From War Stories, A Business Sense

Anyone who has served in the U.S. military gets my immediate respect. My war stories involve writing on deadline or getting hectored by some bigwig. Their war stories involve someone trying to kill you.

So I listened when Frederic W. Malek, a former U.S. Navy officer who has seen combat, wanted to talk about a business he started seven years ago. It's called TIG Global. TIG is based in a Chevy Chase office building and involves managing Web sites and other interactive media on behalf of hotel clients.

Malek, 44, is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and served in the Persian Gulf War on special boat squadrons with U.S. Navy SEAL teams. His father is Washington financier Frederic V. Malek.

We will get to his business, but first I wanted to know from Malek whether his Navy years built skills that help him manage a $38 million business with 150 employees.

"You have to learn what works and what doesn't work," he said. "What works is you have to earn people's respect and loyalty through example and how you treat them. What doesn't work is assuming they are loyal automatically."

He told me about being on a troop ship in the Pacific bound for Iraq and Desert Storm. His team was training for combat on four-hour shifts where half would sleep while the rest prepared. After several visits from a white-gloved senior officer inspecting the quarters for cleanliness, Malek blew up.

"I told him that my people needed their rest and they needed their sleep and this has got to stop," Malek recalled.

Rebuffing the officer might have gotten him in trouble, but it bonded his men to him for the rest of the mission.

"I learned then that it is all about focusing on the mission and giving your team the best chance of succeeding," he said.

Malek attended the Wharton School of Business after leaving the Navy, graduating in 1995. He worked on Wall Street, concentrating on the hotel industry. He got the idea for TIG in the late 1990s while at his father's private-equity fund, Thayer Lodging, which concentrates in the hotel sector. Malek was working at increasing the value of the hotels in the fund so he could sell them for more. That's when he discovered that he could use the Internet to drive more customers to the hotels, which would increase revenue.

In 2001, a major California hotel chain called Malek, who was still at Thayer. The chain asked why the hotel Web sites that Malek managed brought in three times the number of hotel guests compared with other hotel Web sites in the chain.

"We knew we were onto something," Malek said.