Jacque M. Woods grew up a military brat. She was born in Manchester, Missouri, in 1975 before bouncing around to Central Michigan, Southern Illinois and Mississippi. For her junior year of high school, she found herself back in Missouri – this time in St. Louis.
“When you don’t know anything else, you don’t know that it’s different from other people,” Woods said. Her mother, Vera Woods, believed the itinerant life of a military family kept Jacque and her five older brothers close, but shortly after her birth her father, Perry Woods, decided to retire from the U.S. Marine Corps.
Perry was from St. Louis, and Vera got a teaching job at St. Louis University, so moving back to the Gateway to the West only seemed right. Once she finished high school, though, Jacque left home to attend Michigan State.
She majored in forensics psychology and went on to work at a transitional housing program for female offenders. In just three years, though, Jacque felt burnt out and frequently complained to her mother about how unhappy she was.
Naturally, Vera took it into her own hands. At a conference dinner with SLU, she filled out an application in her daughter’s name and set up an interview for the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at Union Station. Despite disliking her current position, Woods fought the move.
“I knew I wanted a career change, I just thought I was gonna go to grad school,” Woods said. Still, she followed through with the interview to appease her mother. “All good African-American parents, they know what’s better for their kids,” she said. “Even though their kids don’t believe them.”
Eighteen years later, Woods is now the sales manager for the Hyatt Regency St. Louis at the Arch. She works remotely from Memphis, Tennessee, where she moved to take care of her ailing brother in June of 2015. Her brother passed away due to pancreatic cancer, but Woods remains in Memphis primarily to help raise her nephew.
During her initial interview, director of sales Lori Coyne told Woods that she had a “sales manager’s personality” and that she wouldn’t be an administrative assistant for long. Woods took it with a grain of salt. “If it happens, it happens,” she said. “If it doesn’t, it’s no loss because I didn’t plan on being there or making it a career.”
Nine months later, Coyne held up to her word. She created a training program for Woods, and within the year she was promoted to sales manager for the Hyatt Regency in Indianapolis. She went on to work at Hyatt properties in Cleveland and Louisville before moving to the location at the Arch – where she has to meet a sales quota of $2.7 million in annual revenue while bringing in 10 to 12 groups to stay at the hotel throughout the year.
“I jokingly say I put heads in beds, that’s what I do every day” Woods said. Outside of selling hotel rooms to clients, she is the overseer of the religious, sports and multi-cultural markets.
As a devout Christian, proud tomboy and black woman, Woods believes that each field fits her perfectly. Her daily tasks in Memphis are mostly comprised of sifting through emails, researching and organizing, but she does travel to St. Louis once a month to meet face-to-face with clients and staff.
Woods also travels all over the country for conferences in various cities. “It’s great,” she said, “but when you’re living out of a suitcase and you don’t have your normal routine, you have that level of stress.”
She still remains active in her local community with her local church and programs like the Make A Wish and Ronald McDonald foundations.
“The balancing act is what’s the hardest,” Woods said. “I think it’s probably harder for people that work from home, because we don’t have a defined line to say, ‘Okay, it’s time to go home.’” Frequently, Woods will find herself still working on her computer at 10 or 11 p.m.
Woods, however, doesn’t let these challenges prevent her from enjoying her career. The travel caters to her adventurer personality, and she’s used to it thanks to her childhood. From her first incentive trip in Curacao to having executives and staff visit her in times of need, there are a litany of great moments and memories from her time at Hyatt.
Through it all, however, she’s never forgotten that her career was “a complete fluke.” She graduated from her alma mater – Michigan State – without ever knowing that its School of Hospitality Business existed, let alone that it was nationally ranked among hospitality programs.
Unfortunately, Woods believes that this lack of knowledge is pervasive throughout the African-American community and prevents them from rising to managerial positions in the world of hospitality.
“We don’t know what we don’t know,” she said. “All you ever see when you go to a hotel are the valet workers, the servers in the restaurant, the bellmen, or the house keepers. It’s just a lack of exposure to management. I think we do a disservice to our kids by not exposing them to this element of hospitality.”
Woods believes that plenty of African Americans have what it takes to be general managers and directors, but they’re scared to take the chance or simply aren’t aware of the opportunity. “We start out just needing a job,” she said. “So, I think we get stuck.”
Luckily for Woods, she had Vera. “If my mom had not have filled out that application for me, there’s no way that I would have ever went and applied for a job at the Hyatt,” she said. “Ever.”
Even with her mother’s guidance and her own hard-work, flexibility and perseverance, it took the courage to take a chance for Woods to make it. She urges other African Americans – no matter their age, class, education or gender – to do the same.
This is the third in a series of profiles of hospitality professionals that Tashan Reed is reporting for The American.
