Encore Enterprises

In early 2005, Encore Enterprises was flying high. With the acquisition of two hotel management companies, Encore’s portfolio peaked at forty-one hotels across 13 states. But on August 29, 2005, everything changed, when Hurricane Katrina tore through the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Although Encore’s Biloxi corporate offices occupied a second floor office space, a thirty-foot storm surge brought saltwater into their IT room and reduced much of their offices to rubble. Adding to an already tragic situation, a new office building they were moving to was also severely damaged.

Fortunately, the Encore team had the forethought to develop a disaster plan. Within 3-5 days after the storm had calmed, they had set-up temporary offices in a nearby hotel meeting room, and began working in shifts to begin recovery. At that time, Encore was operating with all of its hotel accounting outsourced to a team offshore; however, they were still required to have an IT infrastructure on-site. Once backup tapes stateside had been restored, the offshore accounting staff was able to resume the accounting process for all of Encore’s hotels, although a few days of data were lost during the recovery and restoration process.

Through that lengthy recovery process, the Encore team came together and made it through the Katrina ordeal stronger than ever. As a precautionary step, the company’s board of directors asked Encore to reconsider the location of its corporate offices from Biloxi to a location that was less at-risk for natural disaster; so in 2006, Encore moved its headquarters to Dallas, Texas.

Another consideration to be addressed was the offshore outsourcing model that Encore utilized for its accounting process. This process had become very costly and required a large, non-scalable infrastructure of hardware, custom software, and 4-5 IT staff to maintain. Additionally, the existing model provided them no assurance that the accounting functionality could be seamlessly maintained and remain operational in the event of another natural disaster or unforeseen incident that might affect Encore’s corporate office or a hotel property location. Glenn Pedersen, President of Encore Enterprises, became familiar with M3 Accounting + Analytics, as he searched for alternate hotel accounting solutions. In 2010, Encore Enterprises joined the M3 family.