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60 Second Profile Liam Brown ’05
 Liam Brown, MBA ’05, executive vice president of development for Marriott
Corp., came to the U.S. in 1989 for a friend’s wedding, intending to return home
to Ireland in a few days. But he was wooed away from his homeland by a job
opportunity with Appleton Inns, a small hotel chain that was purchased by
Marriott shortly thereafter. Over the next twenty years he found himself firmly
entrenched in both the country and Marriott. Earning his executive MBA (EMBA) at
the Smith School helped him move to the next level in the organization, says
Brown.
At the time he began his EMBA, Brown was running the Fairfield Inn and Suites
brand for Marriott, which was challenged in all areas—growth, performance and
guest satisfaction. Brown’s EMBA classes provided a framework for setting
strategy and direction that he found helpful in addressing the problems with the
Fairfield brand. It helped him consider the question, Are you working on the
right problems or not?
It was a challenge to identify the “right” problems. It was also a challenge
to make changes, because the Fairfield hotels were all franchise-owned. Brown
ended up cutting 20% of the hotels from the Fairfield system in order to
rejuvenate the brand. “A brand is only as good as its weakest link,” said Brown.
“If the brand is weak, you don’t have the ability to create confidence in your
franchise owners. The core of the brand was financially sound. I made sure we
had a value proposition that worked for our guests, an investor value
proposition that worked for franchise owners, and a brand we could be proud of
under the Marriott umbrella.”
It took four years to turn the Fairfield brand around. By the end of that
four years Brown had more than replaced every hotel originally removed from the
system, and Fairfield was the number one brand in the Marriott pipeline. It had
doubled profit contribution to Marriott International, gone from last place to
second place in customer satisfaction numbers and had enjoyed 40 consecutive
months of market share growth.
During that time, says Brown, “The most valuable thing about the EMBA
experience was the ability to come to the College Park campus every other
weekend and sharpen the saw. Every weekend helped crystallize and shape my own
thinking. Very challenging though; the first three months I thought I was going
to die. But it’s amazing what you can get used to.”
Brown found his EMBA classmates to be as valuable a resource as the faculty
teaching his classes. “There was a great group of guys there you could talk to
about problems, and they were all but one in businesses unrelated to
hospitality,” says Brown. “It was a great experience to see the commonalities
across all businesses, but also the many different ways people dealt with
problems.”
Get in Touch! Liam is married to Lillian and has two children, Patrick and
Ciara. He lives in Darnestown, Md. Contact information is available through the
eAlumni Web site.
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