How This CEO Took His Company From Crisis To SaaS Leadership

When the hospitality industry ground to a halt in March 2020, hotels and hospitality vendors alike scrambled to navigate the collapse. Frontline Performance Group made a specific choice about how to do it: rather than demand payments from clients already hemorrhaging revenue, CEO Geoffrey Toffetti paused all client agreements outright. That somewhat counterintuitive move focused on preserving relationships first and figuring out survival second. It was a decision—made in the chaos of a 90-percent revenue collapse—that became the company’s turning point.

In the five years since, Toffetti and his team have scaled FPG from 400 hotel customers to over 2,500, expanded into 120 countries, and fundamentally transformed the business model from high-touch consulting to a global SaaS platform. They acquired two companies to accelerate market access. They deployed AI to multiply their impact across language barriers and operational data. And they’re now entering the food and beverage space—extending the playbook that made them leaders in hospitality revenue optimization.

Toffetti spent 10 years embedded with hospitality operations before building the platform, which means the technology was built not around assumptions about what the market wanted, but on what he’d already spent three decades proving worked. In the following interview, he walks through his decision-making framework during crisis, how to balance speed against stability, why acquisitions were critical to growth, and what he’d do differently knowing what he knows now. His lesson on pricing—leave yourself elasticity—will resonate with any CEO launching at scale.

Walk us through your decision-making process when you chose to pause client agreements during a 90% revenue loss. What ultimately convinced you it was the right move?

Part of our ethos is: our relationship, plus results, equals our reputation. We chose to immediately pause client agreements. Internally, everyone was on the same page, so it wasn’t much of a debate. Either force payments and damage relationships or relieve pressure and preserve the future. We sent a simple agreement pausing services and extending terms by the paused period, expecting 8–12 weeks—it lasted 18 months. Clients were grateful amid vendor demands, and staying true to our values kept corporate relationships warm, about 70 percent ultimately returned. It kept us in contact with our largest hospitality clients at the corporate level. Pausing our client agreements was the ethical choice and let us focus on survival, which is where we put all our energy.

You were already planning a SaaS pivot before Covid. What specific obstacles were preventing you from moving faster?

Yes, that’s right, we always aspired to become tech and in 2016, we began thinking about how to migrate to being tech-first as a business. At that time, we were very much tech-enabled, we had introduced and were using the tech, but it was not our lead-in. Our lead-in was our people on site every day, doing training, working one-on-one with front desk agents, coaching them. That was our model.

The proposition was difficult, we were making a lot of money in some areas on commission, and giving up that revenue seemed foolhardy. We have investors and shareholders, so saying we’re going to cut 50% of our revenue to make this pivot, is not something most companies can survive.

Our approach was to bifurcate agreements—subscription for the technology, services for consulting/training. We were negotiating with one of our largest clients at the time that Covid hit, so we would have flipped one of our main MSAs to this bifurcation. By 2022-23 all of our clients would have had a dual agreement with us, which would have given us SaaS and purified out the consulting. Obviously, there would have been a re-education process. The other constraint was appetite: customers wanted our people, and our headcount and our model reinforced that. Covid reset the rules, no on-site consulting allowed. So it removed the biggest obstacle and accelerated a shift we were already making.

How do you transition from high-touch consulting to scalable software without losing what made your service valuable? Did you lose talent in this transition?

Our consulting model gave us 30+ years of on-site experience, working elbow to elbow with hundreds of thousands of frontline employees. We have the on the ground experience, which is powerful, because no other tech company can say they spent three decades studying the problem and developing the solution. That depth of experience is what helped the transition work. The DNA of our service, the coaching, the frontline insights, the performance focus, lives inside the platform we’ve built. Our performance enhancement platform motivates and manages team performance while providing specialized training to improve sales skills at the point of sale. It blends our proven, people-driven methods with scalable software.

We’re not technologists who had a good idea and tried to find a market fit. We are the world’s expert in incremental sales and built technology to enable it, that’s a huge differentiator. As for talent, yes, some people were deeply tied to the on-site model and that was hard. But we retained those most aligned to the transition, the ones who could carry forward our culture and experience into a new delivery model. That way we didn’t lose what made us valuable; we translated it into a form that could scale. Previously our consultants could support 4–5 hotels; now that same expertise influences 70–100, preserving our know-how while scaling it 10–20× across the portfolio.

Growing from 400 to 2,500+ clients is massive scale. What systems broke first, and how did you rebuild them?

