TL;DR
- Grew from 53 Trainual seats to 525 in roughly 12 months — corporate team first, then the entire company
- Replaced multiple undated versions of the same policy scattered across SharePoint and personal desktops with one current source of truth
- Gave frontline staff who were never on SharePoint their first real access to company documentation — no more printed binders
- Produced a county-ready compliance report on demand for LA County's hotel human trafficking training requirement
- Locked state- and county-specific protocols to groups, so employees only see the training their jurisdiction requires
- Zero complaints about the technology being too hard — from a workforce Rob expected to resist it
Trilogy Spa Holdings is a boutique spa management company. Luxury hotels and resorts hire Trilogy to run the spa — the staffing, the protocols, the marketing, the whole operation. Its portfolio includes properties like the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess and Red Rock Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, plus the Guerlain Spa at The Waldorf in New York and its Well & Being spas across Las Vegas, Arizona, and Dallas. Headquarters is Phoenix.
That structure creates a specific problem. Trilogy doesn't own the buildings. It owns the standard. And the standard has to hold across every property, in every state, with a workforce of massage therapists and estheticians who are hired for their hands, not their laptop skills.
Rob Francom is Trilogy's Vice President of Human Resources. Most Trainual champions have to sell the idea internally before they can buy anything. Rob didn't — the mandate came with the job.
"I think I was very lucky, because I was hired to bring in a training program. So it was up to me to find that platform. I had a lot of buy-in at the very beginning — to be able to find something that we needed, because that was something that they were looking for."
Which raised the stakes rather than lowering them. If leadership hires you specifically to solve training and you pick wrong, that's the whole job.
The problem wasn't that nothing was documented. It's that everything was documented four times.
Before Trainual, Trilogy's documentation lived on SharePoint. Technically.
"All of our things are on SharePoint and hidden little pockets everywhere."
The issue wasn't absence. It was ambiguity.
"There were multiple versions of the same document, and sometimes they were dated, sometimes they weren't. So just knowing what is the most recent and updated. And then oftentimes it wasn't on SharePoint, it was on somebody's desktop."
For a company whose entire value proposition is delivering a consistent branded experience across properties, that's a structural risk, not an inconvenience. And it got worse the closer you got to the guest.
Because much of Trilogy's frontline staff wasn't on SharePoint at all.
"Much of our frontline staff is not on SharePoint, so even though it is there, being able to get them that information was usually printing it out and having it in a book that they would have to review through."
The people delivering the service were the people furthest from the documentation describing it.
Why Trainual won the evaluation
Rob looked at a lot of LMS platforms. He names the same two non-negotiables every time he's asked, and in the same order.
"Looking for something that was easily adoptable was very important to them. And also affordable. And Trainual hit both of those — knocked them out of the park."
Adoptable, because the workforce is heavy on massage therapists. If the platform felt like homework, it would die on the vine.
Affordable, because the math scales. Rob raises price twice unprompted across the conversation, which is worth pausing on — a lot of software evaluations treat cost as a procurement footnote. At Trilogy's size it's a strategy constraint. A tool that only pencils out for the corporate team can't be the company's source of truth, because the people who most need documentation are the 470 people who aren't at corporate. Adoption and price weren't separate criteria. Cheap enough for everyone is what made "everyone" possible.
Then a third requirement, which is where most LMS platforms fell out: it had to do more than deliver trainings.
"I looked at a lot of different LMS systems, and what I wanted was something that was easy to use and did more than just give a training. And that's what Trainual does — it gives you a lot more than just trainings. The SOPs are there, and they're delivered in a way that feels digestible."
The tiebreaker was something most software evaluations undervalue entirely: it looked good.
"The biggest piece was really the visualness of it. It's visually appealing to look at. It's very easy to digest the information that's on there. It has a lot of information, but it doesn't feel like there's a lot of information — especially compared to the other LMS that feel more like maybe 1990 or something. Trainual feels very modern and clean."
Rob goes further than "clean" when he describes what it's actually like to move through — closer to a pleasant layout than a compliance portal, with GIFs in the content, more like a game than a course catalog.
For a workforce predisposed to avoid software, that isn't a cosmetic win. It is the adoption strategy. Nobody resists the thing that doesn't feel like work.
