Premier Project Management eyes new deals

DALLAS—For the last 20 years,
Premier Project Management has only overseen projects for parent company Ashford Inc.—which purchased it last year. Now, with new Co-CEO Don Kelly on-board, the company is expanding to oversee outside projects.

“I am here to take all of our services to non-Ashford hotels,” Kelly said. “My key responsibility is to create the entire go-to-market strategy, the commercial strategy from soup to nuts.”

Kelly, who now serves as co-CEO with Mark Matz, joined the company after serving as CEO of Onyx CenterSource. Prior to that, he held senior leadership roles with several hospitality companies, including Hilton and Accor.

“I was head of global commercial operations for Hilton, responsible for sales, pricing, revenue management—all of the commercial operations,” he said. “Prior to that, I was based in Paris as chief sales and marketing officer for Accor. [I am] bringing together all of the expertise from understanding the hotel side, the ownership side, the management side, along with building out hotels and going through renovations, tied to building out commercial operations, processes and teams.”

He continued, “I approach things differently in that I don’t believe a commercial organization is how you organize it or what the hierarchy looks like; I believe in really engineering that process. I was responsible for a data science group and an advanced analytics group at one of the bigger chains. Ideally, that is what we are building toward.”

Kelly is reworking the company. “The organization on the commercial side will be engineered to grow at scale, high growth and make it repeatable and sustainable, ultimately delivering what I would consider real value to our customers—not just hotel owners and whomever is engaging with us, but also the end-user,” he said. “The way we approach renovations is unique in itself, and a lot of that has to do with Ashford listening to the voice of the customer.”

The company does more than project management. “The Premier Project Management name is a little deceptive,” he said. “We do architecture, design, procurement, construction and development, and project management. What makes us unique is very few [companies] have these services under one roof. We have 100-plus people with 20 designers, a contract and administration team of 18 people, designers and procurement teams. There are a lot of synergies, cost efficiencies that go along with that.”

The company is already overseeing a number of projects, such as the renovation of The Notary Hotel in Philadelphia. “It is a massive, iconic building in downtown Philly, and it operated under the Courtyard by Marriott brand for many years,” Kelly said. “The client wanted to change scale-wise and create greater value for his guests—and obviously on the profitability side as well. We were brought on to convert the property into an Autograph Collection by Marriott hotel. They spent almost $20 million.” At press time, the project was scheduled to complete this month.

The 410-room Clancy in San Francisco is another conversion from a Courtyard to the Autograph Collection. “It has an unbelievable location in downtown San Francisco,” Kelly said. “It is about $30 million in renovation. There we did the exterior, the guestrooms, the meeting space, the lobby, the restaurant and the fitness center.”

Premier is also overseeing the renovation of The Ritz-Carlton in St. Thomas, which includes completely redesigned public spaces, guestrooms and suites, dining venues and meetings and events space. “The hotel was technically destroyed by Hurricane Irma, and we have been contracted to rebuild and renovate the entire property,” said Kelly. “It is close to a $100-million renovation. It is going to reopen sometime in Q4 in 2019. It will absolutely be the most stunning resort in St. Thomas when it is done. In fact, we have other clients in the Caribbean who have seen that work, and now are talking to us about other properties down there.” HB