At Your Service

A bright red string hangs loosely around Neil Amin’s right wrist. Earlier this year, he traveled to India for a cousin’s wedding — “In India, ‘cousin’ is the same as ‘brother,’ ” he says — and Amin, as the eldest cousin on his mother’s side, was there to offer greetings and best wishes.  

The red string had been blessed by a priest as part of the wedding ritual.  

“I wear it until it falls off, and why not?” Amin asks. “It was blessed by a priest for a wonderful occasion.”  

The red string tells you a lot about Amin, because it symbolizes the strong ties he has to family, both in the U.S. and in India, where his parents grew up before emigrating several decades ago and where his father built a primary school in his native village, Sejakuva, for local children.  

Amin, 41, is CEO of Shamin Hotels, one of the largest family-operated hotel chains in the U.S., with 61 properties in six states – 38 in this region alone.

Shamin Hotels has in excess of 8,000 rooms and has operated under the banner of the Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt and Starwood brands.   

Since early spring, Amin has faced perhaps his biggest challenge, as the coronavirus pandemic hobbled the travel and hospitality industry, from airlines and hotels to restaurants and theaters.  

The company employed more than 3,000 people before sharp declines in booking prompted furloughs as business travel ground to a stop. In late March, Shamin established an associates relief fund with an initial $100,000 donation. The fund will help the company’s associates with food and other necessities and will also provide immediate cash assistance to those who need it.

“Although this is a very difficult time period for Shamin Hotels, we feel it’s important to act quickly and broadly to assist our associates,” Amin stated in an announcement about the fund. “We want them to know that we are in this together, and we will come out of this together.”  

By mid-April, in an online teleconference about the state of the hospitality industry, Amin shared that Shamin’s occupancy rates had dropped to about 10% and that three of its seven hotels at Richmond International Airport had temporarily closed.  

Yet, despite the unprecedented challenges his company faces, Amin is optimistic about the future.  

“We want to be the first ones to come back and bring people back and to ensure that our teams and our people have the tools they need to open these hotels back up to a high occupancy level,” he says.  

Measured Growth   

Recently, Shamin Hotels has announced projects in all three of the Richmond region’s major localities:  

In the city of Richmond, Shamin has a new headquarters at the recently purchased Richmond Times-Dispatch building on Franklin Street and a boutique Moxy Hotel at Fifth and Franklin streets.  

In Chesterfield County, a $125 million investment by Shamin includes a 200-room upscale hotel at Stonebridge, a mixed-used development that replaced the former Cloverleaf Mall on Chippenham Parkway and a 180-room dual-branded hotel property in Chester.  

In Henrico County, Shamin will operate a hotel at the reimagined Virginia Center Commons mall, where Henrico is planning a $50 million arena in a private-public partnership.

“We have no plans to cancel any of those projects at this time,” says Amin, who has faced adversity before.  

“I joined [Shamin Hotels] in 2002, but I became CEO in 2008, and we had this recession,” he says, “so a lot of my experience and training was dealing with the recession.

“That’s really ingrained my thinking. I remember those experiences dealing with those issues.”   

“We want [our associates] to know that we are in this together, and we will come out of this together.” —Neil Amin, CEO of Shamin Hotels

The last recession provided a growth opportunity for Shamin Hotels that it would not have had otherwise, Amin says.  

“Before 2009, before that large crash, hotel values would go up consistently over a longer period of time,” he says. “We hadn’t had a major crash, so owners would typically hold onto hotels. They would not really sell. After that crash, people realized that values could go to zero.  

“A lot of people, unfortunately, were hurt by that downturn, so that really created more of a transactional market. We were able to find hotels to buy. So before that, we built most of our hotels. Really, after that is when we started finding opportunities to buy.”  

Amin says Shamin could have doubled the number of hotels it has by using private equity to finance acquisitions and construction, going for the “home run.”    

But he’s not interested in a home run. The company, he says, will continue to grow at a measured pace, depending on the economy and the market. And it will largely finance its own growth.  

“If we can’t, we don’t do the transaction,” Amin says.  

Meanwhile, he has talked with various lenders, establishing lines of credit to prepare for what might be a prolonged downturn in the travel industry.  

“We’re very fortunate to be able to tap those resources during this period,” he says.  

A Hotel Home  

Amin’s father, P.C. Amin, and his uncle B.N. Shah started the business in the 1970s. The company’s name, Shamin, is a combination of the names of its founders, Shah and Amin.  

Members of both families still work in the business, and Amin’s wife, Amishi, who has a mathematics degree from Imperial College London and a background in investment banking, is a vice president.  

Amin’s father says “Neil was shy” as a young man, meeting Amishi on a recommendation from a family friend in London, who thought his granddaughter and Amin shared common interests, both professionally and culturally.

They carried on a quiet long-distance courtship by phone for months before finally meeting in person, when they immediately connected.

“She was third-generation Indian but pretty much same culture,” P.C. Amin says.