The rollout: corporate first, handbook as the green light
Trilogy didn't launch company-wide on day one. Rob started with the corporate team — about 53 seats against a company of roughly 450 employees at the time.
"We started with our corporate team, kind of slowly getting it situated. And then we rolled it out to the rest of the team after that."
The gating question wasn't technical readiness. It was whether there was enough in the platform to justify asking 450 people to log in.
"We wanted it to have at least beneficial information in there. So first we wanted to get comfortable with how to utilize the product. And then we got the handbook in there. Once the handbook was in, we felt confident to be able to roll it out to the rest."
The employee handbook was the milestone. Not a feature milestone — a value milestone. The day there was something in Trainual worth opening, it opened to everyone.
Today Trilogy is at 525 seats.
Getting massage therapists and estheticians to adopt software
This was the part Rob was worried about.
"There definitely was [hesitancy], just because we deal with a lot of service providers that don't want the technology. So rolling out a technology platform, you wanted to make sure it was beneficial and really adopted quickly from the start."
His actual launch strategy, in his words:
"We just kind of pulled the trigger and hoped for the best, to be honest. And it worked well."
What made it work wasn't a change management program. It was the intro training Trainual ships with.
"The part that I really liked about Trainual is that it had an intro training that I didn't have to build, that Trainual already had in there — on how do you use Trainual. And so that's one of the first things they have to take when they get onboarded. I think that really made the difference on making it easy to use, because they could take that training and be able to understand it."
The first thing a new Trilogy Employee Partner learns in Trainual is Trainual.
The result Rob didn't fully expect:
"A lot of times the frontline staff will say the technology is too hard, I don't want to use it. I haven't heard that complaint once with any of them."
Rob started his own onboarding the same way — Trainual University was his first stop, and he credits it with making the feature set legible fast.
Day one looks the same for everybody now
Ask Rob what changed most about onboarding and he doesn't lead with speed. He leads with sameness.
"The greatest part is the consistency and the ability to have the information rolled out on the first day of hire. As soon as they're added to Trainual they immediately get their training path, and they have that consistent training throughout."
And the training isn't a one-way broadcast. Feedback has been positive, and the thing employees like most is that they can talk back.
"They like the ability to comment on things, ask their questions on it."
Which matters more than it sounds like, because those comments are how Rob finds out what's unclear before it becomes a service inconsistency at a five-star property.
What Trilogy documents — and what it deliberately doesn't
Here's the objection Rob's answer preempts, and it's the most common one in skilled trades: my people are already trained, why would I need this?
Trilogy's service providers arrive licensed. Nobody at corporate is teaching anyone how to give a massage or facial.
"We document more of the soft skills, because the service providers should already come prepared on how to do it. So it's more of the understanding of the products, the do's and don'ts, the chemical breakdown of it and all that kind of stuff."
That's the distinction worth stealing. Trilogy doesn't document the craft. It documents everything wrapped around the craft — which products this property carries, what the chemical composition means for which client, what's allowed and what absolutely isn't.
Because that's the part that changes. A therapist's technique travels with them from job to job. The retail line, the protocol, the brand standard, and the county's legal requirements do not. Those are property-specific and they turn over, and they're exactly the things nobody arrives already knowing.
Licensing covers competence. Trainual covers context.
Multiple states, multiple counties, one system
Here's where Trilogy's model gets genuinely complicated. Different properties sit in different jurisdictions with different regulatory requirements. And before Trainual, different properties also just ran differently.
"They all run a different way, and so even the protocols that they might follow would have different protocols. And it's important to have those groupings in order for them to get the right training and not get it confused with somebody else's."
Groups solved it.
"I have a group for each state, or if it needs to, each county. And so that way when somebody gets assigned a certain state or county, they get those specific protocols and trainings that they need."
Then there's the part where a regulator actually shows up.
"In California, there's a training we have to take — just in LA County, for the hotels — where it's a human trafficking training, and we had to show right away who took that training. And so I was able to pull it up and print a report and show it to the county and pass that on it, just from having that there."
That's the difference between "we train on that" and "here's who completed it, and when."
Trilogy calibrates its verification to the stakes. Some content needs a signature. Some just needs to be seen.
"We have a draping policy that the massage therapists need to follow, and that's something that is very important because it deals with confidentiality and privacy. That one is an e-signature. And others, we just want to make sure that they actually viewed it. So some will have a video on there and we'll make it required viewing, and it won't let them pass it until that's been watched."
