I was an eager undergraduate fresh out of Florida State University when I first met the man who would become my boss, mentor, employee and friend.

John D. Lesure, however, was on the backside of a distinguished career with the accounting and consulting firm Laventhol & Horwath. After running the New York office of Horwath & Horwath and being instrumental in the firm’s subsequent merger with Laventhol & Krekstein, he had retired from day-to-day management within the firm. He had moved to Altamonte Springs, Florida, and decided to spend his remaining time with the firm conducting research about the lodging industry by creating the Research, Development and Education Department within L&H.

From left: Randy Smith, John Lesure and Peter Tyson during one of Smith Travel Research's early client conferences.

The specific focus of his research effort was the annual Lodging Study and the Monthly Trends publication published by L&H. However, because of his physical distance from the executive office of L&H and because he no longer had to worry about billable hours, he was free to explore just about any topic relating to a better understanding of how the lodging industry operated.

It was in this environment I joined L&H in 1977 and went to work for Mr. Lesure. On my first, he put me to work reading all the back issues of the industry publications in the firm’s library. So for the next three months, we would discuss different issues confronting the industry, with a particular focus on property management, staffing concerns and industry trends. After a while, he began introducing me to the firm’s various studies, including what data was collected, how it was processed and how that data was turned into industry information.

Additionally, as the firm conducted feasibility and/or market studies throughout the country, a copy of each study was sent to the information center of our department. We could use these studies to get a granular look at the industry and use our national studies to get a broader picture of current trends.

Gradually, he took me under his wing, and for the next three years, I worked across from him at his big desk. He told fascinating stories of working in resorts at an early age and how travel had changed through the years. He worked as a night auditor for several of New York’s largest hotels at a time when it was virtually an all-cash business and room rates were about $2.00.

As the industry began searching for a more convenient method of customer payments, he ended up working with a group of travel industry leaders to develop what became the American Express credit card. By the time I met him, he was in regular discussions with most of the industry’s top management about current trends. And I had a front row seat.

To this day, I’m unsure why I was chosen to be the recipient of his accumulated industry knowledge. To a certain extent, it was simply a matter of timing. He was a teacher, and I was a willing student at a time that was ideal for both of us.

At the time, Orlando was booming with new hotels being developed at an astonishing rate with the creation of Disney World. As a result, it was a perfect laboratory for us to track and monitor the industry’s performance. We had established a survey of Orlando properties and reported on their monthly performances. The entire process was conducted manually with mail and/or telephone surveys, spreadsheets listing each property’s performance, and we tabulated the results by hand. In this manner, we developed the basic methodology of how to collect and process industry data.

After this intense immersion in handling industry data, I was transferred to the firm’s executive office in Philadelphia, became the director of the RD&E department and given the directive to coordinate this process on a national basis. Thus began my next phase of interacting with Mr. Lesure.

Without his constant guidance and support, I never would’ve been able to navigate the internal politics of a major accounting and consulting firm. There was tremendous resistance to some of our work, and to a certain extent, that resistance was justified. We were attempting to process more industry data at a time when processing data was very expensive. We began running up huge processing costs as we began storing data across time periods and creating ever larger databases so we could cross-tabulate and analyze data in various ways.

The database begins

The early 1980s were a crucial time for the hotel industry because it was entering one of its recurring building binges. The idea of creating a listing of every hotel in the United States came from our ongoing discussions about the information needs of industry developers, managers and suppliers. The outgrowth of our discussions was the creation of the Inventory of the Lodging Industry database. This was our first attempt at a database of this size and scope, and it ended up being costly to maintain and difficult for the firm to support.

However, with this database, we could envision finally tracking industry supply and changes in that supply over time. This led to the logical next step of putting together a market share program for the industry. Lesure and I developed an outline for how this program would work and submitted this to the partners in charge of the consulting practice. It was rejected for a variety of reasons.

Following this defeat, Lesure finally retired from the firm. After six years of working closely with John Lesure, my mentor was leaving the firm and with him went my hopes of ever launching a market share program. While one would think this would be the end of our working relationship, it wasn’t to be.

Mark Lomanno had joined us in the RD&E department, and he and I continued to work on developing a market share program. But it was becoming apparent the firm would never support a massive data collection effort of the scope we envisioned. After submitting two further drafts of a possible tracking program and suffering from two further rejections, I decided it was time for me to leave the firm.

In May 1985, I left L&H without a clear plan on a next step. At the same time, my wife Carolyn had also become disenchanted with her job as a structural engineer. In June of 1985, we decided to launch Smith Travel Research. The first person I called with this news was Mr. Lesure. He immediately offered his assistance in whatever manner necessary.

We knew our first step had to be the creation of a census database. We had made some mistakes with our original database we created at L&H, and so with the benefit of hindsight and experience, Carolyn and I began the slow and laborious task of creating a file that contained basic demographic data on almost every lodging establishment in the industry.