The first system to break was implementation and launch. Coming out of Covid we were still relying on on-site training, and the volume of new properties outstripped our resources. So we had to completely reimagine our activation process into a virtual launch, still live training, now via video, which let us invite multiple properties (e.g., clusters under one owner/brand) to a single session and roughly 10× our capacity. By late 2022/early 2023 we executed our largest launch ever which was 600+ properties in 120 days, this was transformational for the business.

Your HeyGen experiment for multilingual videos sounds tactical rather than theoretical. How do you identify AI use cases that create immediate business value?

While proprietary AI capability is being built directly into our own platform, we also experiment with emerging tools that can help us scale learning and insight-sharing. Our team has been seeking use cases since deep learning hit the public consciousness 8- 10 years ago. It wasn’t until the last 24 months that there have been solutions available, off the shelf, that you could actually get into the AI game if you didn’t have a huge development team and data scientists.

We started with translation, our company has 40 languages that are native speakers, so we vetted the language models and started using it to translate the subtitling on videos. As soon as we saw the generative video applications hit the market, we jumped in and started experimenting, and HeyGen was the best for our use case.

Right now, we’re in the middle of upgrading our entire back office to leverage AI and we’re deploying agentic AI into our platform in a variety of use cases. We’ve been dancing on the edge for a small company and it’s just now that the tools are available that we can jump in and implement them. The key is to think of AI as a partner, not a substitute, let AI handle the repetitive or invisible tasks while keeping people at the center of customer interactions. We’re now shifting toward AI insight–driven coaching. So our Customer Success Consultant role will evolve into an AI agent role, with CSCs managing broader portfolios as AI takes on tasks like champion guidance and weekly updates.

What was your framework for deciding which consulting expertise could be productized versus what required human interaction?

We automated the repeatable tasks and relied on people for the irreplaceable ones. We started with the elements we were already teaching clients, like structuring incentive plans or calculating goals, since those processes are largely algorithmic and naturally fit for inclusion. Then we went line-by-line through what we call our ‘Khoury Performance Equation’ (KPE) and asked, “What can be codified, what can’t?” Recognition, for example, can be digitized (thumbs-ups, comments, peer/manager signals); a manager taking someone for coffee cannot. We paired that with client feedback. Finance needed to “tick and tie” every sale, so we built an audit trail to validate transactions and feed payroll. We codify the IP that repeats; leave the human moments to people and build the platform around both.

Why were acquisitions so critical to your growth strategy versus building everything internally?

When you make acquisitions, you’re usually doing it for one of two reasons. You’re buying capabilities you don’t have, or you’re buying access you don’t have. In our case, it was primarily the access question. In 2017, we acquired Honolulu-based Drake Beil & Associates (DBA). This acquisition delivered a major hospitality brand MSA because they were the chosen vendor in the Americas. We knew of Singapore-based TSA Solutions and first made contact in 2019. That led to a meeting in London in January 2020, where we came to terms in principle to buy them. Then Covid hit, so we paused.

TSA had really strong relationships with a leading hospitality brand in Asia and more hotels than us pre-shutdown. We negotiated to buy them and we secured a highly favorable deal.. However, the transition wasn’t without challenges, particularly in integrating and retaining their clients during a tumultuous market upheaval. In the end, it was a very accretive move that delivered substantial international market share growth, a solid financial return, and great strategic benefits.

One other interesting note: TSA had built a new version of their platform and had been telling clients for months it was coming but hadn’t released it. We rolled out our platform and said, here it is. We didn’t have to sell our tech, the stage was already set and the timing worked out perfectly.

How do you balance moving fast enough to survive versus not breaking everything in the process?

I think the first and foremost, it’s priority and discipline. When you’re growing and opportunities come your way that sound enticing, but you don’t have ready-made systems built to address that, they can become a massive distraction and could be a seam breaker in certain areas of the business. You must stay focused on your core capacity. If you are going to expand your area of focus, you must be thoughtful and deliberate about building the tangential systems that would allow you to address that opportunity, without it overloading your core system. You need to invest money up front to create enough separation. This means you can insulate your core business, so you don’t break that down, while you’re trying to pursue something else.

What’s the biggest mistake you made during this transformation that other CEOs could avoid?

I think we probably should have left ourselves a little bit more elasticity in our pricing. It’s very hard to go back and change something like that. So if you’re rolling out a new product, create a range of values that you can play in until you land on what the optimal value price relationship is. My advice to other CEOs: leave room to expand or contract your pricing.

What was your biggest lesson personally, as CEO?

You need a different support system. There are times when you don’t have the outlet internally to express frustration over whatever’s going on, where other people express it to you. So that’s a big transition, make sure you have a good support network around you, confidants around you, that aren’t necessarily in the organization, so that you have that the ability to express yourself freely. You are making all the decisions and, to quote Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, ‘Gripes go up, not down.”