Bimal Patel

Bimal Patel did not have far to go or long to wait to get exposure to his chosen career in the hospitality industry.

His parents, immigrants from India, owned a motel in eastern Kentucky and, later, one in Williamstown, Kentucky, about 40 miles south of Cincinnati, where Patel and his brother pitched in to support the family enterprise. “When we were 12 or 14 years old, we were behind the front desk checking in guests, helping out wherever we could, doing laundry or cleaning rooms,” said Patel. “It’s hard to replace the experiences that I had, being able to learn this business at an early age.”

His preparation continued more formally at Transylvania University, in Lexington, Kentucky, from which he graduated in 2002 with a double major in economics and business administration, with a concentration in hospitality, restaurants, and tourism.

After collecting his diploma, Patel worked in restaurants for about 18 months, working his way up to the general manager level. Then he got a lucky break: a chance to run seven hotels for an independent hotel company in Lexington. He quickly had to grasp financial management, regulation, and other nuts-and-bolts aspects of running a multifacility business and managing employees at different levels of skill and pay. “It was like a two-year MBA,” he said. The experience convinced him to take a chance on starting his own business, so in 2005, he opened Rolling Hills Hospitality with a contract to manage a single hotel.

Almost 20 years later, Rolling Hills controls 15 hotels, with several more in the pipeline.

“I’m kind of the conductor of the orchestra, involved in just about every facet of the business,” he said. Being the maestro requires mastering interactions with accountants, a franchisor, bankers, government agencies, housekeepers, and many others. With about 500 full- and part-time employees, not to mention guests, “it’s a very dynamic environment. Things change day to day,” but “the biggest draw is the human interaction. Owning an establishment where people are coming to visit, you take care of them for a short time, then you do it all over again with someone new, and in that time, you make a little money.”

Patel also likes what he calls “the deal”: developing a new hotel by assessing the interplay among the location and value of a property, the costs of development, the quality of a franchisor, and other variables. He doesn’t have a size goal in mind for Rolling Hills, but what he does know, he said, “is that I don’t feel like I’ll ever stop doing this.”

His involvement with the Cleveland Fed began in 2022 when he attended a meeting at the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber with area businesspeople and the Cleveland Fed’s president, Loretta J. Mester, to discuss regional business conditions. He subsequently became a contributor to the Beige Book, the Federal Reserve’s periodic collection of anecdotal information about economic conditions in each Fed District, and he then joined the Cincinnati Branch board of the Bank in early 2024.

Patel’s perch in hospitality affords him a broad view of financial conditions: “I talk about how construction costs are affecting new developments, about how labor costs are affecting our margins and profitability. I talk about consumer discretionary spending as it relates to travel and tourism.”

Patel said he’s impressed by the breadth of business information that board members bring to meeting discussions. “I was an econ major and this is like the geeky, cool stuff for me,” he said. “I’m just thrilled to be a part of it.”