Five years ago, I started Sparrow with an idea, a work ethic, and the belief that if I worked hard enough, I could build something meaningful. In the beginning, people weren’t hiring Sparrow. They were hiring Mike Baker. They were hiring me because they knew my work ethic, my values, and how I performed. For the first few years, I was still very much in the trenches. I was selling hotels while simultaneously trying to build a company around me.
Five years later, Sparrow has become something much bigger than me. Somewhere along the way, I learned a few things.
What you see is what you get with me.
I’m honest to a fault. If I don’t think we can do something, I won’t tell you that we can. I think my honesty and transparency are the things I hear about most from our partners, associates, and anyone who comes into the Sparrow ecosystem.
I’ve had calls with people who believed they needed sales support. After looking at the data, it became clear that sales wasn’t the problem. Occupancy was there. What they needed was a rate strategy and a revenue management partner who could help them capitalize on the demand they were already generating.
I told them that.
I didn’t try to force a sales engagement because it wasn’t the right solution. I gave them my honest recommendation, and they moved forward with it.
That may not always lead to a new contract for Sparrow, but it builds trust. And trust matters more to me than making a sale that doesn’t serve the client.
If we can help, I’ll tell you exactly how.
If we can’t, I’ll tell you that, too.
The right people can change everything.
Before I learned how important it was to protect our culture, I learned how important it was to find the right people in the first place.
My first two hires were critical to Sparrow’s foundation, and I got incredibly lucky with both of them. Today, one is my VP of Sales, and the other is my Senior Regional Director of Sales. They weren’t just early employees. They helped me carry the weight of building the company when Sparrow was still taking shape. They believed in what we were building, helped establish our standards, and gave me the confidence to keep moving forward.
Looking back, I understand how fortunate I was. The first people you bring into a company can influence everything that comes after them: the culture, the expectations, the pace, and the way people treat one another. I got lucky with those first two hires, but I also learned that luck can only take you so far. Eventually, you have to become intentional about finding, developing, and retaining the right people.
You can't help everybody.
This may be the biggest lesson of the last five years. When I started Sparrow, I genuinely believed we could help everybody. Give me the hotel, give me the problem, give me the person who needs some extra coaching, and we’ll figure it out.
I’ve learned that’s not always true.
Some owners have unrealistic expectations. Some hotels simply aren’t sales-ready because their operational problems are bigger than anything a sales strategy can fix. Sometimes you have a team member whom you coach, support, train, give resources to, and give opportunity after opportunity, and it still doesn’t work.
I’ve always believed in the good in people. I believe people can accomplish incredible things when they’re given the right tools and resources.
But I’ve learned something important:
Resources can't manufacture desire.
I can teach someone our tools, systems, and processes. I can’t teach someone to care, and I can’t make someone want something they don’t want.
So I’ve stopped trying to help everybody and started focusing on helping the right people.
Culture matters more than a résumé.
I’ve hired people who looked incredible on paper. I’ve interviewed people who absolutely crushed the interview. Then they got into the trenches with us, and it was a completely different story.
Today, when my leadership team interviews someone, they’re evaluating whether that person has the skills and ability to do the job. But before we ever get there, I want to understand whether they’re a cultural fit.
We have a culture of getting sh*t done.
People help each other here. We don’t live in silos. There’s a sense of urgency to what we do.
One of our core values is:
We do what we say we're going to do, when we say we're going to do it.
Companies love to say they lead with integrity.
Okay. Define integrity.
That’s what it means to us.
I’ve also learned that protecting your culture sometimes means making difficult decisions about who gets to remain a part of it. Earlier in my career, I probably believed being a good leader meant continuing to give someone another opportunity, and another, and another.
Today, I understand there’s another side to that equation.
I have a responsibility to protect the people who are showing up.
Not all money is good money.
This one took some learning.
We’ve underpriced ourselves before. I’ve taken partnerships because I wanted to get in the door. I’ve worked with owners I probably knew weren’t the right fit before we ever signed the agreement.
Twice, I’ve ignored red flags with owners and eventually ended up in litigation.
You’d think once would’ve been enough.
Apparently, I needed the refresher course.
But the bigger lesson wasn’t about contracts, payment methods, or collections. It was learning to trust what I was already seeing.
If something feels wrong at the beginning of a partnership, it usually doesn’t magically get better six months later.
Today, I would rather have one incredible partner than a portfolio of 50 hotels with the wrong one because not all money is good money.
I’ve become fiercely protective of my team’s time, energy, and resources. If an owner isn’t the right fit for us, I have no problem firing the client.
That’s something five-years-ago Mike probably would’ve struggled with.
I’m not interested in growing as fast as possible anymore.
I’m interested in growing correctly.
I don’t care how slow we go, as long as we’re going in the right direction.
Invest in the business and the results tend to follow.
One belief I had when I started Sparrow has only gotten stronger: take care of your people, invest in your people, invest in your systems, invest in your processes, and give good people the tools and resources they need to be successful.
Obviously, you have to be methodical about where you’re putting money when you’re running a business. But I’ve watched what happens when we continue putting resources back into Sparrow instead of simply trying to pull everything we can out of it.
