PODIUM – Sean Riley

by Mike Woelflein

podiumpodiumpodiumpodiumpodiumSean RileySean RileypodiumpodiumLessons in Hospitality
Sean Riley, COO of Maine Course Hospitality Group, has made motivating and empowering people his main course of action for 28 years.
When Sean Riley speaks to the employees at one of Maine Course Hospitality Group’s 13 hotels, he often explains the way to get ahead in the company.
“To get to the next level, you’ve got to be great at what you’re doing,” the MCHG chief operating officer says, “and you have to take on some additional responsibilities when the opportunity arises. Be a leader. Show us you can do the next job, and it’ll be a no-brainer to give it to you.”
Riley knows what he’s talking about, because over the last 28 years he’s risen from a high school teacher running a small hotel—right down to cleaning the toilets—to overseeing all day-to-day operations and about 400 employees from Scarborough to Bangor, and into New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
He’s an early riser who calls his night auditors just after 4 a.m., to see how things are going and to let them know they’re part of the team. He has a tendency to work seven days a week, often spread out across the company’s properties.
“I think you have to get out there and be in the trenches with your people,” Riley says. “They are the most important asset you’ve got, especially in this business. I’ve done all of their jobs, and we try to instill a culture where they know we understand, where they can grow. If they know that, they’ll take care of our guests and we’ll all be successful.”
Riley shares leadership of MCHG with CFO Gary Serino, who’s also CFO of the Ground Round Independent Owners Cooperative, a Freeport-based LLC that operates 30 Ground Round Grill and Bar restaurants in 13 states.
Maine Ahead sat down with Riley at the new Hampton Inn in Bath, just before it opened early this summer, to talk about his career, his company and industry, and tourism in Maine.
You started out as a teacher. What did you teach?
I taught many subjects, because I dealt with kids in special ed, people with learning disabilities, trying to help them get over some of the obstacles that they had. Being a teacher really lent itself to what I do now. Today I deal with different people at different levels and skill sets and try to find out what works best for each one, whether they are in housekeeping or assistant manager or general manager.
Why did you change careers?
In 1982, my wife Dayna and I started running a 19-room hotel in Wells. It was called Slumber Land, and we changed it to something really sexy: Water Crest. It wasn’t anywhere near the water, so I don’t know how we did that [laughs]. We lived on the property and we did everything: maintenance, housekeeping, front desk, accounting, reservations. We did that for about five years, while I was teaching, and we moved on to bigger and bigger places. When we got to 130 rooms, I went full-time. But that property went on the market, and I ended up at the Freeport Inn and Café. Maine Course Hospitality bought us as their first hotel, and they bought me with it. I was lucky, really.
Have you had any mentors in this business? What did they teach you?
The biggest lesson is caring for the associate at every level, from general manager to dishwasher. There is another company that has 20-plus hotels in Maine, and I look to their leader as a mentor, because he’s shown the importance of knowing the associates, knowing what they need, and building a team. We grew fast in the last five or six years and we took everybody who was a great housekeeper and made them a supervisor, and made anybody who was a good supervisor a manager.
You’ve been in the hospitality business for many years. How has the industry changed?
Maine was very much a mom-and-pop industry, and I started in a mom-and-pop, and I don’t think we were as customer-friendly as you need to be now. I think travelers have become far more seasoned, not as accepting of a lower standard of service. People want what they get in Boston, or a major city, when they’re in Maine, and it didn’t used to be that way. I think that is a good thing for the traveler. It’s more costly for the hotel and restaurant business, but we’ve had to rise to it through the industry, nationally and locally, with the amenity creep.
What do you mean, specifically, by amenity creep?
In this hotel, for example, we have 37-inch flat panel HD TVs—I remember when I started you had to nail the remote down because someone might steal it. We have high-end pillows and bedding, high-level mattresses, décor, everything. I think it is a challenge for Maine businesses to stay on top of that. There is a tendency in Maine to say, “Well, this is who we are, this is what we do.” But today, to be successful, you need to meet those higher expectations, whether you’re a B&B, a boutique, or brand-driven hotel. It is much more competitive now, and I think we are all raising our level of service and quality.
And I think we’re all driving more people to come to Maine. The brand names, which is a lot of what we do, have played a role in that, because when I was running non-brand properties, it was scary when Hampton or Marriott came to town. But when you take the mindset of “Okay, let’s follow their lead, there is a reason Marriott and Hilton are doing well,” it lifts everybody.
How have you changed since you started in this business?
