About Wildhaven
Wildhaven Sonoma is the top-rated glamping spot in the Bay Area. Our glamping experience was designed to provide guests with comfort, warmth, and cleanliness, while still maintaining a close connection to Sonoma County’s stunning natural beauty. We are a leader in the fast-growing outdoor hospitality segment and also operate a 2nd Wildhaven location outside Yosemite National Park. Learn more at WildhavenSonoma.com.
The Role
Wildhaven is seeking an experienced and accomplished Hotel GM to run all aspects of our business. This candidate lives and breathes the fundamentals of hospitality. They thrive when they can interact with strangers in an often chaotic business environment and make every guest, including the unhappy ones, feel welcome and understood.
A close second to your authentic love of making others happy is your emphasis on achieving financial and operational results in spite of whatever obstacles you confront. To do this, you are incredibly organized, very tech-savvy, incredibly entrepreneurial (e.g., a highly effective and creative problem solver when faced with limited direction and resources), never take 'no' for an answer, are comfortable with delegating and managing, and won't rest until you've achieved your goal. You believe that what gets measured, gets managed, and enjoy producing reports for the owners that reveal opportunities for the business to grow.
With these two skills, you will be more effective at accomplishing your operational goals, which include managing 4 departments, driving down costs when possible, identifying opportunities to drive greater revenue, and increasing operational efficiency. The office for this role is a 10-acre campground. While most responsibilities are performed from inside our reception building, a portion of the role takes place outside in hot Sonoma County summers or rainy winters, with occasional physical demands.
General Responsibilities
> Build and Manage Your Team: You will have sole responsibility for creating the most productive team to meet your financial goals. This includes recruiting, training, motivating, delegating work, retaining our talent, and reviewing their performance. You believe that at the end of the day, our business is only as good as our people.
> Monitor and Improve Business Finances: You enjoy working with reservation software, spreadsheets, and financial statements daily to identify areas to reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve efficiency of our operations & staff. You are not happy just delivering ideas to Wildhaven's owners, but also providing an action plan, budget, timing, options, and then reporting on results.
> Monitor and Improve Business Operations: You will meet with department heads multiple times per week to track and assess their efficiency, resolve problems, provide support, and hold them accountable for their goals. You have experience creating and enforcing SOPs and running effective teams in front desk, housekeeping, and maintenance. You are comfortable running a small retail operation for Wildhaven guests. You are also an absolutely project management guru and love using online tools like Google Sheets & Drive to track projects and push them to completion
> Maintain Our Beautiful Property: In addition to the normal operations required for glamping, you have experience maintaining a large outdoor space. This includes managing landscaping, ongoing small and large construction projects, preventative tent maintenance, challenges with utilities such as electric/water/septic, and difficult-to-work-with contractors. You will be comfortable ensuring work is done to applicable safety standards, building code, and county permitting regulations.
> Constantly Improve Guest Offering: You will devote time daily to walking the property, reviewing tents and amenities, and chatting with guests about their experience. You will combine this knowledge with insights from guest reviews and competitive activity to create a monthly action plan for improving our guest offering, increasing repeat visitation, and driving higher occupancy rates and ADR. This could include new revenue sources such as food and beverage, gear rentals, events, tent add-ons, etc.
> Demonstrate the Player-Coach Mentality: When needed, you will not hesitate to jump in personally to support any team, and demonstrate your commitment to your staff
Requirements
> A passion for the great outdoors: If you don't truly believe that society needs to spend more time outdoors, disconnecting from technology and stressful lives, and re-connecting with friends, family, and themselves, then this job isn't for you.
2+ years experience as GM at a highly-rated hotel: You have managed at least 10 staff in at least 3 departments, and had full responsibility for hiring/firing, payroll, purchasing, maintaining brand standards, and the P&L. Very accomplished AGM candidates are also considered.
> Exceptional communication skills: You will be interacting face to face, on the phone, and via email with hundreds of guests each week, many of whom are nervous first time campers and benefit from reassurance, empathy, and authentic advice. You must be able to write a professional email, calm an irate guest at your desk after a difficult day, and read a guest's mood over the phone and choose your words carefully to avoid a negative review.
> Comfort With Tech: You are very, very comfortable with Google Docs/Sheets/Drive. Experience with project management apps like Asana a plus but not required
> Comfort with Numbers: Strong math and quantitative reasoning skills. Very strong comfort level with hotel P&L sheets and ability to analyze them and produce actionable recommendations on a monthly basis
Entrepreneur Mindset: Ability to solve difficult problems you've never seen before in creative ways and with limited resources
> Other Requirements: The GM is subject to both inside and outside environmental conditions: Adverse conditions may include extreme heat and/or cold, wind, humidity and sometimes inclement weather. Ability to stand, walk, climb stairs, lift & carry up to 30 lbs. Ability to work weekends and holidays, and occasional 10-hour days, as needed. Possess a valid Driver’s License
Compensation includes base salary, health insurance contribution, discretionary annual bonus, and other benefits.
Fun Fact: We're expanding! Your GM role may have the opportunity someday to rotate to our pipeline of new locations
