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agenda
power points
power points
Double-Take: Crowne Plaza White Plains
A $15 million renovation ensures out-of-town clients will wake up on the right side of the bed.
TourIsm Is a boomIng InDusTry here
in the County—in fact, the industry generated nearly
$1.7 billion last year, a substantial increase over 2011. To keep ahead of the curve, the mainstay Crowne Plaza White Plains-Downtown recently underwent a $15 million facelift. “With the high-end competitive environment in Westchester County, it is important for all of the hotels to remain relevant and modern,” says General Manager Scott De Savoye.
The renovation, completed this past spring, involved a near-complete gutting of the hotel. All 402 guestrooms were updated, including furniture, carpet, drapes, bathrooms, and bedding, which De Savoye points out as the most criti- cal update. “At the end of the day, guests do not sleep in restaurants, meeting rooms, or the lobby,” he says. “A large emphasis of our renovation was spent where it matters most—the guestrooms.”
As for the other areas of the property, all 17,000 square feet of meeting space was also upgraded, as were the fitness center, lobby, and swanky restaurant-bar, Mix Cocktail Bar & Kitchen. All of these renovations, the hospitality brand hopes, will help its central-county foothold better contend in that lucrative tourism market. “We have competed with The Ritz-Carlton, Westchester, from the day they opened,” De Savoye admits. “Certainly, a multi-million-dollar renovation allows us to com- pete more aggressively.”
Though he won’t say if the upgrade has boosted bookings or revenue thus far, the Crowne Plaza is forecasting 111,000 rooms sold for this year, amounting to $22.5 million in rev- enue. But, says De Savoye: “Until the hotel is running 100- percent occupancy, we have room to improve.”
—Scott Simone
14
In Their Wheelhouse
A Bronxville communications company beats
tChe training video game.
onfessIonal InTervIeWs
intercut with scenes of the work-
place, the types of people you totally know from your company, and gentle parody of the half-dopey/half-serious way people act at their jobs—no, it’s not an old episode of The Office. It’s a training video from Bronxville-based Wheelhouse Communications, LLC. And it’s surpris- ingly, well, enjoyable.
“Anyone who has seen a corporate training video has rolled their eyes and said, ‘This is cheesy, and I’m not paying more attention than I have to,’” admits Dan Krystallis, who co-founded Wheelhouse, which produces a reinvented breed of cor- porate training videos, in 2007. “I’ve sat through some painful stuff. And I swore we’d be different.”
For Wheelhouse, being different means eschewing voiceovers, stilted acting, and poorly lit shots in favor of higher production values and scripts that often emulate recogniz- able genres and even specific TV shows and
Q4 2013
web series, hence the ref- erences to The Office.
“It’s all about audi-
ence engagement,”
Krystallis says. “The best
way to hold attention
is to entertain. If you
can’t keep [employees’]
attention, all the time,
energy and money that went into the project is wasted.” Krystallis’ partner, Christopher Ming Ryan, agrees: “It’s like Mary Poppins— putting the message with a little sugar makes it easier to swallow.”
Krystallis says that growing up, he
“was the kid with the movie camera down
in the basement. I’d make movies with my friends.” But being “too practical” for a long-shot career in Hollywood, he instead got a master’s degree in psychology from Columbia University's Teachers College, then got into consulting, and ended up doing in- house training for Pepsi Bottling Group.
At the time, Pepsi trainers were look-
ing increasingly for “behavior modeling” to aid instruction, and it became clear that to do that, “video was critical,” says Krystallis. “All of a sudden, this came full circle from when I was a kid. Not that I didn’t enjoy the PowerPoints, but video was where I started to get excited and do some really creative things.”
That included a video called “PepsiCenter,” a SportsCenter-invoking piece that ran at a training event to teach coaching techniques to the compa- ny’s sales managers. To make other vid- eos, Krystallis often worked with Ryan, who was an external video producer at the time.