When you hear about companies sending employees to another city, do you picture one or two vice presidents attending conferences or face-to-face client meetings?
Lexington-based Creative Lodging Solutions books hotel rooms throughout the country (1.7 million a year) for a client base consisting of a variety of companies. Many have construction crews building everything from water treatment plants to windmill farms, or putting new turf on football fields, checking the underground integrity of telephone poles, delivering Santa Clauses to shopping malls across the country, as well as management staff s opening up chain restaurants.
Creative Lodging Solutions also has a storm team at the ready, to facilitate lodging for people who are needed during natural disasters: rescue, cleanup, insurance adjusting and construction for rebuilding.
Mike Tetterton is founder and CEO of Creative Lodging Solutions. CLS is among 24 different companies he has started since the mid-1980s.
“While my buddies were sophomores in college, I opened my first business,” he said.
In his native North Carolina, he also got involved in the hotel industry with Marriott International. At 26 he was sent to Lexington to open the Residence Inn on Newtown Pike, making him the youngest general manager in Marriott’s history at the time.
“It’s not hard to tell your family you’re leaving North Carolina to go to Kentucky,” he said. Tetterton developed a relationship with Buddy Cowgill, who owned an apartment rental company in Lexington.
“We remained friends for six or seven years,” he said. “When he got ready to take StudioPlus public, he hired me to help him do that.”
That was in 1995. Four years later, Tetterton started his own extended-stay hotel company, Home-Towne Suites, and grew it to a dozen hotels in nine states. Alongside it was his hotel management company, Home-Towne Hospitality, which is active today.
The profitability of Home-Towne Suites helped fund CLS in 2002.
“We had a client using a bunch of hotel rooms. We went over to talk to them and found out what they were doing with me they were doing with 26 other locations,” Tetterton said. “We helped them get their billing squared away, in synch and audited.”
Although not a travel agency, CLS does perform a similar service in one area for businesses.
“You know that $5 million you spend in air, the $3 million in cars? We don’t do that,” Tetterton said. “But the million you spend in long-term hotel rooms? We do that.”
CLS customers can save more than 20 percent on the costs of booking by themselves, Tetterton says.
Within its first four years of business, CLS was booking $5 million in hotel rooms; Tetterton expects to close out 2016 with $160 million in lodging.
Marsha Couch, CFO, and Carolyn Hundley, chief culture and development officer, were integral in putting CLS together in 2002.
“We’re assisted also by Shelley Predmore, our COO and CIO, and Cindy Rudovich, chief sales officer,” Tetterton said. The executive staff and the vice presidents of Creative Lodging Solutions are female.
“They slow me down,” Tetterton said. “I get an idea and I’m ready to go with it right now. That’s the serial entrepreneur in me.”
He counts on his team to slow down his jump-on-an-idea tendencies and provide a methodical process for due diligence.
“As I meet others, a lot of us are like that,” he said of fellow entrepreneurs.
Another element of Tetterton’s success strategy is employee appreciation. His philosophy is: “If you have to be away from home to work, at least enjoy what you do.”
Most of the company’s 217 employees work out of the Lexington office, a 67,000-square-foot building in Beaumont, formerly a Kroger store. CLS has in-house programs and resources for employee assistance in times of emergencies. The company also has a charitable giving committee, in charge of vetting people and projects in need and then deciding how to help.
“At least 50 percent of my company are millennials,” Tetterton said. “They have been brought up to work for socially responsible companies. The millennials actually care.”
One of the employee benefits provided by CLS is an additional paid week of vacation for community service.
“The people who work here have a vested interest in something other than punching a clock and going home,” Tetterton said. “The service business is a noble profession. It’s OK to serve other people. We give you a week off to take whatever you personally are passionate about. You go serve someone else.”
Tetterton is involved with several of his other businesses on a regular basis, including MM327 and Blue Ark, both of which are Federal Express contractors. Ever the energetic entrepreneur, he said, “I am currently looking for other businesses and investments that are a good fit for our future and that would fit in our overall plan for growth.”