akQuise strategen - Podcast · Chef-Strategin Petra Sierks & die akQuise strategen

Vertrieb- & Marketing-Tipps aus der Sicht von Hotelier und Unternehmer Marco Nußbaum | Interview #36

·40 min·3 clips

Marco Nussbaum, a former hotel director at 26, reveals how a cold almost canceled this podcast.

1. The akQuise strategen podcast hosts an interview with Marco Nussbaum, entrepreneur and former CEO of Preis Hotel, on the themes of hospitality marketing, employee management, and people-first company building. 2. Host Petra introduces Marco Nussbaum, 54, described as a former single parent, lifelong Werder Bremen fan, and one of Germany's youngest hotel directors at age 26, who later rose to Vorstand level before going independent. 3. The episode's core question is: what principles of marketing, sales, and people management made Preis Hotel successful, and how is Marco applying them to his new venture Hiamo AG? 4. Marco traces Preis Hotel's origin to 2005, when he met co-founder Dr. Matthias Zimmermann at a Werder game; the brand name came from writing 'Preis' and 'Hotel' on a restaurant napkin and playing with the letters until the wordplay 'it's all about the price, not the price' emerged. 5. The company launched on Valentine's Day 2009 with a full house from day one, expanded across Germany, and was partially acquired by Radisson Hotel Group (49%) in 2016 with a put-and-call option that Radisson exercised at the end of 2019. 6. Marco sold the company in January 2020, weeks before COVID hit, then remained as CEO through the crisis under Chinese parent company ownership, describing the experience as 'like someone pressing the brakes while you're doing full speed on the autobahn.' 7. During COVID, Marco ran weekly 'Ask Marco' Zoom sessions with all staff to maintain transparency, stood outside the insolvency court multiple times ready to file if Chinese wire transfers failed to arrive, and personally offered to advance employee salaries from his own account. 8. After Preis Hotel, Marco built Polyo Wacht, a collection of hospitality properties near Hohwacht on the Baltic Sea, including Boutique-Hotel Waldwiese and four semi-detached houses, named by combining his then-partner's first name Poli with the place name Hohwacht. 9. On marketing, Marco argues that the hotel industry is drowning in mediocre content and that rating portals like Booking.com function less as review platforms and more as anonymous voting portals where audience context is unknown. 10. He describes a 2008 pre-opening video strategy for Preis Hotel that predated modern content marketing: he filmed weekly video updates with a handheld camera, edited them in Final Cut on Apple, posted them on YouTube as the 'Preis Hotel Podcast,' and emailed them to every contact — when episodes were late, customers emailed to ask what was happening. 11. Marco argues that the viral potential of authentic content cannot be planned and illustrates this by referencing an unidentified American girl who went viral spontaneously, contrasting her with the manufactured content flooding TikTok and Reels. 12. On employee management, Marco says his core principle is not to motivate people but to give motivated people a working environment that does not demotivate them — a distinction he learned by misapplying pressure to a receptionist named Elmo. 13. Elmo, a long-serving team member named after the Sesame Street character, handled 80 check-ins per shift without complaint but broke down when asked to confront guests who had smoked in non-smoking rooms and collect 350-euro fines. 14. Using Steven Reiss's 16-life-motives model, Marco assessed Elmo's personality profile and found he scored extremely low on conflict, competition, and aggression — the opposite of Marco himself — so they reassigned all confrontational tasks to team members who actively sought conflict. 15. Marco's 2018 decision to double apprentice wages was driven by learning that staff were commuting an hour each way from outside Hamburg to work 5:45am breakfast shifts because they could not afford city rents; a Facebook post about the decision became Spiegel Online's most-clicked article of that week. 16. The viral wage story was picked up by Manager Magazin and SAT.1 Frühstücksfernsehen; the hotel industry accused Marco of using it as an advertising stunt and sent insults and threats, while external observers praised it as evidence of his actual values. 17. The episode is conducted in a warm, conversational tone between two people who previously shared a weekly entrepreneur group called 'Gipfelstürmer' run by Martin Lindbeck; Petra occasionally interjects personal reactions (she says she cried watching Marco's farewell video from Preis Hotel). 18. Marco speaks in long, associative monologues with occasional self-corrections and digressions, often circling back to re-anchor a point; Petra's role is primarily to prompt and affirm rather than challenge. 19. The episode suits entrepreneurs and managers in hospitality, retail, or service sectors who want concrete examples of people-first leadership translated into operational decisions. 20. Listeners expecting a structured marketing playbook or step-by-step acquisition strategy will find the format loose and anecdote-heavy.

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