A career of a lifetime

By the very nature of what they recognise, career achievement awards encourage a degree of self-reflection on the part of their recipients. That can be difficult, however, when you don’t recognise yourself.

“I look in the mirror and I certainly don’t see a public figure or CEO,” claims Nissen. “I’m a sports coach, encouraging my players as part of a team, a guy who’s always ready for a game of handball.”

Nissen is famously not shy with a sporting analogy, but back home in Sweden, and across the international hotel sector, the Pandox chief executive is not just recognised as a captain of an industry, but also feared and feted in equal measure as one of the toughest, most outspoken and successful leaders in European hotel real estate. “Humans may not always be so enthusiastic, but dogs seem to like me,” Nissen says jokingly of Pandox’s tradition of keeping a company canine. “It gives me someone to play with.”

‘Hard but fair’ would be a good way to summarise Nissen’s playing style and it has garnered him and Pandox a reputation as demanding owners who reward longterm, performance-oriented relationships with operators. Having been in the hot seat since the company’s 1995 inception, it is an approach that has seen the group grow from a disparate collection of 17 distressed Swedish assets into a portfolio that numbers almost 150 hotels with approximately 32,700 rooms across 15 countries.

Nissen is in London to receive the Hot.E Hall of Fame Award, an accolade that recognises an investor, developer or hotel leader whose career ‘has had a profound and positive impact’ on the European hotel sector. There is no denying Nissen fits the bill, though one wonders whether looking back over more than three decades in the industry comes naturally to a man who has previously gone on record as wanting to work beyond the age of 100.

He may speak about being a failed sportsman, but listen to Nissen discuss the early days in hospitality and one is left in no doubt about Nissen’s passion for the industry both then and now. “I got my first job as a management trainee with a Scandinavian hotel company at the beginning of the ’80s,” Nissen recalls. “It was there I had an opportunity to learn it all: front of house, the back office, conferencing, restaurants, banqueting. Also, the importance of choosing your words carefully and knowing your audience, thinking about management and leadership.”

It was a grounding that clearly served him well as Nissen climbed the leadership ladder impressively quickly, entering the role of general manager at a remarkably early age. “25 years young,” Nissen exclaims. “The first job was in a small town in northern Sweden. The property was outdated and the guests were few, but it didn’t matter; I had the best job in the world. Genuinely, when I left each evening, I couldn’t wait to get back the following morning. I look back at how keen I was to interact with guests and co-workers and think of what a pain I must have been with so much energy.”

The start of a journey

It was exactly that youthful energy, however, which so appealed to Lars Thunell, CEO of Securum, a ‘bad bank’ founded by the Swedish Government in the wake of the country’s financial crisis to take on and unwind bad debt from the partly state-owned Nordbanken and, ultimately, stabilise the country’s property market. Many of the debts were owed by realestate companies, and Thunell decided to group and manage assets by type – still a somewhat unusual strategy in the early ’90s. He had quite a few hotels on his hands. The problem was, Thunell did not know anything about hotels.

“I went to the headhunter we were using and said we needed somebody with a lot of drive, an individual who understood the ins and outs of the business, but also somebody not afraid to take a risk,” Thunell recalls. “One name came back: a young guy with a lot of talent and a lot of opinions.

“So, on a Saturday morning in 1992, I gave Anders a call and invited him into the office. By the afternoon, he had agreed to come on board. That was the start of a fantastic journey.”

Looking back on the phone conversation that would change the entire course of Nissen’s career, the memory evokes a chuckle. “You have to understand, at the time Lars was on the TV three times a day,” Nissen says of a career mentor he calls “the Leo Messi of the finance world”. “The crisis was everywhere and he was the face taking care of it. There I was, watching him on the screen, my kids playing in front of me, suddenly the phone rings and he’s on the other end. I thought it was Candid Camera.”