Not that much, really. I’m kind of a hyper guy and I like to do a lot of things. And this is perfect. We’re opening this hotel in Bath. We’re building one in Hanover, New Hampshire, and we’re running all of the others. I always tell people I can plunge a toilet at 10 and have a meeting with the governor at noon. I love this job, this business, and all the activity. I miss teaching, and I’d love to go back to it as an avocation when I can. I miss sitting down and helping someone one on one. But there are similarities in my job now. I like sitting down with a general manager helping them progress to another level, and that is what I did as a teacher.
What’s the most gratifying thing about the hospitality business?
It’s developing people, taking them from point A to point B. I mean, we have two people in our company who started as dishwashers, at 14, at the Freeport Café, and they are now in their late 20s and still with the company, as managers. People talk about our business being hamburger flippers or low-level jobs with low pay or minimum wage, and there are low wages sometimes, at the beginning. But if you like taking care of people, you can really do well in this business. We have leaders who are Cornell grads. We have leaders who are Southern Maine Commu-nity College grads, and we have people who are high school grads—all of them managers and leaders in our company.
What’s the most frustrating or challenging thing you encounter, and how do you deal with it?
Apathy. If there is apathy toward the guests or apathy toward associates, whether it be a manager or a front desk associate, that’s trouble. A room is a room is a room. So, everything we do has to be focused on the guests. I fight it by getting out there, spending time at our properties, and working side by side with our people. As leaders, our associates need to see us positive, upbeat, excited about what we’re doing.
A few years ago, I helped out making beds and cleaning rooms at one of our hotels because we were short-staffed. Six months later, at the Christmas party, one of our housekeepers came up and said, “Thanks.” I asked her, “For what?” It was for helping her with her rooms, six months earlier! That kind of gesture, that little help, is the same kind of thing that guests remember.
You’re a Maine native, a UMaine graduate, and have spent most of your career here. What kept you here?
I love Maine. We’ve chosen to live and work and conduct business in Maine because of Maine itself, and we love it. It is difficult sometimes and I think that is why Maine sometimes struggles to bring business here, with the tax burdens we have. We’ve made the decision to conduct business in Maine for personal reasons, for the quality of life.
Are there big differences between running a property in Maine compared to the other states you’re in?
If I was living and working in New Hampshire, I’d pay less taxes. And we’d pay less taxes if we had a corporate office there. Maine has to be cautious not to cross that tax line that is going to drive business away or keep businesses outside. If people are going to have huge taxes by bringing their business here, they are not going to. But the quality of life is so great here, so you weigh that.
It’s the same with the environment. Maine has to be careful that we don’t go too far with regulations, or make it too difficult to do business, but we also have to recognize that we have to take care of the environment, because what is driving our economy here is the beauty of Maine. We don’t find drastic differences in the cost of power, that sort of thing. And in Maine, the quality of the workforce and the work ethic is great. That’s true in New Hampshire, too. We ran a business in Connecticut, and that was not an easy place. The cost levels are ridiculous down there.
Being in the hotel/tourism business, how much of the company’s profitability is in your control as opposed to tied to the economy?
When sales go down, we take a bigger impact than, say, a restaurant. Restaurants in tough times have less labor and less food, and that’s 65% of your expenses. In a hotel, the biggest expenses are your debts—it’s a big structure, so you go down in labor but you can only go down so much, so profitability takes a hit. I think the tough times in the economy are hardest on the people who really overleveraged, or leveraged pretty high back in the boom times, and they took on loans they probably shouldn’t have.
Maine Course avoided those issues?
We have. We stick to our knitting. We know our markets. We’re not doing hotels in downtown Boston, or casinos. We’ve targeted communities that need hotels, and we’ve worked with communities. We’ve formed partnerships with local banks, with construction companies, with the hotel brands. We’ve been careful. We’ve made mistakes, yes, but we’ve learned from the down cycles and we were ready for this one. And we’re lean. Right now I’m the only operational person among the senior leadership, and that’s lean.
How was/has the hospitality industry in Maine been affected by the economic slowdown?
Maine room occupancy was down a little over 10% in 2009, and nationally it was 17%. If you follow the trends, you will see that Maine kind of follows nationally, but not to quite the extremes. We have more leisure business in Maine. Nationally, you get the conventions that cancel, and that can hurt. This year wasn’t looking rosy, but in May, Marriott lifted their expectations, from 3% to 6% down, to slightly up. That was good to hear. We are not out of the woods but we are sensing a little bit of relief.
