Jason Cheng is the CEO of Friendwell Group of Companies. He brings to the company more than seventeen years of experience in owning and operating both full service and limited service hotels, real estate acquisition, revenue generation, cost control, and renovation projects. Mr. Cheng holds a B.S. in Economics and MBA in Finance from New York University.
He has been in the hospitality industry since 1996, when he started with one hotel. “My partners have been in the business longer than I have,” he says. In fact, they still own the first hotel he started with. “That’s where we started to manage property personally,” he says, “and now we have 1500 employees altogether.”
And those employees are crucial to his success. Friendwell’s goal, he says, is to “provide opportunity for investors.” To do that, he maintains a steady belief in the Marriott formula of “happy owners equal happy employees, which in turn equals happy customers.”
The company is “very concentrated” in New Jersey, with 13 hotels. It’s where Cheng grew up. “I came to the U.S. when I was 13,” he said. “I guess it was fate. I’m grateful to God for putting us here. We’re so close to New York―it was a wonderful starting point for the business.”Friendwell Group of Companies also has two hotels in Pennsylvania.
Friendwell Group of Companies specializes in the acquisition and management of income-producing real estate, such as shopping centers, office buildings and hotels. People make up the company. At Friendwell, each customer is important and every member of the team has essential contributions. From the CEO to the customerfacing employees, Friendwell is aware and proud of the fact that they are in the hospitality industry.
Information leads to improvements: Friendwell takes pride in an exceptional Management Information System that provides management with the data needed to optimize performance. Revenue analysis, labor analysis, breaking-down guest satisfaction trends, staff’s problem resolutions pattern, sales team’s activity journals; Friendwell is able to make use of every bit of data to continue improving themselves.