When Jennifer Miller joined ACCESS Destination Services two decades ago, the hospitality management company had just been launched as essentially a startup in the San Diego hospitality management industry. Today, she is CEO of a $120 million brand with responsibility for managing five company-owned offices and overseeing another 15 licensed offices across the country.
Over the course of that journey, often breaking new ground as a woman executive, she has faced challenges of building a service-oriented brand that organizes and produces events for businesses that service Fortune 500 corporations. When ACCESS rebranded in 2000, it served San Diego and Palm Springs and soon expanded to Los Angeles and Orange County. “I was getting out every day and marketing this new brand,” said Miller, who was in the inaugural hospitality program at San Diego State University. “It was an industry I know really well.” Today, the San Diego office alone puts on about 300 events annually.
A major turning point came in 2009 with the first licensing agreements “that changed the complexion of the company,” Miller said. ACCESS Destination Services was growing by 10 to 30 percent annually while the hospitality industry in San Diego was starting to consolidate, and it was time to expand, first to Northern California and then to Florida. The next major step came in 2018 when ACCESS was acquired by a private equity company, providing the capital to carry out an acquisition strategy to add new licensed operations. In the process, Miller’s title changed from regional president to CEO and she continues to run the company
Along the way, she credits perseverance, flexibility and hard work. “I was always willing and able to do what others weren’t,” she said.
She places a premium on developing a supportive, team-oriented culture in a workforce that is largely female. “In history, women aren’t traditionally supportive of one another,” she said. “We ask people to step in and lean in to treat people around them how they would like to be treated. Understanding the “culture fit” is so essential that Miller meets with “every person who joins this organization for at to lay the foundation and set the proper expectations specifically as it relates to the culture of ACCESS.”
She points out that the demands on her team are rigorous. “We have to create an organization that feels very supportive, ” she said. “Their boss changes from day to day and week to week.”
Miller, 48, was one of the founding members of Sage Executive Group. She joined “a bit reluctantly” as its first female member, but over time the experience of interacting with other top executives has “enhanced my perspective on almost everything as it relates to this business,” including a willingness to be “vulnerable in front of a group.”
In her rare spare time, she is a meditation advocate and has practiced yoga for more than 30 years. She’s an active mom, raising two young men.