Stephen Coston’s path to Innkeeper of the Year began in a motel basement, with a stack of CDs and a job many people outside the industry don’t think about.
just now
BAR HARBOR — Before Stephen Coston was named Innkeeper of the Year, before the 13 properties and the renovations and the business accolades, before the recognition that comes with building something that lasts, there were a whole lot of cigarette butts.
He wasn’t smoking them.
The cigarette butts were a staple when Coston was a kid working at the Villager Motel on Main Street. His first work assignment was picking up what guests had left behind and a lot of what they left behind were cigarette butts.
After that came the work of folding towels, cleaning rooms, scrubbing the swimming pool and, for years, washing laundry in a basement.
There was a boombox down there in the Villager’s basement and a stack of CDs.
Coston spent much of the money he earned doing laundry buying more of those CDs. They were rap albums, almost exclusively. He doubts a single non-rap song played in that basement for 15 consecutive years.
It was an unlikely soundtrack to the beginnings of a hospitality career based in Bar Harbor, Maine, but a lot of worthwhile things begin in places that don’t look particularly important —or particularly impressive—or seem sensical at the time.
Origin stories are like that.
Coston is not in charge of folding laundry anymore. Now he’s the man behind Stay Bar Harbor’s growing collection of lodging properties on Mount Desert Island and he has just been named HospitalityMaine’s Innkeeper of the Year. The award recognizes an achievement that, by his telling, belongs to considerably more people than the man whose name appears on it.
“Stephen Coston is a Maine success story. He’s a local guy who has built something meaningful here, and just as importantly, he gives back to the community. He has preserved classic Maine cottages, breathed new life into motels and invested in a new, year-round boutique hotel in Bar Harbor. He understands what makes Maine special while recognizing the need to evolve. That’s exactly the kind of entrepreneurial spirit, investment, and energy we need in Maine’s hospitality industry right now.” HospitalityMaine Director of Membership and Communications Kathleen Pierce said via email, Thursday.
He sees the honor as recognition of the entire operation, of the employees whose daily work makes a guest’s stay worth remembering.
Across 13 properties, he said, maintaining a high standard of hospitality requires the consistent efforts of a great many people.
“The guest experience is the most important outcome of our business,” Coston said.
It is a measured answer, and perhaps an appropriate one from a man who seems more comfortable discussing the machinery of a successful business than the machinery of his own recognition.
There is, however, a story in how he got here.
Eleven years ago, as operations manager Brandon Monroe remembers it, the work began with the 12-room Rockhurst Motel. What stands today as the Inn on Mount Desert came through years of research, training, renovation and the kind of incremental work that rarely makes for an exciting announcement.
People see the finished building, Monroe said. They don’t always see what it took to get there.
He does.
“He deserves it because of where this started. People forget this started as the 12 room Rockhurst Motel 11 years ago. I feel people forget the process. The research. The training. The time it took to turn that 12 room motel into the now Inn on Mount Desert. That alone is an achievement, let alone the additional projects. The growing and renovating,” Monroe said. And then there were the other projects, the growth, the renovations, the additional properties. The work kept coming.
Christopher Walsh, who has worked for Coston, describes an employer with exceptionally high standards and little appetite for anything less than excellence.
There is a difference between demanding good work and making people want to do it.
Coston, Walsh said, is the sort of employer people respect enough to meet even the highest expectations.
“Stephen Coston has been, without question, one of the best employers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working for. His standards are exceptionally high, and he expects nothing short of perfection,” Walsh said. “But what makes him such an extraordinary employer is that he makes you want to deliver exactly that. When you work for someone you genuinely respect, meeting even the highest expectations comes naturally.”
That may be the less visible part of running a hospitality business: building something that works not just because one person insists upon it, but because an entire group of people believes in the standard.
In Bar Harbor, where tourism is both an economic engine and a defining part of community life, that responsibility extends beyond the front desk.
Everal Eaton, speaking on behalf of the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce, said, “On behalf of our the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce, we would like to extend our congratulations to Stephen Coston on being named HospitalityMaine’s Innkeeper of the Year.”
He called Coston an example of the island’s hospitality tradition.
“Stephen represents the very best of MDI’s long hospitality tradition. Running Stay Bar Harbor on MDI requires not only operational excellence and an eye for historic stewardship, but a strong commitment to the guest experience. Through the past several years, Stephen has modeled what thoughtful, community-minded business leadership looks like in Bar Harbor,” Eaton said.
