Red Lion Hotels

SINCE ITS FOUNDING IN 1937, RED LION HOTELS CORPORATION HAS GROWN TO 52 PROPERTIES AND 9,014 GUEST ROOMS. THE COMPANY HAS RELIED ON STRATEGIC TRANSACTIONS TO FUEL ITS GROWTH AND SUPPORT ITS FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE SINCE ITS 1998 IPO ON THE NYSE.

SITUATION

Red Lion Hotels regularly evaluates acquisition and divestiture opportunities. In the past, sensitive financial and legal documents related to these transactions sometimes had to be scanned and emailed – an exercise that was time-consuming and inefficient. If files were too large to be emailed, Red Lion would upload them to Dropbox or physically mail them on a USB flash drive. Each of these options presented real security concerns, and did little to help streamline or organize the process.

SOLUTION

Red Lion’s strategic counsel, decided to try Intralinks. Intralinks is an advanced VDR that gives deal professionals – buyers, sellers, and advisors – the ability to easily and instantly share sensitive documents digitally with both external and internal parties, while maintaining physical control and ensuring the security of all information. At Red Lion, this meant that participants in the deal process could also conveniently access information without suffering through the delays introduced by physically shipping materials around or having emails with large file attachments blocked by firewalls. In addition, deal participants were instantly and automatically informed when new information was added to Intralinks, which helped keep all parties engaged.

As a member of the legal department for Red Lion, Julie Langenheim, Director, Corporate Services, Legal & Asset Management was charged with uploading documents and maintaining and tracking usage of Intralinks.

Intralinks enabled Red Lion to see when groups logged in and which documents they were accessing – insight that allowed the Red Lion team to manage the process more deftly. “Once we used Intralinks, it was easy to organize all our information in Intralinks and give access to people to view files at their leisure – to look at what they wanted, when they wanted to,” explained Langenheim.

BENEFITS

As a result of using Intralinks, Red Lion was able to accelerate the due diligence process because the team spent significantly less time on deal administration – the prepping, sharing, and managing of documents and information related to a transaction. Not only did the deal process get faster with an easy-to-use, secure environment, but the experience also helped Red Lion organize its financial and legal documents to facilitate future needs.

“Like a lot of companies, Red Lion got to the point where we became so big, we needed a better way to manage our documents,” Langenheim said. “The long term benefit of using Intralinks is that it made us think about that and be proactive about how we were managing sensitive documents.”