Hotel entrepreneur shares insights from risk-filled career

Experience, tactful marketing and good timing turned former Four Seasons general manager Robin Brown into a successful hotel developer.

Last night, Brown — developer of the Mandarin Oriental Boston hotel — spoke at the Wharton Undergraduate Real Estate Club’s event “Service Sells: Inside perspectives on luxury hospitality and development.”

Brown was accompanied on stage by Gregory LaBine, director of mortgage banking firm Holliday Fenoglio Fowler, which acquired some early financial backing for the Mandarin Oriental. While LaBine spoke briefly about the hotel’s complex financial history, the talk focused mostly on Brown’s first successful hotel development.

Early in his career, Brown managed Four Seasons hotels in Washington and Boston. However, after getting this early start in the hotel industry, in the late 1990s, he started looking for a change.

“In a dream on the beach, I decided I was going to be an entrepreneur,” he said.

Brown found that change when he left the Four Seasons to develop his own hotel. As a new developer, Brown ran into a series of fortuitous events that ultimately led to the success of his first project. After meeting with a bank to discuss his idea, he ran into Steve Weiner — one of Boston’s most successful developers — and within a week settled with Weiner and his partner on a venture involving a hotel, condominiums, apartments and retail.

As Brown’s expertise in the luxury hotel industry taught him, location was everything, and finding the right location in Boston was no easy task. He had his eyes set on a parcel of land next to a major retail complex, but was told that he had been outbid on that particular property.

However, through “fortuitous lightning bolts and circumstances” they were able to convince the buyers that they were the perfect “front door.”

Unfortunately, the rest of the 13-year process to create the hotel was far from smooth sailing.

In 2000, Brown applied to a 22-member city board for permits to start the project. To Brown’s dismay, the vote came back as 22 to zero.

However, after a year, he was finally able to secure a unanimous vote in his favor.

Luck played a role for Brown in one particular situation. On October 6, 2008, the Mandarin Oriental Boston officially opened its doors at noon. Two hours later, Brown and his partners sold the hotel, and 30 minutes after that, the stock market crashed and dropped 800 points. He said that if they had sold the hotel any later, its value would have suffered drastically.

Brown’s honest remarks received a steady stream of laughs from the audience — as well as admiration.

“I’ve always dreamed about having my own hotel since the fourth grade, and Robin Brown showed the behind-the-scenes facts that you might not necessarily know,” Wharton freshman Cameron Scari said.

Second-year Wharton MBA student Heather Guo shared a similar sentiment.

“I am particularly interested in hotels and real estate development … I wanted to learn about how they quantify everything in the hotel industry.”

In the end, Brown said that in the hotel industry, success comes down to not only delivering on the basics — like “renting rooms, clean grout and coffee” — but doing it all with fine attention to the details, too.

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