His recognition, Eaton added, was a point of pride for the wider business community.
“Having one of our own recognized statewide by HospitalityMaine is a point of pride for our entire business community. This well-earned achievement highlights the standard of hospitality, service, and dedication that sets Bar Harbor apart from other destinations. Congratulations to Stephen and his dedicated Stay Bar Harbor team on this remarkable achievement,” Eaton said.
Coston himself is quick to credit the people around him. He also believes that being a successful business owner in a small town means understanding that the town is more than a place to operate a business.
“Bar Harbor has many great business people, and I think one thing they all have in common is a commitment to the town. The business community in Bar Harbor is predominantly local and extremely supportive of all sorts of non-business matters,” Coston said when asked about being a business leader in a small town. “I’m not sure this is part of what is required to be a great business person in a small community, but I think Bar Harbor certainly benefits tremendously from its overwhelmingly local business leadership.”
It is a commitment he appears to admire as much as any balance sheet.
He has collected his share of other honors. Mainebiz named him to its 40 Under 40. The Inn on Mount Desert received the Rising Star award from the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce. He is also a member of Husson University’s Alumni Hall of Fame and was co-valedictorian of his graduating class.
That last distinction carries a little personal history. Coston says he was not a particularly good student in high school.
He has also accumulated a philosophy or two along the way.
“I think my absolute favorite bit of business advice is borrowed from Warren Buffett: ‘You can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow,’” Coston said. “This one-liner has spared me an incredible amount of grief over the course of my business undertakings. In the vast majority of instances, anger and conflict just don’t prove to be conducive to business success.”
A good innkeeper, he believes, must be able to roll with the punches. The unexpected is part of the business. Difficult interactions are inevitable. The challenge is not allowing them to rob you of the patience and steadiness required to make somebody else’s stay a good one.
There is something of the Stoic in that approach, although Coston seems less interested in announcing a philosophy than in quietly living with one.
He paraphrases a Confucius quote from Analects: “Even when eating coarse rice and using a bent arm for a pillow, surely there is happiness to be found.”
And perhaps that is where the more interesting portrait of Stephen Coston begins. The joy, that quote continues, is in the midst of things. “Riches and honours acquired by unrighteousness are to me as a floating cloud.”
For years, he said, he identified primarily as a businessman. It was probably necessary, he acknowledged, to build the business. More than a decade into it, though, he no longer sees himself quite that way.
He plays basketball, badly, by his own admission. He likes cars, particularly those from 2012, before automobiles began looking, in his estimation, like “rolling iPads.” He still listens to rap music. Some of his favorite artists have signed those old CDs from the motel basement.
He reads biographies, follows the Green Bay Packers and likes Rosalie’s. He lives in Seal Harbor, where he enjoys watching the boats.
His favorite days are the ordinary ones, the days when the telephone doesn’t ring and little or nothing of consequence happens.
And these days, he says, he spends substantially more time and energy trying to collect old paintings than trying to collect commercial real estate.
It is a telling distinction from a man whose professional life has involved so much building, buying, renovating, and expanding.
There is still work to do, of course. Coston remains involved in the business every day. The guests still arrive, the rooms still need tending, the properties still need attention. Hospitality, after all, does not offer many days off from being hospitable.
A couple of years ago, Coston wrote in a candidate profile for the Bar Harbor Story, “My primary goal is to go to bed a little wiser than when I woke up.”
That’s still true, he said, but there’s a bit of a different focus now.
“I’d say I’ve become less concerned with taking things I learn and employing them. I’m just as happy learning things simply for the sake of it,” he said.
Maybe the measure of what Coston has built is not simply the number of properties under his care, or the recognition that now accompanies his name.
It is that a boy who once picked up cigarette butts and folded towels at a motel on Main Street has helped build a business that gives other people a place to feel at home, which is what an innkeeper is supposed to do.
The award is technically his. The work and the reasons for that award, as he is quick to point out, belongs to everyone on his team.
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Rick Osann Art.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
There is still time to register for the awards night and summit here. It will be on Nov. 16 at the Sheraton Portland Sable Oaks. Tickets for the awards dinner are $110
The Islander originally broke this story.
All photos courtesy Stephen Coston. Graphics via HospitalityMaine
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