Watch Charles Drury speak

With a story of a sometimes exasperating, sometimes humorous rise from Kelso, Mo., to the top of one of America's popular hotel chains, Charles Drury kept an audience of about 70 members and guests of the Cape West Rotary Club in their seats long past the end of the lunch hour Thursday.

Drury, who founded the Drury Hotels chain with his brothers back in the early 1970s, used stories of his experiences both as a member of the family plastering company and as a hotel operator to provide lessons on achieving success.

In an interview after the speech, Drury, who was born in 1927 on a Kelso farm, said he goes to his office at the Drury Hotels corporate headquarters in St. Louis five or six days a week. The privately held family business includes 120 hotels in 19 states, with more under construction, as well as numerous affiliated companies that include land development and construction.

The family built its success, Drury told the Rotarians, on learning from mistakes, being willing to innovate and making sure that customers were satisfied.

One lesson he learned early, Drury said, was that a profit was a good thing, no matter how small.

When the family business was plastering, he said, his father was adamant that handshake deals, not contracts, were the way to do business. His father had lost their family farm, purchased for $9,000 with money carefully saved in the 1920s, during the Great Depression.

"He wasn't about to trust anybody who was educated with a Sunday suit, a coat and tie, lawyers, doctors, Indian chiefs," Drury said.

But Drury said he took a chance, and put in a bid on plastering a building owned by three doctors on Broadway in Cape Girardeau. After winning the contract he discovered he had dramatically underbid his competitors.

He told his father and lamented that "I left so much on the table."

His father, in reply, asked if the price included a profit. Told it did, Drury said his father replied: "Well, dammit, shut up and be satisfied. You ought to know you can't make it all on one job."

The family entered the hotel business with a Cape Girardeau Holiday Inn that opened in 1961. After nine months with no profits, they hired an accountant to examine the business. He discovered they were making money on rooms and losing it on the restaurant and bar.

That led to the construction of a rooms-only motel in Sikeston, Mo. The family couldn't decide on a name at first, so the architect's plans, which Drury held up at the Rotary Club, said only "A motel for Sikeston, Mo." As the chain grew, he said, they got a lot of compliments for design.

The lessons learned from mistakes, Drury said, are compiled in a book he calls "Kelso University." Drury did not attend college, but did graduate from Catholic high school in Cape Girardeau.

Kelso University lesson No. 87, he told the audience, "says simply if you get kicked by the same mule twice, you've got a major problem."

rkeller@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 126