Dhillon gears up for hotel growth
After developing five hotels in the High Wycombe area of Buckinghamshire, entrepreneur Tej Dhillon is ready to enter the next phase of business growth by acquiring an existing hotel.
Mr Dhillon, who describes himself as a second-generation Asian hotelier, has spent the past four years buying run-down buildings and converting them to three-star standard hotels aimed at business travellers.
His next project is to buy an existing hotel and totally refurbish and change it to his style of operation. His goal is to buy and open two or three hotels each year.
He plans to open small hotels with some character in areas where the market is dominated by bigger, chain-owned properties. Bedrooms in the latest hotel - the Ambassador Court in High Wycombe, which opened last month - are finished to a standard comparable to chain competition.
Mr Dhillon, who is 29 years old, started work in the City of London but decided he didn't like working for other people and started his own property company.
"In 1990, I got some money together and convinced a bank that I had a viable project. It was a residential development. It didn't make a vast profit but it worked," he said.
It was then that Mr Dhillon realised he could pick up properties in good locations at very cheap prices, the result being planning permission to develop his first hotel, the 18-bedroom Hamilton Court Hotel in High Wycombe.
"The next thing was how to run the hotel. I wasn't a hotelier but I realised that everything should be based on customer service," he said.
He picks his staff carefully and pays them well to maintain high service standards, but doesn't believe in staff uniforms, office-bound general managers or a management hierarchy.
Mr Dhillon freely admitted that he was an "arrogant" property developer when he started out, but is now totally committed to service, management and income.
In that sense he is rather different from most of the hotel developers of the 1980s who were unable to service the huge debt they accumulated.
