Originally, Davidson Hospitality Group’s newly appointed COO Jason Reader’s sights were set on a career in aviation, not in hospitality. He described a path that was, at times, difficult. Yet, once he committed to building a successful future for himself, there was no stopping him. Judging from the journey he shared with LODGING, his remarkable rise reflects an ability to seize the day and think strategically, sometimes by taking his own advice: “Fake it till you make it” (see sidebar, page 16).
Reader said he had been a shy child whose family moved eight times in 12 years, and who lost his mother at an early age. Although he did come out of his shell socially during college, he said he didn’t really apply himself in school or his job at Perkins Restaurant in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he worked as a dishwasher during high school and summers home from college.
Reader did find and pursue a passion—to become a pilot—only to flounder after needing to abandon that dream. “This was a low point. It just didn’t seem fair. I had earned a pilot’s license but had to drop out of the program to become a certified flight instructor when I ran out of money,” he recalled.
He recounted a single event that turned his life around. “I was driving home from a late night out with friends and hit a deer. I realized I was lucky I was OK, although the deer was not. I drove home and sat in the driveway contemplating my future. As the sun came up, I decided I needed to do something different.”
He was then again working as a dishwasher at Perkins but began applying himself a bit more. “I went from being the guy that would ask to leave early to one who would take extra shifts.” He was also the guy who stepped up to take on challenges that became opportunities once he changed his mindset. The first, he said, came just a week or two into that attitude adjustment, when he was called upon to be a fryer cook during a busy day at Perkins. In a short period, he was promoted from cook to assistant production manager, to kitchen manager, and eventually GM of the restaurant.
Stepping Into the Hotel Industry
Reader said his transition into the hotel side of hospitality started with a gutsy move, one he didn’t actually have the authority to make. He had been asked by the GM of the nearby Days Inn whether Perkins could provide breakfast as part of an Elder Hostel (now Road Scholar) package tour that included the Gettysburg battlefield, classroom learning, hotels, and meals. “I said, ‘Great. What about lunch and dinner?’” When the hotel GM nixed the idea of serving “Perkins food” for lunch and dinner to this travel group, Reader proposed offering catered meals in the hotel ballroom.
In the two weeks he had to come up with the RFP, he was able to recruit an ambitious young chef from the upscale Dobbin House, enticing him with a promise of freedom to create the menus, a little more money, and guaranteed work—if they won the contract, which they did.
As a result, Perkins’ sales skyrocketed 80 percent over the previous year—and its rating climbed from near the bottom to No. 3 in a few weeks. “I was still running the restaurant, but from Elder Hostel alone, we were serving 50 people lunches at $24 and dinners at $34, 50 weeks a year.”
As Reader saw it, he was basically acting as the director of catering at the hotel, where the GM he met with each week wore a suit, “not a stained polo shirt smelling of fried food.” During one of those meetings, he mentioned his interest in moving to hotels. “As luck would have it, she told me their small hotel company was opening a new hotel in Gettysburg and offered to get me an interview with the owner,” he related.
So, wearing his father’s suit, Reader interviewed with the owner, not knowing anything about a possible job or that the hotel owner was also a minority owner of Perkins and receiving its quarterly statements. After explaining the story behind Perkins’ spike in revenue, Reader was promptly offered the GM job at an 83-room Country Suites Inn that would be opening more than a year later.
Despite his initial panic about taking a job for which he wasn’t qualified, during the 18-month period between being hired and opening the hotel, Reader scaled the necessary learning curve. “I was like a sponge, going 100 miles per hour to learn what I needed to know, going from housekeeping to the front desk to dealing with construction,” he said.
After about a year and a half as GM of that limited-service property, Reader began contemplating a move to full-service hotels, but realized he would need a different approach. “I knew I couldn’t walk into a Marriott or Hilton having run only a Perkins and Country Suites Inn, so I decided to go through food and beverage,” he said.
Mentors That Made a Difference
It was thanks to the first of two mentors Reader mentioned that this strategy quickly paid off, and from there, his career went into high gear. It was then-VP of operations Tico Bevier who “really took a chance on me,” hiring him first as director of food and beverage, and later advocating for his promotion to GM of Embassy Suites. It was also Bevier who recruited Reader to join him at the Pyramid Group. During his 15 years at the company, he rose from managing hotels to SVP of operations.
It was also at Pyramid where he encountered another influential mentor, Pyramid partner and COO Jim Dina. “I learned a lot from Jim during my 15 years at Pyramid, as the company and my career grew; they had eight hotels when I joined and 128 when I left,” he noted. It was also Dina who stood behind him when his hotel in Clearwater Beach was among those shut down in 2004, when the state was struck by three hurricanes whose names he can still rattle off: Francis, Ivan, and Jean. His hotel closed, but Dina stuck with him. “He put me on a task force that assists hotels with management transition, then later moved me up to New Jersey to run other hotels,” Reader said.
In the years just prior to accepting his current position, Reader was chief of operations at Magna Hospitality and then Remington Hospitality. During his four years at Remington, he rose from SVP of operations to COO.
Balanced Growth
Only two weeks into his job at Davidson at the time of this interview, Reader mentioned two related challenges faced by so many growing hospitality companies, including his: maintaining a desirable company culture and finding and keeping the right people. Reader spoke of the difficulty of growing a company while maintaining the culture that nurtured that growth. He likened the impact of rapid growth to a widening circle that makes it a challenge to keep the company culture in place. For that reason, he said, “It’s more important to grow strategically rather than quickly. It always comes down to finding and keeping great people by creating and maintaining an environment where you can promote them and allow them to grow.”
Noting how his own success, especially in the early days, was spurred by the faith others had in him, Reader said, “One of the greatest joys of my job is giving people an opportunity to do more and to see something in someone, sometimes even before they see it themselves.”
Seizing Opportunity
Brand-new Davidson COO Jason Reader is by nearly any measure a success story, but he is quick to admit this wasn’t always the case. Difficult as his early experiences were at the time, he learned life skills as a result of his family’s numerous moves, as well as disappointed expectations and a car accident that jolted him into a sharper focus on his future.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from his story is the importance of seizing opportunity when it’s offered—even if it might seem a bit premature, as was the case when he was thrown into career-changing jobs for which he felt unprepared.
“There may be situations where you feel like you aren’t yet ready, but there are times in life when people who’ve never done something are presented with an opportunity that might not come again. Sometimes you just need to fake it till you make it,” he said.
This is not to say, he added, to forge ahead without thinking. “Don’t sell yourself short, but pay attention to the people around you to learn, to pick up on things. That’s how you gain experience.”