With 2013 in full swing, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect back on BirchStreet’s very successful year last year – and what this success means to our future. 2012 saw BirchStreet grow at a rate above our wildest expectations: New customers like Montage, Destination Hotels & Resorts and the Olympic Club came on board in great numbers, and existing customers like Hilton Hotels and Marriott Corporate expanded use of our services all over the world. Keeping customers – both new and old – happy is our number one goal, and balancing this growth while never losing sight of this is our charter this year.

More and more hotel companies are realizing that, even as we come out of the deep recession, controlling costs continues to be a huge issue. Our procure-to-pay solution gives our customers visibility into what they are spending and where they are spending it. Business process improvement and compliance are hot buttons for hoteliers. Our goal is to give our customers a huge advantage when it comes to these issues – and the steady increase of hotel companies turning to BirchStreet is a sign that more and more hotel operators are realizing how important it is to solve their back office processes.

With that in mind, we will continue to expand our product and service offerings to meet customer needs. Although it is a great benefit to us that our target market is now more focused and aware of the issues surrounding costs, it also means that they are much more conscious and exacting about what they want. This puts the onus on us to deliver – and we plan to do just that. BirchStreet is uniquely positioned to give management visibility, efficiency and control.

One major highlight of 2012 was the expansion of our Enterprise Recipe Management Suite – which plugs into the supply chain to allow hotels, restaurants and other food service operators to see and track their food cost/profitability on a continuous basis – and react in real time. This product has been a major success for us – Marriott, for example, just rolled this out across their properties worldwide.

Finally, in 2012 we developed a strategic relationship with Premier, one of the largest Healthcare GPOs in the world. We look forward to expanding that relationship in the coming year.

Here is a high level overview of some of our most important initiatives for 2013:

• Healthcare companies and long term care facilities can also reap the benefits that visibility brings, and one of our initiatives for this year is to expand our efforts to reach further into this market.
• We are currently upgrading our datacenter to bring the latest, state of the art systems to our customers. We are also updating our disaster recovery systems.
• Moving aggressively to roll out an expansion of our systems worldwide for existing customers – including Marriott, Four Seasons and Fairmont.
• Introducing a new product that is scaled down and simplified to bring the value of BirchStreet to smaller properties.
• Rolling out compliance management: this will allow customers to map their compliant products across the portfolio; tracking which hotels are in compliance and which are not.

As you can see, there is a lot on our list – and we are very excited to tackle all of these wonderful opportunities.  Rest assured that we will continue to provide exceptional, customized service to our existing customers as we acquire new ones.  In fact, we plan on hiring aggressively – and carefully training these new team members – to meet the growth needs of our customers – both new and old.