After graduating from high school, Neil Amin entered the University of Pennsylvania, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from the university’s Wharton School, graduating summa cum laude and adding an MBA in finance from the same institution, as part of an accelerated five-year program.  

But his education in the hotel industry happened well before any type of academic preparation.  

He grew up in one of his family’s hotels in Chesterfield County and lived there until he was 12. The hotel’s front desk clerk was also his babysitter.  

“She was working while taking care of me, and I believe she was taking care of her family as well, and I saw that firsthand,” Amin says. “And I saw how hard people worked.

“I would visit the laundry room. People would bring their lunch there and talk, and we had a laundry attendant there. Her name was Betty. She had been with us over 25 years,” he says. “She did not change locations. She stayed at that location. And she became a friend of mine and a friend of our family’s.”   

Amin’s routine is to rise every day at 5 a.m. and hit the treadmill for a long run. He got interested in running when he attended the Governor’s School in Richmond, when it shared space with Thomas Jefferson High School.  

“We did sports with Thomas Jefferson [kids]. So it was not like I was around people who looked exactly like me or had the same socio-economic status, and I think that’s important,” Amin says, referencing the larger pool of people from different backgrounds he met when he began attending school in the city.

In 2001, the Governor’s School moved to what is now the campus of the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School for Government and International Studies. Amin suffered a teenage crisis when he failed to make the tennis team — his father is an avid tennis player — after losing in a sudden-death playoff for the last spot on the team.  

It was his first big failure, and he says he learned from it.  

“It taught me the importance of being able to pick yourself back up after a huge loss,” he says. He turned to running track, and that’s when fate opened a door for further learning, about people and about life.  

James G. Holdren Jr., Maggie Walker’s legendary track coach, captured Amin’s attention and admiration. Though Holdren has won national coach of the year in two sports, with a list of All-American runners and national record holders to his credit, it was the way he embraced all participants, not just his top athletes, that stuck with Amin.  

“I had no experience, but he welcomed me with open arms, and not just me but everybody,” Amin recalls. “And he made sure that even the slowest guy on the team had a specific training program to make them better and to show progress. ... My father and Coach Holdren, you see how much they care about helping people, and it’s infectious.”

Amin, class of 1996 at Maggie Walker, is an involved alumnus. In 2018, he and his wife made the largest donation in the history of the school, giving $100,000 to create a new speaker series and to improve the school’s robotics program.  

Fulfilling a Vision   

When Amin went to India for his cousin’s wedding last winter, he also took along his children, 5 and 7 years old. He wanted them to see the small rural village where his family is from, and the daily struggle people have just getting food and water.   

He also wanted to show them the impoverished conditions in which some people live and work.  

“We saw some kids selling on the street barefoot, very poor kids,” he says. “I wanted to show them that those kids didn’t even have shoes, and they were out there working with their parents. I showed them this is what people have to do.  

“You’re fortunate you don’t have to do this,” Amin told his children.  

When he enrolled at the Wharton School, Amin thought he was heading for a career in finance. He went to work for Goldman Sachs, the multinational investment and financial services firm on Wall Street in New York, immediately after graduation.  

For three months, he worked in fixed income, currency and commodities. Then for a year he was an associate in high-

technology investment banking before he returned to Richmond to work for the family business.   

So why did he give up the glitter of Wall Street to return home to run a hotel business?  

“I went to college in 1996,” Amin says, “and at that point, we had maybe four or five hotels. To me it was more like a single-person or husband-and-wife operation — it wasn’t like Shamin Hotels today.  

“And then when I got out, we had maybe eight hotels, and it was starting to become a company,” Amin says. “My parents worked so hard to go from zero to 10 hotels, and they were continuing to work hard to turn over the baton. So I felt a sense of duty to help them continue to see their vision fulfilled. That’s the honest truth.”  

Since then, the hotel chain has grown sixfold.   

Shamin Hotels began its long and prosperous relationship with Chesterfield County in the early 1980s, when the newly developing company purchased its second hotel, a then financially troubled motel lodge at the Walthall exit (exit 58) off Interstate 95.  

Amin’s mother made sandwiches for hotel guests who came off the interstate, usually on their way south toward Florida. The sandwiches were served without charge, as part of the service.  

At the time, Chesterfield was rapidly growing toward a population of 150,000. Today, it’s climbing toward 350,000 people.  

Shamin has been along for the ride, especially benefiting from the area’s sports tourism, which has become a nearly $50 million industry for the county.   

John Watt, tourism project manager in Chesterfield County’s department of economic development, paints the picture: “Given they have a preponderance of properties, nearly a dozen in Chesterfield County, Shamin Hotels has been really, really important to the economic vitality of our region,” he says.  

“Their hotels are scattered from the edge of 295 in Meadowville all the way over to Brandermill and provide a wide assortment of choices for the traveling public, for our business travelers who are coming into the community and, for the past 10 years or so, the explosion the region has seen in sports tourism,” Watt says. “We couldn’t do it without the number of rooms that the Shamin properties provide, both here in Chesterfield and also the city and Henrico.”  

