Dr. Bharat Lall is a skilled diagnostician; he has an aptitude for sniffing out problems, identifying where an issue lies and how to correct it to ensure everything is working effectively. However, it has been many years since he has devoted these skills toward medicine. Although he trained as a physician and worked for a number of years in the medical field, for over two decades, Dr. Lall has been an entrepreneur in the hospitality industry. Starting with the purchase of a single 12-room motor lodge on the coast of California, today Lall heads a thriving company that manages a total of 1,790 keys and seven restaurants across nine properties.
In many ways, a hotel is comparable to a human body. Just as the body’s many organs and systems must work together in perfect harmony in order for an individual to be healthy, so must a hotel’s many departments and people within it function in a coordinated and harmonious manner. From housekeeping to food & beverage to sales and marketing, all of these departments must function well on the whole together in order to produce the most efficient results, and just as within a human body when one thing goes wrong it can have a dramatic effect on the organization as a whole. For Dr. Bharat Lall, translating his ability to diagnose from medicine to hospitality has been vital to his success and the success of his organization, and today he specializes in finding hotels that are underperforming and turning them around, transforming them into thriving organisms.
Most recently this ability has manifested in the newly rebranded Hilton Richardson Dallas, a 337-room property with a meeting space of over 15,000 square feet. Formerly known and operated as the Hyatt Regency Richardson—Dallas, in September of this year the hotel was reopened after a $13 million dollar renovation of the guestrooms, lobby, meeting space and restaurant. It is being managed by Aimbridge Hospitality, a global brand that is one of the largest hotel management companies in the world that also happens to be headquartered in Dallas. Situated just two miles from the University of Texas at Dallas and near to corporate offices for some of the nation’s largest companies including AT&T, Allstate Insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cisco, Raytheon and Dell, Dr. Bharat Lall was well-aware that the hotel was in a prime location, and with meeting and event capabilities also available on-site it was also already well-equipped for success.
According to Dr. Lall, there are a number of reasons why a hotel may become distressed. The owner may have over-leveraged the asset, making the size of the loan too big in relation to the value of the hotel. A decline in the economy, while a factor outside of any owners control, could cause a consequential decline in demand for hotels. The hotel may have been managed inefficiently or neglected by the owner altogether, resulting in dilapidation of the condition of the guestrooms and the public spaces and causing it to appear tired. A weak choice of brand for the hotel can even have detrimental effects on its performance.
However, it is in these environments that he thrives. Growing up in Nyasaland, a British colony in southeastern Africa, Dr. Lall’s family moved to Zambia when he was a teenager where his father opened up a clothing store. Even at an age where most people would balk at having to work rather than spend time with their friends, Dr. Lall found enjoyment when his father left him in charge of running the storefront. Solving the day-to-day problems came naturally to him, but when it came to a career his parents wanted him to put his academic pursuits towards a stable future. For them, the world always needed more engineers, lawyers and doctors, and so Dr. Lall moved to England for his pre-med degree before attending medical school in Scotland and moving to the United States for his medical internship.
After practicing medicine in the United States for a number of years, Dr. Bharat Lall was tired. His career had enabled him to move his parents over to America with him, settle in San Diego, California and purchase a beautiful house overlooking the coast, but medicine lacked the necessity for ingenuity or creativity. As a clinician he was (still) able to diagnose problems, but the necessary rigidity that comes with treatment meant that his entrepreneurial aspirations were constantly being stifled. Taking the first of many calculated risks in his career as a hotelier, Dr. Lall jumped on an ad in the local paper for a small motel in Coronado that was priced to sell, seeing that although it was rundown and hadn’t been updated in years it had good “bones” and a prime location that gave it the potential for success. He set to work replacing the windows, painting the walls, re-landscaping the grounds and adding new carpets and furnishings, all while also learning the daily minutiae of running a hotel and a business, from changing the bedsheets to creating a spreadsheet.
Through perseverance and intuition, Dr. Lall was quickly able to right the ship of the motel and soon went on to successfully flip many other hotels. While this sometimes meant making sacrifices, such as when he moved his family from their seaside home in California to stay on location at a Days Inn in Arizona, Dr. Lall credits the full support of his family in following his dreams as one of the biggest reasons for his success. In the three guest rooms they had carved out for themselves as living quarters he was able to maintain a constant eye on the transformation of the hotel, and it is this dedication that has also proven to be an imperative aspect of the way he does business. Today, Dr. Lall’s hotel management company Pinnacle Hotels USA is known for its ability to turn around distressed properties, taking them from dilapidated buildings to fixtures in their respective markets.
Dr. Bharat Lall’s most recent acquisition of the Hyatt Regency in Dallas is a prime example of his transformative abilities. The hotel previously had many of the criteria of a distressed property: a great location, but lacking effective management and a strong brand. Embarking in a multi-million dollar renovation of all the guestrooms and public spaces, Dr. Lall strengthened the brand considerably by converting it from a Hyatt to a Hilton, and enlisting one of the top hotel management companies in the world to run it. The guest rooms and suites now have amenities such as 65 inch flatscreen televisions, mini-fridges and electronic hotel safes, while the common spaces feature a restaurant and bar, shuffleboard, heated outdoor pool and a 24-hour fitness center with spin bikes. For Dr. Lall, transforming a hotel is more than just a business transaction. It is a chance to put his diagnosing abilities to good use, and flex his creativity in taking an undeserving asset and bringing it up to its full potential.
