manage through other people.
And we started redoing a room here and there, testing it out. And so we used that nine room inn as our test kitchen in a way to develop a thesis around how we could evolve hospitality in the small spaces in New England. So that was in 2012, after owning those two properties for a little while and working on some other properties, consulting, I started Lark. We started Lark with four, four properties, two on Nantucket, one in Kennebunkport and one in Newport, Rhode Island. And people just started noticing that we were doing something different. Had a little bit of a different spin on how, things should be. We, we opened the Atwater, which was our first sort of like prototypical, not, not prototypical, but it was intended to be a Lark Hotel. And it was like in the vision of what we had been learning. And the first day we were training our staff and we were on the, we ended up on the Today show and the phone just started ringing. And so we were booked for the summer within like two weeks. And then we were on the Condé Nast hot list and all this other stuff. Cause my friend Rebecca did a little bit of PR for us on the side, like just like as a favor. And so it was just a confluence of really great things that came together to turn into the roller coaster that we've been on since then, which has led to 75 hotels in our portfolio across 26 states and two countries and 80 people working on the leadership team and the off property support team. And it's been fun and wild. And I can say more, but I've been talking a lot, so I'm going to pause.
Doug Logan (06:09)
I'm just curious if your muffin cooking skills gotten any better.
Rob Blood (06:13)
They were really good Doug for a long time. I think they've probably regressed a lot. The one thing about running a larger company is that you don't get to bake the muffins as much as you used to.
Doug Logan (06:22)
Well, no, that's really, I mean, you at least went to college. I went to art school for like a day and stepped out and thought I knew what I was doing and I'm still doing it because at that time, 2002, the web, which is what caught my attention, was still the wild west. I mean, people were having their nephews or some cousin build them a website and it was more important that a brochure at that time than it was a website. And now most companies don't even have a brochure. So, you know, just kind of comes full circle in that sense. For me, it was I, I learned and then went to school to try to learn more and was capable at that point of teaching the class level they were at. So I just said, well, I think I know more than the professor. I don't think I'm going to learn something. So I left. I think I was right. I'm not right about a lot of things, but that school is out of business. And 20 plus years later, I'm still in business. I think probably that means I was right at least about one thing.
Rob Blood (07:19)
Yeah. That was a good thing to be right about. mean, betting on yourself. And I think that's a founder, that's like a founder mentality is that ultimately you end up, I was a terrible employee, by the way, when I worked, couldn't. I was never meant to be an employee. So I think that that plus like just willing to bet on yourself is one of those things that either really works well if the bet's worthy or, you know, it doesn't. For you, it worked. It's working so far for me.
Doug Logan (07:24)
It was. Yeah. Well, and I think also, I mean, like hearing your story about that property getting on Good Morning America is great. And I think to a lot of people that probably looks like overnight success, but that took you 10 years. That sounds like to get to, and a lot of muffins as well. You have to get to that point where you were not sleeping on the floor, but you could afford a bed and then move up. Then, you know, it's, it's more, know, being a founder is less about hitting the lottery, in that case, and more about being ready when the lottery shows up to be able to act on it, right? When that opportunity knocks, you're able to open that door and run with it, you know?
Rob Blood (08:23)
I think that's so right. And regardless of whether you went to college or not, you definitely paid tuition along the way in some way, right? The sweat equity you've put into it, the mistakes that have been made that have cost or that I've made, I should say the mistakes I made that cost me money, that's sort of tuition, right? I think I always like to say that I paid my mom back in three years and her all of her friends told her not to make that investment because you could never make money in a nine room in. And so I like I think that founders also a lot of the time founders also do things in a way that other people tell them not to or don't necessarily have. Like if I'd gone to Cornell Hotel School there's no way I'd be running hotels under 100 keys because I would have been told you can't make money doing that.
I don't know. I think that when you bootstrap something and you learn along the way, you do things in ways that actually work and break molds that you don't even know are there. I just think that that's where innovation happens is when you're not taught to do something, but you figure out how to do it, or you find a space that needs filling, that no one even knew needed filling. It's how things evolve or how things radically change.