Business travel is coming back a little bit more, too. One of the nice things for Maine is that coming out of some of these tough times, the leisure travelers start coming back because people say, “The heck with it. Let’s go to Maine.” They may not come for a week, but they’re coming for three days, and people in the Northeast are staying closer to home, coming to Maine instead of Europe or Florida. I think maybe Maine will have an edge this year in that it is relaxed, down to earth, not opulent. Rates have come down because of the economy. And it will be awhile before the industry feels good enough to let rates start climbing back up again, so I think people will see good deals here and come to Maine.
What is your forecast for the next few years for tourism
in Maine?
I think things will pick up later in the summer, and we’ll start feeling a real increase in the third quarter. People are going to start traveling more, but they are going to get rooms for a little less—instead of $129 it will be $99, and instead of $250 it will be $179, so even as occupancy comes back, rates won’t and the year will end up flat. We are not going to see the glory years of 2006 and 2007, but we are going to stop seeing the decline that we’ve had. In 2011, I think we’ll start seeing the uptick. The experts, and I’m not one, say 2013 will be a good year.
What do you see as some of the greatest long-term opportunities for the industry here?
We’ve got something that so many people don’t have. We’ve got the most beautiful coastline, and the mountains and the lakes. Tourism is a huge piece of our economy and we need to keep that in focus, and we need to support that. And one opportunity we have not done all we can do as a state and as an industry is to market ourselves. We could do more, and the state could do more. If you spend a dollar on tourism promotion, you can bring in $3.
How about the biggest threats?
Healthcare costs are one. We’ve talked to consultants during the healthcare debate, and we’ve heard that costs could double. That will be tough for us, and it could put some people out of business.
If you could ask the legislature for one bill to help the tourism/hospitality industry, what would it be?
One? A bill that would not allow legislators to make any decisions without really looking at the full impact to business. When we make a business decision, we have to look at the associate, the guest, the town, the partners in business, the ownership. We have to look at all of those things, and I think in politics, the focus is too narrow at times. A Republican pulls too far one way, and a Democrat pulls too far the other way. They all ought to say, “Let’s look at it from everybody’s perspective and see what the impact is going to be on everybody involved before we pass the bill.”
In January, you told a group of tourism leaders that there were three properties under construction and six scheduled to start in Maine. Is that a positive or a negative trend at work?
It was more than double that the year before, and there’s not a lot happening in the early planning stages, either. At Maine Coast, we don’t have any others in the pipeline right now, and our company in the past has always had one to three projects going on. We are just being cautious. We had two other properties going, but we sold one under construction and we pulled back on another one. It’s tough right now, so we pulled in our reins a bit. A lot of people have done that, I think. It is definitely harder to get financing. You need more money down, and a project has to be a real winner for it to happen. A lot of companies have had financing pulled on projects.
What’s it going to take to turn the industry back onto an upward trend?
I think there has to be a higher confidence level in the traveler, and the businesses that send people on the road. We are not going to grow until we feel comfortable that the travelers are back in the game and they are willing to start buying rooms at the right price. We’ve given many of our corporate accounts great deals, and we’ve taken a hit on rates. It’s supply and demand, and you need to hit that equation, on your rates and on the hotels that you build or don’t build. We all need to see demand shift before we add supply, or raise rates. Until then, we’ll all be a little cautious.
The Riley File
Born:
October 18, 1956, Portland, Maine
Education:
Bachelor’s in education, University of Maine, Orono, 1979.
Career:
For eight years after college, Riley was a special education teacher and coach at his alma mater, Kennebunk High School. During that time, he and his wife, Dayna, lived at and managed a 19-room motel in Wells, then a succession of larger hotels. Eventually he left teaching and joined Maine Course Hospitality. In 2004, Riley became director of hotel operations, taking charge of site selection, development, and acquisitions. He was named COO, overseeing all day-to-day operations, in 2007. One of his latest projects is developing his company’s communications on social media.
Other roles:
Riley is a past president of the Maine Innkeepers Association and the Freeport Merchants Association, and has served on the board of the Maine Tourism Association. In 1995, he represented Maine at the White House Conference on Tourism and was named Innkeeper of the Year by the Maine Innkeepers Association.
Company:
Based in Freeport, Maine Course Hospitality Group (mchg.com) has developed more than $75 million in hotel projects. The company operates 13 hotels, largely affiliated with national brands, in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, as well as Muddy Rudder restaurants in Yarmouth and Brewer. MCHG’s next hotel, set to open this winter, is a high-end facility in Hanover, N.H.