The revenue follows.
The profit follows.
The growth follows.
Money matters. Of course it does.
But I’ve come to see money primarily as a resource.
The more resources Sparrow creates, the more opportunity we’re able to create for the people who are helping build it.
I had to learn to get out of the way.
This was hard.
When you’ve built something yourself, your instinct is to have your hands in everything. For the first few years, I was running the company while still carrying my own portfolio of hotels.
Eventually, I had to recognize that what Sparrow needed from me had changed.
My job wasn’t to personally deliver everything anymore. My job was to figure out how to take the values, urgency, work ethic, and standards people associated with Mike Baker and make them part of Sparrow.
That meant trusting people, building leadership, letting other people make decisions, and sometimes accepting that someone might do something differently than I would, and that’s okay.
Today, I don’t carry a portfolio of hotels. My focus is our clients, our people, our systems, our procedures, our product, and making sure our team has what they need to be successful.
Five years ago, taking care of Sparrow meant doing everything.
Today, taking care of Sparrow sometimes means knowing what not to do myself.
Your strengths can become your weaknesses.
My desire to help people has been both a gift and a curse.
It’s helped me build this company. It’s also caused me to avoid conversations I should’ve had sooner.
I’ve kept team members longer than I should have because I believed I could help them get there. I’ve probably stayed in client relationships longer than I should have for the same reason.
That’s still an evolving process for me. I haven’t mastered it.
What I have gotten better at is recognizing it.
I’ve learned that self-awareness doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve solved the problem. Sometimes it simply means you can finally see yourself doing it.
Once you can see it, you can start getting better.
One wrong decision can hurt. It doesn't have to define you.
There was a point when I genuinely wasn’t sure Sparrow was going to make it.
We were right on the cusp of reaching another level when poor performance from the wrong hire cost us six hotels.
Today, six hotels wouldn’t bury us.
At the time, it almost did.
Things got weird pretty quickly. I paused my salary, made moves behind the scenes, and figured out what needed to happen.
My people never knew the difference.
We made it through.
Today, I don’t have a prospect problem. I have a capacity problem. There are times when the question isn’t where we’re going to find another client, but where we’re going to put them.
It’s funny how different a problem can look five years later.
That experience changed the way I hire. It changed how quickly I’m willing to address performance problems. It reinforced how much the people you put inside your company can change its trajectory.
But more than anything, it taught me:
Everything works out.
Not everything works out the way you planned.
Sometimes it gets really uncomfortable first.
You adjust, make decisions, learn, and keep moving.
Eventually, the thing that felt like it might end your story becomes another chapter in it.
Then Sparrow became real.
There was a moment over these five years when something shifted for me.
We’d done a few consulting engagements for brands on and off, but they were minimal and nothing like what we’re doing now. We’d worked with individual owners and groups with portfolios of hotels, but then Sparrow was approached by a worldwide hotel brand about providing sales support.
That one hit differently.
We had somehow made enough noise to get noticed.
For years, people hired Sparrow because they knew me.
Now a major hotel brand knew Sparrow.
That’s when I remember thinking, Oh sh*t, this is a real company.
It wasn’t just about the contract. It was knowing that our reputation had traveled further than I had.
My definition of success has changed.
Five years ago, success was much more personal.
I wanted freedom. I wanted to be able to step away from work without feeling like everything would fall apart. I wanted to be present with my family. I wanted enough financial resources that I could make choices instead of feeling like work made those choices for me.
I’ve achieved a lot of what five-years-ago Mike would’ve considered successful.
So now the goal has changed.
Success to me now looks like creating a successful environment for other people.
I want the people helping me build this company to have opportunities to grow, make more money, and reach their own financial goals. I want Sparrow to create resources for them and their families.
The next level isn’t about me sitting back and collecting bigger checks. It’s about creating something where the people who helped build it get to experience the benefits of what we built together.
If Sparrow disappeared tomorrow and you asked me what I’m most proud of from these five years, my answer wouldn’t be our revenue, the number of hotels we’ve represented, the contracts we’ve signed, or even getting noticed by a worldwide brand.
It would be my team and the positive impact we’ve been able to have on their lives.
Five years later.
Every once in a while, I catch myself looking in the mirror and pause.
Five years of flashbacks seem to happen all at once: starting with nothing, the wins, the wrong hires, the right hires, the clients who believed in us, the clients I should’ve never taken, the moments when things got weird, the moments when I wasn’t sure how I was going to figure it out, the people who helped build this with me, and the moment Sparrow stopped being Mike Baker and became Sparrow.
Eventually, all those flashbacks lead me right back to the person standing in the mirror.
I know saying anything is possible sounds cliché.
Five years ago, I probably would’ve thought the same thing.
I don’t anymore.
I’ve watched something that started as an idea become something real, something that provides for people, creates opportunities, and makes me incredibly proud.
Usually, that moment in the mirror ends the same way, with a little grin that says:
You did it.
Then it’s time to figure out what we’re going to do with the next five.
