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 Hanson PWC |
New York–For the last two decades, Bjorn Hanson, Global Industry Leader—Hospitality and Leisure for PricewaterhouseCoopers, has been one of the most-quoted experts in the lodging industry. On June 30, he will retire from PWC to join the faculty of the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management at New York University.
No stranger to academia—or to NYU, Hanson has served as an adjunct professor at the school and has been on its executive committee and advisory board. He has also been a visiting assistant professor at Cornell School of Hotel Administration, his alma mater; and is a Distinguished Conti Professor (named for an endowment) at Penn State.
"I always have had an interest in academic hospitality programs," Hanson said. "And I have always enjoyed working with students. I also enjoy the research elements of academia."
Starting in the fall, Hanson will be a full-time faculty member, teaching managerial finance, a course on hospitality consulting, and a freshman-level class called "Introduction to the Lodging Industry." He said when he turned 55 last year and became fully invested in the firm's pension plan, he began thinking about what he should do next. "There was an opening for a faculty position at NYU and I decided to build on my affiliation with that school," Hanson said.
As a professor, Hanson will have tremendous professional experience to draw on. He was with consultants Laventhol & Horwath for 17 years and with Coopers & Lybrand and PricewaterhouseCoopers for another 17 (PWC is the result of a 1998 merger between Coopers& Lybrand and Price Waterhouse). His primary services for clients at PWC, Hanson said, included strategic research; litigation and arbitration; due diligence on transactions; and profit-improvement studies.
Hanson said there have been dramatic changes in the arena of hospitality consulting during his career. When he started, "feasibility studies and appraisals for to-be-built hotels were 90 percent of what hotel consulting was," he said. "For my first two years at Coopers & Lybrand, we had a policy not to do feasibility studies because we were looking for other consulting tasks."
If a client called during those two years looking for feasibility studies, Hanson said they would inquire about what else Coopers & Lybrand did. "That's how we were able to build the other practices," Hanson said.
"Our average fee at Coopers & Lybrand was 10 times that at Laventhol & Horwath," Hanson said of the repositioning.
"Now we look across the consulting profession and we see a much more valuable scope of services provided by many consulting firms," he said.
And there have been commensurate changes to the industry itself. Hanson recalled that, "In the late 1980s and early 1990s, due to changes in tax policies and the Gulf War, the industry was forced to redefine itself and become more professional. It started to employ customer and operations research; also, an increasing number of hospitality companies became public and were followed by independent research analysts, who also called for more discipline."
"In 1990, when we were in the midst of this transformation, the industry lost $5.7 billion," Hanson said. "In 2003, with the same industry-wide occupancy, we made $14 billion. That showed that the industry learned how to structure itself financially so it could generate returns for investors."
Hanson said he will continue to conduct and report on research—for quotation—as an individual and as a faculty member, and will continue to be involved in consulting "to the extent that I'm not competing with PricewaterhouseCoopers. My goal is not to become an independent consultant."
Hanson said even under the worst case economic scenario, the lodging industry will be profitable. "And looking ahead, the demographics of GenXers and Millennials present a very positive outlook," he said. "We should always keep in mind that we are a cyclical industry."
Hanson said he has a lot to be thankful for. "Through all the many hours of overtime and extensive travel, I have been very fortunate to have the support of my wife Cathy and daughter Sabrina," he said.
"I can't imagine," Hanson concluded, "anyone having enjoyed a career as much as I've enjoyed my first career—and I'm looking forward to the next one."
And you can quote him on that.
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