podiumLessons in Hospitality

Sean Riley, COO of Maine Course Hospitality Group, has made motivating and empowering people his main course of action for 28 years.

When Sean Riley speaks to the employees at one of Maine Course Hospitality Group’s 13 hotels, he often explains the way to get ahead in the company.

“To get to the next level, you’ve got to be great at what you’re doing,” the MCHG chief operating officer says, “and you have to take on some additional responsibilities when the opportunity arises. Be a leader. Show us you can do the next job, and it’ll be a no-brainer to give it to you.”

Riley knows what he’s talking about, because over the last 28 years he’s risen from a high school teacher running a small hotel—right down to cleaning the toilets—to overseeing all day-to-day operations and about 400 employees from Scarborough to Bangor, and into New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

He’s an early riser who calls his night auditors just after 4 a.m., to see how things are going and to let them know they’re part of the team. He has a tendency to work seven days a week, often spread out across the company’s properties.

“I think you have to get out there and be in the trenches with your people,” Riley says. “They are the most important asset you’ve got, especially in this business. I’ve done all of their jobs, and we try to instill a culture where they know we understand, where they can grow. If they know that, they’ll take care of our guests and we’ll all be successful.”

Riley shares leadership of MCHG with CFO Gary Serino, who’s also CFO of the Ground Round Independent Owners Cooperative, a Freeport-based LLC that operates 30 Ground Round Grill and Bar restaurants in 13 states.

Maine Ahead sat down with Riley at the new Hampton Inn in Bath, just before it opened early this summer, to talk about his career, his company and industry, and tourism in Maine.

You started out as a teacher. What did you teach?

I taught many subjects, because I dealt with kids in special ed, people with learning disabilities, trying to help them get over some of the obstacles that they had. Being a teacher really lent itself to what I do now. Today I deal with different people at different levels and skill sets and try to find out what works best for each one, whether they are in housekeeping or assistant manager or general manager.

Why did you change careers?

In 1982, my wife Dayna and I started running a 19-room hotel in Wells. It was called Slumber Land, and we changed it to something really sexy: Water Crest. It wasn’t anywhere near the water, so I don’t know how we did that [laughs]. We lived on the property and we did everything: maintenance, housekeeping, front desk, accounting, reservations. We did that for about five years, while I was teaching, and we moved on to bigger and bigger places. When we got to 130 rooms, I went full-time. But that property went on the market, and I ended up at the Freeport Inn and Café. Maine Course Hospitality bought us as their first hotel, and they bought me with it. I was lucky, really.

Have you had any mentors in this business? What did they teach you?

The biggest lesson is caring for the associate at every level, from general manager to dishwasher. There is another company that has 20-plus hotels in Maine, and I look to their leader as a mentor, because he’s shown the importance of knowing the associates, knowing what they need, and building a team. We grew fast in the last five or six years and we took everybody who was a great housekeeper and made them a supervisor, and made anybody who was a good supervisor a manager.

You’ve been in the hospitality business for many years. How has the industry changed?

Maine was very much a mom-and-pop industry, and I started in a mom-and-pop, and I don’t think we were as customer-friendly as you need to be now. I think travelers have become far more seasoned, not as accepting of a lower standard of service. People want what they get in Boston, or a major city, when they’re in Maine, and it didn’t used to be that way. I think that is a good thing for the traveler. It’s more costly for the hotel and restaurant business, but we’ve had to rise to it through the industry, nationally and locally, with the amenity creep.

What do you mean, specifically, by amenity creep?

In this hotel, for example, we have 37-inch flat panel HD TVs—I remember when I started you had to nail the remote down because someone might steal it. We have high-end pillows and bedding, high-level mattresses, décor, everything. I think it is a challenge for Maine businesses to stay on top of that. There is a tendency in Maine to say, “Well, this is who we are, this is what we do.” But today, to be successful, you need to meet those higher expectations, whether you’re a B&B, a boutique, or brand-driven hotel. It is much more competitive now, and I think we are all raising our level of service and quality.

And I think we’re all driving more people to come to Maine. The brand names, which is a lot of what we do, have played a role in that, because when I was running non-brand properties, it was scary when Hampton or Marriott came to town. But when you take the mindset of “Okay, let’s follow their lead, there is a reason Marriott and Hilton are doing well,” it lifts everybody.

How have you changed since you started in this business?