Quizzes get used selectively — Rob doesn't want a knowledge check bolted onto a two-minute topic just because he can.
Keeping it current without becoming the bottleneck
Right now Rob owns most of Trilogy's content, which means it stays current.
"Right now I'm the owner of most of the content, so I'm very up to date and responsive."
His process for building and updating it is deliberately collaborative — he drafts with the operations team rather than legislating from HR.
"A lot of it is reaching out to the operations team and sharing what I think the update should be, getting the approval on that. It's really more of a checks and balances, checking with the teams to make sure it looks good."
The hard part of that loop isn't approval. It's getting subject matter experts to write anything down at all — and this is where Rob has a genuinely reusable tactic.
"Oftentimes I tell people, just give me the bullet points that you need and I can work with the rest. And the AI tools really help with that a lot. Sometimes the resistance is they don't even know how to document the process. But if I can even just get the bullet points of the idea, start off with something and then present that to them for approval and making any edits that they want — it's been very helpful."
Lower the ask from "write the SOP" to "list the steps." Trainual's AI tools close the gap.
"Is that in Trainual?"
The clearest sign a documentation habit has taken hold isn't a usage dashboard. It's the language.
"Trainual is one of the buzzwords that even the CEO will use. There's times that they'll be like, is that in Trainual? And so everyone knows Trainual is where the most recent version of that thing is."
Trilogy also runs unusually low turnover for hospitality — Rob says they hold one of the higher retention rates in the industry. He's careful not to hand Trainual the credit.
"We have pretty low turnover as it is for our industry. But I do think it coincides with our values and shows that we do care about our employee partners. So it supports what we're already doing."
The values do the work. Trainual proves the values are real on day one instead of month six. Trilogy calls its people employee partners because, as Rob puts it, they want it to be a partnership. One of the company's stated values is creating a workplace where somebody wants to come to work.
"We make all of our decisions based around that."
What's next: turning one champion into many
Trilogy is adding roughly four locations this year and hoping for four more next, with international expansion on the table. Rob can't stay the single content owner through that.
"I'm a little nervous once I release that out and make different owners, to see if they're going to be as responsive."
His answer is characteristically on-brand for an HR leader who solves problems with documentation: he's building a training on how to be a champion.
"Creating a training on how to be a champion, and having those same standards throughout so that we're creating the same look and feel on these trainings. Sometimes when you have several different people doing different things, it can feel disjointed when it doesn't feel like it has the same look and feel. But I do love in Trainual how it has the themes that kind of lock stuff in — so it starts off having at least a similar feel when it comes to formatting."
What he'd do differently
One thing, and it's a useful warning for anyone still building their Trainual in a Word doc first.
"I think I would go ahead and risk it more — put in more documents and know that we can edit it there. When we first started, it didn't have a lot of the collaboration tools, so having those in there now makes it a lot easier to build out things in Trainual, where before we kind of felt like we had to have it built out before we even put it in."
Build it in the platform. Not next to it.
Rob also picked up a fix at Playbook that had been silently costing him for months — Responsibilities weren't applying the way he thought they were.
"I saw them in there and I kind of used them, but I didn't realize there's a button that you click that applies it throughout. And so I thought that they were applied and they weren't. And I just completely missed that button. So having somebody that was really good with it — I was like, I'm not seeing the responsibilities here and I know I have them in there. They're like, oh, click this button. And so that really helped."
Which is, more or less, his pitch for showing up in person.
"Playbook hits a lot of the different skills that are out there, where somebody could be a CEO and they want to learn more about management, or they could be the champion of Trainual and really know the nuts and bolts of it. And everybody can actually come away with something."
For the HR leader on the fence
Rob's summary of what Trainual did for his role is three things long.
"Putting it all into one location, making it easy to use, the AI tools. It's very user friendly, and that's been the easiest part."
But the cleanest measure of what a system is worth is what its absence would cost. Asked what would hurt most if Trainual disappeared tomorrow, Rob doesn't reach for a feature.
"Pretty much the ability to share all of this information."
Not the reports. Not the e-signatures. The distribution itself — the fact that 525 people across a dozen properties and several jurisdictions can be handed the current version of anything, on their first day, without a printer.
Trilogy has the standard either way. Trainual is how it reaches the people who deliver it.
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