Doug Logan (09:27)
I mean, your story started from a place of passion, right? Like you were inspired young and it's easier to make, you know, crazy decisions when we're younger, right? It's much harder the older we get to start a new business or try something new, but you didn't start from the perspective of, think running a nine room in is a great way for, you know, my financial future. Right. Like that was, I don't think that thought ever crossed your mind. Doesn't sound like, yeah. And, but I think that's, I think that's key. Right. That's, I think that's probably a universal shared amongst most founders. I know for a fact that I can make a lot more money going to work for somebody else than running my own agency. But I would hate it. I would absolutely hate it.
Rob Blood (09:55)
No, it's full of passion. Want to do something. Yeah. I found that whenever I've diverged from my passion, which is creativity and creation, and I thought about how do we make more money, it goes the other way, it goes the wrong way. And so I kind of feel like being guided by the principle of what started it all, which is passion about creating experiences and spaces and working independently in a space that other people don't necessarily choose to work in has been the thing that has caused success. And then when I start thinking about like, we've been approached about mergers and acquisitions and all this kind of stuff. And when my head goes down into that space, things stop going well. When I'm, when I stopped feeding my soul, it doesn't work well for anybody who's connected to that, that hunger. I don't know. It's interesting.
Doug Logan (11:03)
I look at it as like people and profit. And I think that's, there's two different ways. To me, those are the most important things, right? It's you look at a business and you say, I, am I profit focused or am I people focused? And I think it's not realistic to be really solely focused on one over the other. Right. There's plenty of businesses out there that are all profit focused. And then there are plenty of businesses out there that are solely people focused and that those would be nonprofits. Right. And I think what's healthy is a balance of both because we can't serve the people that we work with either in your office, in your team, or the people on the other side of the table from you, your clients and customers, whatever they may be, if you're not profitable. Right. But you also can't sacrifice those relationships, those people just for profit because nobody's gonna wanna follow you if that's. Yeah.
Rob Blood (11:51)
Right. Yeah. You lose your soul. You lose your following. And I think hospitality is in a bit of a revolution at the moment because we're in a, in a time period where tech is finally enabling us to do things that have been impossible in the past and reach more people and serve people in a good way. And yet when you try to replace the humanity of hospitality with tech, you fail. And we've seen it again and again and again. So, you know, we are unapologetically people first at Lark. It's like all of our stakeholders are people. Guests, hotel owners, our team. They just, we have to serve people and we have to enable that service with great tech because what we don't want… And we're kind of like off topic a little bit here, but we've been thinking about this a tremendous amount, right?
What we've been thinking about a lot is how do we put our people in front of people in the most meaningful way? And that is to use tech to take transactional moments away, right? To take the busy work that can be completed behind the scenes off property and outside of the purview of the people who are really supposed to be creating experiences. And I think some people, like some companies, when they've tried to replace humans with technology, have found that it's really hard in our world to do that. I think we were at a conference recently together where we were talking about AI and someone made a very meaningful point, which is if you're an interesting person and you form good connections, you're not going to be replaced by AI or tech. But if you're not, you better watch out. So, I know. just weird, like we're just at this weird point because historically hotel tech has been terrible. And I feel like finally we're in this Renaissance moment where we have choices and we have optionality and we can do what we want with it instead of having it be placed in place in the weirdest Frankenstein terrible way possible.
Doug Logan (13:46)
Yeah. Well, I think that, I mean, not to blow smoke up the Lark Hotel aspect of it, but I mean, think you in a way provide that to hoteliers because you are giving them access to… not just better technology, also processes and the learnings of what they would get from a flag, from a bigger group, right? And they're able to still remain independent and kind of leverage that, right? I mean, that's what you're doing. I mean, not solely, but part of what you do. And so they're leveraging that and it's phenomenal because they're getting a lot of those benefits and the guidance. And I think a lot of times, and this isn't just, just true of the hospitality space, but I think a lot of times what happens is that there's just so many options and you end up, you know, I think we were at another conference, the same conference, but in a different location when we were in New York and it was all tech focused. I remember someone on stage saying they've got 50 pieces of software. This stuck out at me 50, and this was a very well known hotel.