Not that much, really. I’m kind of a hyper guy and I like to do a lot of things. And this is perfect. We’re opening this hotel in Bath. We’re building one in Hanover, New Hampshire, and we’re running all of the others. I always tell people I can plunge a toilet at 10 and have a meeting with the governor at noon. I love this job, this business, and all the activity. I miss teaching, and I’d love to go back to it as an avocation when I can. I miss sitting down and helping someone one on one. But there are similarities in my job now. I like sitting down with a general manager helping them progress to another level, and that is what I did as a teacher.

What’s the most gratifying thing about the hospitality business?

It’s developing people, taking them from point A to point B. I mean, we have two people in our company who started as dishwashers, at 14, at the Freeport Café, and they are now in their late 20s and still with the company, as managers. People talk about our business being hamburger flippers or low-level jobs with low pay or minimum wage, and there are low wages sometimes, at the beginning. But if you like taking care of people, you can really do well in this business. We have leaders who are Cornell grads. We have leaders who are Southern Maine Commu-nity College grads, and we have people who are high school grads—all of them managers and leaders in our company.

What’s the most frustrating or challenging thing you encounter, and how do you deal with it?

Apathy. If there is apathy toward the guests or apathy toward associates, whether it be a manager or a front desk associate, that’s trouble. A room is a room is a room. So, everything we do has to be focused on the guests. I fight it by getting out there, spending time at our properties, and working side by side with our people. As leaders, our associates need to see us positive, upbeat, excited about what we’re doing.

A few years ago, I helped out making beds and cleaning rooms at one of our hotels because we were short-staffed. Six months later, at the Christmas party, one of our housekeepers came up and said, “Thanks.” I asked her, “For what?” It was for helping her with her rooms, six months earlier! That kind of gesture, that little help, is the same kind of thing that guests remember.

You’re a Maine native, a UMaine graduate, and have spent most of your career here. What kept you here?

I love Maine. We’ve chosen to live and work and conduct business in Maine because of Maine itself, and we love it. It is difficult sometimes and I think that is why Maine sometimes struggles to bring business here, with the tax burdens we have. We’ve made the decision to conduct business in Maine for personal reasons, for the quality of life.

Are there big differences between running a property in Maine compared to the other states you’re in?

If I was living and working in New Hampshire, I’d pay less taxes. And we’d pay less taxes if we had a corporate office there. Maine has to be cautious not to cross that tax line that is going to drive business away or keep businesses outside. If people are going to have huge taxes by bringing their business here, they are not going to. But the quality of life is so great here, so you weigh that.

It’s the same with the environment. Maine has to be careful that we don’t go too far with regulations, or make it too difficult to do business, but we also have to recognize that we have to take care of the environment, because what is driving our economy here is the beauty of Maine. We don’t find drastic differences in the cost of power, that sort of thing. And in Maine, the quality of the workforce and the work ethic is great. That’s true in New Hampshire, too. We ran a business in Connecticut, and that was not an easy place. The cost levels are ridiculous down there.

Being in the hotel/tourism business, how much of the company’s profitability is in your control as opposed to tied to the economy?

When sales go down, we take a bigger impact than, say, a restaurant. Restaurants in tough times have less labor and less food, and that’s 65% of your expenses. In a hotel, the biggest expenses are your debts—it’s a big structure, so you go down in labor but you can only go down so much, so profitability takes a hit. I think the tough times in the economy are hardest on the people who really overleveraged, or leveraged pretty high back in the boom times, and they took on loans they probably shouldn’t have.

Maine Course avoided those issues?

We have. We stick to our knitting. We know our markets. We’re not doing hotels in downtown Boston, or casinos. We’ve targeted communities that need hotels, and we’ve worked with communities. We’ve formed partnerships with local banks, with construction companies, with the hotel brands. We’ve been careful. We’ve made mistakes, yes, but we’ve learned from the down cycles and we were ready for this one. And we’re lean. Right now I’m the only operational person among the senior leadership, and that’s lean.

How was/has the hospitality industry in Maine been affected by the economic slowdown?

Maine room occupancy was down a little over 10% in 2009, and nationally it was 17%. If you follow the trends, you will see that Maine kind of follows nationally, but not to quite the extremes. We have more leisure business in Maine. Nationally, you get the conventions that cancel, and that can hurt. This year wasn’t looking rosy, but in May, Marriott lifted their expectations, from 3% to 6% down, to slightly up. That was good to hear. We are not out of the woods but we are sensing a little bit of relief.