A Culture of Service

For many years, Amin served on the board and as chairman of the finance committee for Richmond's Better Housing Coalition.  

Amin says he was drawn to that service initially by concern that some of the associates who worked at his hotels might not be able to find affordable housing.  

“I got to know the associates at the hotels, so I see when people are lacking the basic needs — shelter, health care, education, food,” Amin says. “Those are the things I’m focused on, and those are my passion, to ensure that not only Shamin associates but the entire community has those basic needs. So I’ve tried to align myself with those types of organizations.”  

Greta Harris, BHC president and CEO, praised Amin’s service and commitment, as well as his business acumen. Amin rotated off the coalition's board last year.  

“He was a savvy businessman who understood the connection between successful employment and quality affordable housing in close proximity to jobs,” Harris says.  

“The folks who are taking care of our children, the folks who are helping us take care of our parents, the folks who are serving great food and drinks and who are cleaning hotels and things like that, all of those folks need quality housing at an affordable price,” Harris says. “Not every business necessarily sees it that way.”  

Amin has earned accolades for his contributions to the community  — tourism development, affordable housing and the like — and for his business savvy.  

But he says he is uncomfortable with the attention and shifts the credit to his parents for the work they have done to give the company a sound foundation.  

He says his mother, Purnima Amin, is often overlooked for her contributions, which he says have been inestimable.  

“She’s really the glue that keeps this company together,” he says. “She’s that motherly figure, the caretaker. If someone has a need, they come to her. She’s very easy to talk to, and that’s created this culture.”  

Despite Shamin Hotels’ success, Amin says his family business — and his family — have tried largely to eschew the outward trappings of success.   

“You’ll see that my father nor I don’t have an assistant,” Amin says. “We don’t live an extravagant lifestyle. My father still lives in the same house that I grew up in. I lived in a hotel until I was 12, and then he built this house [in 1991], and I moved in there. He lives in that same house today.  

“We came from nothing, and we were always happy. When we lived in the motel room, we were happy. We never felt that we were missing out or anything, and that’s how we still feel today.  

“We’re just happy spending time with friends and family, taking care of our communities and taking care of our associates,” Amin says. “That’s what brings us happiness, rather than changing our lifestyle.”

---

Origin Story

Shamin Hotels began when Neil Amin’s father, P.C., emigrated to the U.S. from India in 1970, looking for opportunity.   

He was from a middle-class farming family — his father later became a teacher and eventually  a social worker — and he, his three sisters and his parents lived in a 500-square-foot house, rolling up their beds in the morning to begin each day.  

He earned a civil engineering degree in India and, as a top student, was able to get loans and scholarships that enabled him to earn a master’s degree in civil engineering at the University of Utah.  

After graduation, he borrowed $200 and bought a 21-day bus ticket, sleeping on the bus at night and looking for jobs during the day. He rode from city to city, but no job offers were forthcoming.  

With one day left on his bus ticket, he arrived in Richmond with $20 in his pocket. He saw a notice about a job opening at the Virginia Department of Transportation and rushed to apply.   

“I think they felt sorry for me,” Amin says, because he told a VDOT administrator that he needed a job immediately, "any kind of job," because he had spent nearly all of his money for his bus ticket.

He was hired on the spot as a technician at $3.69 an hour, while VDOT officials verified his credentials as a civil engineer and reviewed his academic record.

“A month later, they made me an engineer after they saw I could do the job,” Amin says with a chuckle.  

He took a room for $2 a day at the YMCA shelter for men until he had enough money to move into a small apartment.  

In the late ’70s, while still working at VDOT, Amin says his vision for his future changed.  

“I met someone in Fredericksburg who had a 20-room hotel,” he says. “I was really impressed with his success, the way people respected him, and I made my decision that this is what I wanted to do.”  

He used money he had earned at VDOT to invest in a bankrupt 104-room hotel in Lumberton, North Carolina, with his brother-in-law, B.N. Shah, who had been working for a drug manufacturer in Connecticut.   

After a rocky start, the hotel began earning money — lots of money. “It became a gold mine for us,” Amin says.  

He then returned to the Richmond region, acquiring another hotel in financial distress (pictured above) at the Walthall exit off Interstate 95 in Chesterfield County. He was married by then, and he and his wife, Purnima, moved into the hotel with their only child, then 1-year-old Neil. It was 1979.  

“I thought life could not be any bigger, and probably that is still true,” Amin says wistfully.   

He said he worked briefly for Duke Energy, 1980-81, before deciding to go into the hotel business full time.

Amin says his family, including son Neil, has never been obsessive about making money. “I don’t worship money,” he says. “I don’t feel fear of losing the money or everything that I have. My value is the happiness in being able to do something constructive.”

In 2009, the Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors recognized Amin for his business accomplishments and civic contributions, citing among other things his underwriting of the construction of the nonprofit The Cultural Center of India, Virginia (CCIVA) in Chester, which has been used by the public schools as well as community organizations.  

At age 74, the Shamin Hotels co-founder still reports to work every day.