With this database, we were in a position to conduct the first truly random sample of industry properties to track their performance. There was a convergence of several trends that were crucial to our success at this time. The need for better data within the industry was escalating as the building binge was increasing. The cost of processing data had collapsed with the advent of the personal computer.

Therefore, after all the preliminary work I had done with Mr. Lesure, we knew what needed to be done, and now we had the capability to do it. How this data was handled from weighting the sample and estimating for the nonrespondents to report generation was a significant undertaking and again, with Mr. Lesure’s assistance and input, we launched the first STAR reports in January 1987.

Two years later, we began hearing reports of difficulties within L&H, and we began talking to Mark about coming to STR. In the fall of 1990, L&H collapsed, Mark joined STR and Mr. Lesure lost his retirement. Thus began the next phase of our relationship.

Mr. Lesure joined STR as a researcher and writer, drafting subsequent issues of our monthly and annual studies. While he was an employee of STR, our relationship never really changed. I continued to report to him on our progress and to turn to him when we had problems. He continued to work for STR up until the end. It was just a few weeks ago we got another email from Mr. Lesure about text errors in one of our publications.

A lesson in values

I wrote this in an attempt to convey how much he meant to the three of us (Carolyn, Mark and myself). He was pivotal in the development of our careers, offering his wisdom and experience freely.

I’ve often wondered how fortunate I was to have the opportunity to work with someone with his insight and understanding of the lodging industry. He took a fairly inexperienced young man from Arkansas and taught me how to be an industry researcher. In the process, he reinforced the values of dedication, focus, and, above all, integrity. He never cut corners and never let preconceived ideas cloud his research. He taught me leadership, compassion and understanding of those less fortunate.

He was staunchly conservative, and we had many lengthy discussions about how political, economic and financial trends affected us personally, the industry we studied, and life in general. (No, this is not how I became a conservative, I was already there. He did, however, teach me to become a more thoughtful conservative emphasizing the concepts of self-reliance, independence and freedom.)

He embraced change with a passion, particularly technological developments, always pushing to adopt the latest data processing techniques. When he first joined STR, he immediately began pushing for a new PC loaded with one of those spreadsheet applications. He was soon showing us how to chart data and develop forecasts using some of the newest applications available. He even began a new series of articles for the Cornell Quarterly where he published a regular forecast for the industry. He would push us to constantly reexamine how we did what we did or if there was a better way.

The following are some Mr. Lesure’s rules of life (in no particular order):

• Never go to him with a problem for which I didn’t have at least one solution. This one was obvious. He wanted me to think through a problem and as a result, I often solved the issue without his input. Then we would discuss the issue and solution to assess my handling of the situation.

• Always use a straight edge. At the time, most of our work was done on columnar paper, and when I underscored a total, he insisted that I use a ruler to draw the lines. This taught me attention to detail, don’t get sloppy. Think through what and why I was doing something. I hated doing this, and I often tried to cheat, drawing that line as carefully as possible. I never got away with it.

• Always double space all written reports. This taught me humility. I never was a good writer, so he was constantly “grading my papers.” He wanted room to make his corrections. I frequently got back articles or studies that had more corrections than original text. Over time, it forced me to focus more clearly on the concept and to convey this in as few words as possible. Always remember hotels didn’t do anything, management did.

• Always do research with an audience in mind. He would later modify this to only do research for which you could charge. In this manner, he brought home the idea that in conducting research one could often become sidetracked pursuing tangents that were pointless. Research for the fun of it had its place, but always work toward a better understanding and outside validation was your best insurance you weren’t wasting your time or the firm’s money. If your research was worthless to the marketplace, what was the point?

Because of his poor eyesight, he was never very comfortable traveling. In all the years I worked with him, he only took two business trips (one to the executive office in Philadelphia to help me out of a jam and one to Hendersonville, Tennessee, for one of our first client conferences) other than the occasional trip to Ithaca, New York. He never attended any of the industry conferences or client meetings. This obviously limited his exposure to the industry at large, so his impact on the industry was less visible than most other industry leaders.

Yet, to me, he was one of the most fascinating individuals I’ve ever met. I will miss him. I wish to send his family my sincerest condolences, but surely his life is to be celebrated. We at STR, and the entire lodging industry, have lost a dear friend.

In my eyes, he was always a great man, and because of our original situation, he the teacher and me the student, I never felt comfortable calling him John. He insisted I stop calling him Mr. Lesure, but I could never bring myself to overcome the respect and admiration I had for my teacher. Mr. Lesure passed away this weekend surrounded by his family. He was 86. Rest in peace, Mr. Lesure.

Randy Smith is co-founder and CEO of Smith Travel Research.