Business travel is coming back a little bit more, too. One of the nice things for Maine is that coming out of some of these tough times, the leisure travelers start coming back because people say, “The heck with it. Let’s go to Maine.” They may not come for a week, but they’re coming for three days, and people in the Northeast are staying closer to home, coming to Maine instead of Europe or Florida. I think maybe Maine will have an edge this year in that it is relaxed, down to earth, not opulent. Rates have come down because of the economy. And it will be awhile before the industry feels good enough to let rates start climbing back up again, so I think people will see good deals here and come to Maine.

What is your forecast for the next few years for tourism
in Maine?

I think things will pick up later in the summer, and we’ll start feeling a real increase in the third quarter. People are going to start traveling more, but they are going to get rooms for a little less—instead of $129 it will be $99, and instead of $250 it will be $179, so even as occupancy comes back, rates won’t and the year will end up flat. We are not going to see the glory years of 2006 and 2007, but we are going to stop seeing the decline that we’ve had. In 2011, I think we’ll start seeing the uptick. The experts, and I’m not one, say 2013 will be a good year.

What do you see as some of the greatest long-term opportunities for the industry here?

We’ve got something that so many people don’t have. We’ve got the most beautiful coastline, and the mountains and the lakes. Tourism is a huge piece of our economy and we need to keep that in focus, and we need to support that. And one opportunity we have not done all we can do as a state and as an industry is to market ourselves. We could do more, and the state could do more. If you spend a dollar on tourism promotion, you can bring in $3.

How about the biggest threats?

Healthcare costs are one. We’ve talked to consultants during the healthcare debate, and we’ve heard that costs could double. That will be tough for us, and it could put some people out of business.

If you could ask the legislature for one bill to help the tourism/hospitality industry, what would it be?

One? A bill that would not allow legislators to make any decisions without really looking at the full impact to business. When we make a business decision, we have to look at the associate, the guest, the town, the partners in business, the ownership. We have to look at all of those things, and I think in politics, the focus is too narrow at times. A Republican pulls too far one way, and a Democrat pulls too far the other way. They all ought to say, “Let’s look at it from everybody’s perspective and see what the impact is going to be on everybody involved before we pass the bill.”

In January, you told a group of tourism leaders that there were three properties under construction and six scheduled to start in Maine. Is that a positive or a negative trend at work?

It was more than double that the year before, and there’s not a lot happening in the early planning stages, either. At Maine Coast, we don’t have any others in the pipeline right now, and our company in the past has always had one to three projects going on. We are just being cautious. We had two other properties going, but we sold one under construction and we pulled back on another one. It’s tough right now, so we pulled in our reins a bit. A lot of people have done that, I think. It is definitely harder to get financing. You need more money down, and a project has to be a real winner for it to happen. A lot of companies have had financing pulled on projects.

What’s it going to take to turn the industry back onto an upward trend?

I think there has to be a higher confidence level in the traveler, and the businesses that send people on the road. We are not going to grow until we feel comfortable that the travelers are back in the game and they are willing to start buying rooms at the right price. We’ve given many of our corporate accounts great deals, and we’ve taken a hit on rates. It’s supply and demand, and you need to hit that equation, on your rates and on the hotels that you build or don’t build. We all need to see demand shift before we add supply, or raise rates. Until then, we’ll all be a little cautious.

The Riley File

Born: October 18, 1956, Portland, Maine

Education: Bachelor’s in education, University of Maine, Orono, 1979.

Career: For eight years after college, Riley was a special education teacher and coach at his alma mater, Kennebunk High School. During that time, he and his wife, Dayna, lived at and managed a 19-room motel in Wells, then a succession of larger hotels. Eventually he left teaching and joined Maine Course Hospitality. In 2004, Riley became director of hotel operations, taking charge of site selection, development, and acquisitions. He was named COO, overseeing all day-to-day operations, in 2007. One of his latest projects is developing his company’s communications on social media.

Other roles: Riley is a past president of the Maine Innkeepers Association and the Freeport Merchants Association, and has served on the board of the Maine Tourism Association. In 1995, he represented Maine at the White House Conference on Tourism and was named Innkeeper of the Year by the Maine Innkeepers Association.

Company: Based in Freeport, Maine Course Hospitality Group (mchg.com) has developed more than $75 million in hotel projects. The company operates 13 hotels, largely affiliated with national brands, in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, as well as Muddy Rudder restaurants in Yarmouth and Brewer. MCHG’s next hotel, set to open this winter, is a high-end facility in Hanover, N.H.

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Tagged as: Maine Tourism Forecast, Sean Riley