Rob Blood (14:51)
Yeah.
Doug Logan (14:52)
And she was like, if someone here would just consolidate even five of them into one, I'm like, 50.
Rob Blood (14:58)
At least make them all work together so you don't have to manage those pieces, right? Insane.
Doug Logan (15:03)
Yeah, it is. It's very, so it's probably a lot easier in some regards as a smaller property to be able to start and just be like, yeah, we're gonna, the technical debt there is low, hopefully, right?
Rob Blood (15:16)
Yeah, It's easier to be nimble when you're small. I mean, having 75 hotels have to make a change is kind of a big deal, but it's pretty easy for us to be nimble.
Doug Logan (15:18)
Hmm.
Rob Blood (15:27)
You know, you always want to know what your return on ad spend is and this and that, what metrics there are and, you know, how you're converting at the bottom of the funnel and all the stuff you guys talk about better than I do. But the other piece for me is like, how do we create great brand awareness and bring brand stickiness and loyalty? And it's not, you know, it's not always. We don't always get the greatest return on ad spend when we're trying to create awareness in the world for who Lark is. And hopefully it'll trickle down eventually, but I don't know.
Doug Logan (15:55)
Yeah. I mean, I think, I think a lot of that we've been kind of spoiled, right? I mean, cause I'm going back to like when I started, mean, like analytics and everything that we could track, track everything. And, and we still can to varying degrees. It's getting muddier is kind of the challenge is like privacy and all these things, are good concerns to have are making things harder to track effectively. Right. And now just like in the hotel industry, you have so many different options of technology. What we see a lot of times is that every channel, albeit you know, albeit Google or Meta or TikTok or whatever has their own way of measuring and telling that story. They're each telling the truth from their perspective. But when you add it all up, it doesn't tell the same story. And that's the challenging part that really comes at it from marketing. So, you know, there are definitely agencies and marketers out there that are just like, well, you know what, just throw it all in one big pile.
We'll figure it out in the end and measure everything and just call it all the same. That's one train of thought, but I haven't given up fully on analytics. I think that there's still value in analytics. I think we can measure things, but I also think that there's a great value in your gut. And there are things that we can't fully measure. if you, again, you have a balanced approach to it and look at it, like you were saying, sometimes the objective is just drive revenue. Sometimes the objective is to drive loyalty and build the brand. And when you look at things from those different perspectives, you ask different questions and you look for different answers. And there's nothing wrong with that. think where a lot of people get screwed up is that they don't ask those questions and don't set those expectations from the beginning.
Rob Blood (17:43)
That's interesting. And I wonder from an analytic perspective, if things will continue to evolve and new tools will appear that allow us to aggregate them. It almost like makes me think about the evolution of what will happen in distribution and how people find us. Because I know, you now people are using ChatGPT to find a fireplace in Vermont with the ski mountain next to it and, you know, rather than conventional search. I think it'll be really interesting to see how your business evolves. makes my head explode a little bit to think about all of the possibility of how things will be changing.
Doug Logan (18:18)
To me, it kind of heartens back to the beginning, like where I was working out of my parents' basement and convincing people that, you know, in addition to designing them a brochure, we should make them a website as well, and in 2002.
Rob Blood (18:34)
In those 2002? Yeah, same thing. I was working at the Sherburne Inn on Nantucket in 2002 and we, all of our reservations with the exception of maybe 2 % were on the phone. You'd fill out the registration card, mail out a confirmation letter and write it down on the tape chart, which I carried around in my backpack. When I was at the beach and had my first cell phone so I could answer phone calls on the beach. And it's funny, you mentioned like people building their own websites when Lee and I, bought Captain Fairfield in, we built her own website because she was an art and biology major at Williams College. And one of the classes she took at this great liberal arts college was web design. And how applicable did that become in our life, which she never thought it would be. So our first website in Kennebunkport was a self-built I built out most of the stuff on Photoshop and she made it work online. It's crazy. It's changed.
Doug Logan (19:27)
There you go. My very first website that I made was a Flash website for, it was like a Jurassic Park fan page. I wish I could find it.
Rob Blood (19:39)
I miss flash. Flash was awesome.