But, with the Swedish economy in the doldrums and every government move being forensically monitored, the initial challenges were immense. “It was very public,” Nissen recalls. “Everyone was there all the time; TV, radio, newspapers, asking what’s being done with tax payers’ money. At the same time, the hotel market was crashing, people were worrying about their jobs. It was an important experience though; a good platform from which to see these various issues and concerns and I have that with me still.”

Nissen was also not helped by the fact that the hotel property market was yet to be established and focusing on a single asset class not typically the done thing. “People would ask what we did and, when I told them we just owned hotels, they would say, ‘why?’” Nissen recalls.

They are not asking anymore. In 1997, the same year Securum was being wound down, Pandox became Europe’s first publicly listed hotel property company, resulting in 4,000 new shareholders and a strategy of investing in large properties while divesting itself of smaller hotels.

Nissen acknowledges that convincing shareholders to invest in a sector hit sideways by recession was a challenge, but the IPO proved a success, enabling Pandox to establish a presence beyond Sweden – its acquisition of Hotellus in 2000, the property owning company of Scandic, was a particular highlight.

In 2004, Pandox was acquired by the Norwegian industrial investors Eiendomsspar and Sundt through a public offering. The shares were subsequently delisted and the company taken private. This ushered in a significant age of expansion, as it acquired several large hotels in cities as varied as Berlin, Brussels, Basel, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Malmö.

“It was the best thing that ever happened because, overnight, we had two owners who completely understood us and our strategy, wanted to support it, both financially and in terms of knowledge, and had a network we could use,” Nissen says. “It’s been 15 years now and I’m still so happy it happened.”

During the first 10 years, Pandox moved into new European markets, purchased properties in Canada, and acquired Norgani Hotels, a portfolio of 72 hotel properties across Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, which established the company into one of the biggest hotel owners in Europe.

In fact, things went so well that in 2015, after 10 years of rapid growth and no shareholders to answer to, Nissen received another seismic call. “[The owners] came to me and said they had something important to talk about,” Nissen recalls. “’They told me they were trapped in our success; we had become too big and they needed to spread the risk – we had gone from being something like 20% of total assets to closer to 90%: ‘You need to go back to the stock market,’ was the message.

“I remember, I was on my way to London at the time and I started to think about what I had in front of me, the next six months. Taking a company public is a fantastic and special experience, but it’s also a lot of hard work. You have no trouble with friends and family during that time because you don’t see them.”

Going public has not slowed growth, however. In 2016 the company acquired eight new European properties, while also divesting itself of eight smaller Swedish hotels – Nissen’s focus is very much on scale. In 2017, it acquired a portfolio of 37 UK and Irish hotels under the Jury’s Inn brand, and further grew its UK presence in 2018. This year has seen a further three German hotels added to the portfolio.

“I want Pandox to be more diversified, in more segments, cities and countries; an even stronger network,” Nissen says of future plans. “Northern Europe will remain a priority, but we are also looking at southern Europe, specifically Spain and Portugal. We would love to take our platform in Canada to the next level. You will see us in new geographies.”

Nissen prefers his operators to participate by long-term lease, an arrangement he feels incentivises productivity, but has previously opined that, as they become increasingly asset-light and unwilling to invest, some of the larger brands have forgotten how to operate hotels. In circumstances where Pandox cannot find the right partner, it is willing to manage the property itself.

“Brands are certainly important,” Nissen says, “but I think they have at times taken too strong a position and overestimated their importance. I would say they are perhaps realising this and being better than before, but they need to understand that they are only part of the value chain and not even always the most important part. If you have a good team, a desirable location and a nice property, I will choose a good manager every time ahead of any brand.”

The CEO credits this faith in people as the fundamental driver behind success and sounds more like a passionate sports coach than calculating business executive when discussing their significance. “It’s the team,” Nissen replies, when asked to identify the proudest achievement of the last 25 years. “It’s the best in the industry, as far as I’m concerned.”

And with that, clutching his latest trophy, it is time to return to the field of play.