A Hospitality Journey: Eric McCarthy-Zink on Disney Lessons, Leadership, and Scaling With Purpose

From washing dishes at his local Chinese restaurant to Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of a global hospitality company, Eric McCarthy-Zink’s career is a shining example of the opportunities that can come from a career in hospitality.

He caught up with Josiah Mackenzie, VP of Marketing at Actabl, to talk about his career path, how Disney’s guest service mantra has always stayed with him, and what he still hopes to achieve with Hotel Equities, as he works with Actabl to help the company scale with purpose.

Josiah Mackenzie, VP of Marketing at Actabl: Eric, let’s start at the very beginning. How did you first get involved in hospitality?

Eric McCarthy-Zink, Chief Financial Officer at Hotel Equities: I grew up in a small rural town in Florida, and the “nice” restaurant in town was a white-tableclothed Chinese restaurant. With five kids in the family, eating out was rare, but once a year we’d go there. I was in awe. By the time I turned 16, I had one goal: get a job there. I started as a dishwasher, worked my way up to busboy, then waiter. My family loved it because I brought home fried rice and egg foo yong almost every night.

From there, I went to Disney. That was a totally different ball game; fine dining, banquets, catering. I ended up in entertainment, dancing in parades and doing shows. Disney taught me something that’s stuck my entire career: “The guest isn’t always right, but they’re always our guest.” That’s one of our values at Hotel Equities as well. That principle—treating people with care and respect—still drives me today.

I still take my family on a pilgrimage to Disney every year, whether it's one of their cruises, one of their hotels or the park or an adventure. 

At one point, I was a front office manager at a very busy airport hotel. That taught me a lot about organization, and about guest interactions; that just because someone's upset doesn't mean they're upset at you. You need to find that balance. 

Josiah: What drew you into the financial side of hospitality?

Eric: While I was in F&B at another hotel, the hotel’s Controller would lunch at the restaurant where I worked. I would wait on him. He noticed my end-of-shift paperwork was always spot on. When he needed someone to cover maternity leave, he asked me to help with Accounts Payable. It made sense to me; I liked the order. From there, I moved up in accounting, went back to school to get my accounting degree, earned my CPA, and built my career from there.

Josiah: Tell us about Hotel Equities today and your role as CFO.

Eric: Hotel Equities started about 35 years ago with Fred Cerrone. Fred Cerrone came up through the industry; he worked at hotels, helped build hotels, and then eventually he caught the attention of Mr Marriott and became one of Marriott’s first franchisees.

Mr Cerrone built his culture around “The guest isn't always right, but they're always our guest and everyone matters”. And, as I said, those are pretty big deals to me. I'm glad I ended up at this company.

We’ve gone through many evolutions. Over the years, we have formed strategic alliances with like-minded hotel companies across the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. One of the best things around doing these alliances is it gives us the opportunity to look for that gold nugget that each of them has, that one thing that they do, that process, that person, that software, that will better everyone in the organization. That’s how we first encountered Actabl’s ProfitSword, which one of our partners was using, and we expanded it across our entire enterprise.

As CFO, I handle far more than numbers on a spreadsheet. I work with banks, asset managers, institutional investors, regulators, and auditors. I oversee risk management, insurance, disaster response, and policy development. It's a lot of talking to executive boards, talking to people, and less around the numbers, and a lot of people lose sight of that.

Josiah: We’ve been hearing more discussion around profitability in hotels. At first glance, it may seem obvious—businesses need to make money. But why is profitability such an important focus right now, and what trends are you seeing that drive this conversation?

Eric: I would look at it more as trying to drive efficiency.

We're always going to have pressures from wage increases and recruiting costs and trying to find our share of the revenue bucket. That's always going to be there. Where we need to really focus is around efficiency. And that's where we look at our vendor partners, and we do call them partners because they have the same goals as us.

One of the reasons I went to Actabl [for Hotel Effectiveness] was because they got what we needed to do. They understood that we needed to manage our labor more efficiently. They understood that we need to be able to see numbers in real time from various sources.

Our wages are never going to go backwards. We’ve just got to manage it better and be more efficient with what we have. And that will go through the entire middle of the profit and loss statement.

• Discover how Hotel Equities is enabling real-time ownership at the property level with Actabl. Discover more here: https://actabl.com/blog/hotel-equities-invests-in-actabl-to-scale-with-purpose/