Rags To Riches Success Story - Hilton

Conrad Hilton started his empire from a 40-room stucco hotel in Cisco, Texas. I’ve seen this hotel – now home of the Cisco Chamber of Commerce – and it’s hard to believe that such a small hotel in a tiny town could be the birthplace of the modern hotel industry. While Hilton was running the Mobley (that was the hotel’s name), his mother told him “Conrad, if you want to build big ships, you have to go where the water’s deep”, which basically meant to take on more risk, with bigger hotels, in the big city. Next thing you know, he’s building high-rise hotels all over Texas in the roaring 20’s. But what’s really interesting about Hilton was his strategy when he lost everything he’d built during the Great Depression. Instead of giving up and falling into a depression, he went to the very banks that had foreclosed on him, and asked to take over management of the hotels. Although he had been a financial disaster when the Depression hit, the banks had to admit that he had been a good hotel manager, so they hired him. While acting as manager, he put together financial syndicates to buy the hotels back. It took about a decade, but he started to buy the hotels back for a fraction of what he had paid to build them. This is where he developed his strategy of “never build anything, buy it during a recession for a penny on the dollar”. At one time, he owned the three largest hotels in the U.S. at the same time. When World War II broke out, his hotels soared on G.I.’s travelling across the U.S. As you know, the Hilton Hotel chain is now one of the largest in the world.
So what makes Hilton’s story so unique is that he went from rags to riches note once, but twice.