Backstory: Circa 2017, I worked at a small, 36-room condo-hotel on Marco Island, Florida, and that property was owned by a small venture capitalist firm ran by 2 wealthy siblings and one of their sons. I was brought onboard by a colleague who was hired as the General Manager. Since this was a new/small operation that had pretty much zero actual industry knowledge or expertise, it was basically the GM and myself who were responsible for bringing real changes to the property while also wearing multiple hats and doing the job of several roles with our industry experience. There was only one other office employee who was a curmudgeonly old lady (ironically her name was actually Karen lol) who basically just did the billing for unit-owners and sat in the back when she could. I myself was responsible for, not only the day-to-day front desk presence, phone presence, concierge presence, assigning daily housekeeping duties, and running a brief night audit, but most importantly also managing the business revenue strategy/competitive set, and online room inventory with our own website and major OTA companies like Expedia/Booking/Trivago/etc.
2017 was a record year for us and my revenue strategy earned the company several tens of thousands of dollars more than previous years by comparison. Then shit starts slowly hitting the fan Q2-Q3. My colleague, the GM, resigned due to personal issues completely unrelated to his work performance. That brought the office staff down to 2 people, Karen and I. Karen had had this month long trip to Italy planned like 2 years in advance, so she was going to go regardless. Karen flies out in the midst of the news that there's a bad hurricane a few days out from landfall. Cue hurricane Irma. For those unaware of hurricane grading, Irma made landfall in the US as a category 4. That is staggeringly powerful. For reference, Katrina (which devastated New Orleans in 2005) was also a cat 4. Needless to say, everyone was on high alert and made plans to evacuate.
During my evacuation, not on the clock or being paid by the company whatsoever, the firm's accountant called me on my personal phone asking me to walk her through the steps of how to remotely run the property management system's audit. With hotel computer systems, the “day” doesn't actually end until you tell the system that the day is over, and that it's time to run reports/tally up the numbers, so if no one is there to do the audit, the hotel will permanently be “stuck” on a previous day. I spend about 2 hours on the phone with her while evacuating from a natural disaster, and I was never compensated for it. Irma ended up making landfall on the island I worked on, and the entire surrounding area lost power for about a week. We all returned to devastation, some of our rooms on the top floor having theirs walls and roof blown out, and slowly trying to pick the pieces back up. My hours were cut from 40 per week to about 16 per week as the damage from the hurricane drove business way down.
I was beginning to struggle financially, and I was forced to use all my PTO and Vacation days I had earned up to this point to keep full paychecks coming in as I was just some single 24-25 year old guy who lived alone, and the company offered absolutely zero roadmap for getting back to full time compensation. I sent the CEO, who I spoke with every week in revenue meetings, an email explaining the situation and asking for a possible advance to make ends meet for the time being. The email I got back was basically one sentence to the effect of: “OP, we'll be open again soon, thanks.” Bold strategy, let's see how that plays out for you considering I'm the literal only person running the hotel operations right now.
Within a week, I secured an interview for a better paying job closer to home, crushed the interview, and kept it completely to myself. The CEO's brother (the CFO) had flown down to be on property for the first day of the reopening where business started to come back to normal. The day before the reopening, while in the office, I got a call from HR at the new company confirming the job offer, and to stop by later that day to finalize everything. I called the CFO and asked him to come down to the office because I wanted to talk. The second he got there and he asked what's up, I told him I was resigning effective immediately.
Him: “OP, you realize that'll make it hard for us to open tomorrow, right?”
Me: “Nothing personal! Just like your company has financial concerns that prevent you from keeping your only employee here to run the hotel, I also have financial concerns that prevent me from staying here as I have bills to pay. You'll be open again soon, don't worry!”
He gritted his teeth and said, “… ok then.” I handed over my key to the property, got in my car, and never looked back.