I bought the Lakeside Inn eleven years ago, a modest thirty-two-room property I’ve run mostly hands-on ever since, which meant that on a Tuesday night last spring, exhausted from a twelve-hour day and carrying my sleeping four-year-old daughter Ruthie from the car, I walked through my own front doors expecting nothing more complicated than heading straight up to the owner’s suite on the third floor.
I didn’t make it past the front desk.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, but I can’t let you go up without a room key or a reservation. Are you a guest here tonight?”
The young man behind the desk, whose name tag read Devon, was new — I recognized him vaguely from a hiring batch my manager had brought on the previous week, someone I hadn’t yet had a chance to properly meet myself given how many other things had been competing for my attention that month.
“I own the hotel. I’m just heading up to my suite.”
“I understand that’s what you’re saying, but I don’t have any record of an owner’s suite on file, and I can’t just let anyone go up to the third floor claiming ownership without some kind of verification. I’m sorry, I know it’s late, and you’ve got your daughter with you, but I do need to check with my manager before I can let you up.”
I want to be honest that my first internal reaction was a flash of genuine irritation — exhausted, holding a forty-pound sleeping child, being asked to prove ownership of a building I’d personally renovated three different times over eleven years. But something in Devon’s careful, unwavering politeness, even under what he clearly recognized as an awkward and potentially embarrassing situation, gave me pause before I let that irritation turn into the kind of “do you know who I am” moment that would have been easy, and satisfying, and entirely the wrong response to what was actually happening.
“That’s actually the right call,” I told him. “Go ahead and call Priya. She’ll confirm everything.”
Devon looked visibly relieved that I hadn’t reacted with anger, and called my night manager, who arrived within two minutes, took one look at the situation, and started laughing in the specific way you laugh at something that’s simultaneously mortifying and completely understandable.
“Devon, this is Marisol. She owns the hotel.”
Devon’s face went through a full, visible collapse of professional composure into genuine mortification, stammering an apology that I stopped almost as soon as he started it.
“Please don’t apologize. You did exactly what I’d want any front desk employee to do in that situation. I could have been anyone claiming ownership to get access to a guest floor at eleven at night. The fact that I actually am the owner doesn’t change that your instinct to verify was completely correct.”
I want to be honest that this wasn’t purely selfless generosity on my part in the moment — I was also, admittedly, working through my own embarrassment at having apparently never properly introduced myself to a new hire, an oversight in my own onboarding process that this awkward encounter had just made impossible to ignore.
What actually stuck with me, once I’d finally gotten Ruthie settled into bed that night, was less the momentary inconvenience and more a realization about a gap in how I’d been managing hiring and orientation as the hotel had grown. Devon had made exactly the right security decision with exactly the wrong amount of institutional knowledge to know he was making it about his own employer, a gap that existed entirely because I hadn’t built a proper introduction process for new hires to actually meet me, understand the ownership structure, or know what legitimate owner access should look like versus a security risk they were right to flag.
I restructured our new hire orientation the following month, adding a simple but previously missing component: every new employee now gets a brief, in-person introduction to me directly during their first week, along with a laminated reference card behind the front desk listing ownership and senior management with photos, specifically so situations like Devon’s — correct caution meeting incomplete information — wouldn’t have to resolve through an awkward late-night standoff with a sleeping child in the middle of it.
Devon, for his part, became something of a favorite story among our staff, told and retold with increasing fondness rather than the embarrassment he’d initially felt, particularly once I made a point of publicly commending his judgment at our next team meeting rather than letting the incident sit as something to feel ashamed of.
“You made the right call,” I told the full staff meeting, with Devon visibly uncomfortable but also, I could tell, genuinely relieved to hear it stated plainly in front of everyone. “I’d rather have every employee on this team willing to hold that same line with someone claiming special access, even if it occasionally means an owner has an awkward five minutes proving who she is.”
Devon’s been with us over a year now, recently promoted to a shift lead position, a role I specifically pushed for once it became clear that his instinct that night — careful, polite, unwilling to bend a security protocol just because someone confidently claimed an exception — was exactly the kind of judgment I wanted more of on my team, not less.
Ruthie, for her part, still occasionally asks, when we’re at the hotel together, whether “the nice man who didn’t believe you were the boss” is working that night, a story she’s apparently decided is one of the funniest things she’s ever witnessed, four years old and sleepy as she was through most of the actual incident.
I think about that Tuesday night more than the minor inconvenience probably warrants, mostly because it revealed a real gap in how I was running my own business, one an embarrassing but ultimately harmless mix-up happened to surface far more effectively than any internal audit likely would have.
