Yedla Employee Spotlight: Teresa White Taylor

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For the next installment of our Employee Spotlight Series, we sat down with Teresa White Taylor, Vice President of Culture and Engagement at Yedla Hotels.

Nearly four decades in, her career has a shape to it. "This is my bookend career," she says. "I started with Yedla, and I'm planning on ending with them."

She is a natural storyteller, but what you notice is how she connects ideas: a person to a possibility, the work to the reason it matters.

Her first job out of college was an hourly role at the first hotel the Yedla family ever built, in Madison, Alabama. "It was the best job I ever had," she says.
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"We just took care of people. People leave happy, they'll come back."

She loved Yedla, but at that time it was a one-hotel company. Taking the leap, she ventured out and spent the next 26 years with another management company, learning every side of it, much of it on the road as a regional from Phoenix to Albany to Florida.

Then the founder, Dr. Rao, called her to lunch. "He tricked me into coming back," she says, laughing. She trusted the family behind the name, and still does: Dr. Rao's son, Srinath Yedla, is now at the helm as CEO.

When she rejoined, Yedla had six or seven hotels; it now runs 27. She rebuilt its sales, marketing, and revenue work, then moved into a role she never expected: leading Yedla Cares, the company's community program. Its workforce is housekeepers, laundry attendants, students, and second-jobbers.

"We don't go out and ask team members for money," she says. "We typically ask for volunteer hours."

Lately she has been pairing individual hotels with individual nonprofits, so each property adopts a partner in its own community, aiming for one at every hotel by 2027.
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"What keeps me up at night is who is going to do the day-in and day-out work in hotels,"

Teresa says. Guests do not rate a building. They rate the person who seated them and the person who cleaned their room. Which is why a $500 car repair can be the difference between a job-hopper and a career.

That is what Good Culture is for, and it reaches past Yedla. The charitable organization offers financial support to frontline hotel, restaurant, and travel workers in Alabama, Charlotte, and Central Florida when an unexpected emergency threatens a job they would otherwise keep.

None of the community work is separate from the business. One of her contests sends associates out to be tourists in their own hometowns, photographing themselves at festivals, campgrounds, and trailheads.

When a front-desk associate has hiked the trail or found the mural downtown, they can tell a guest where to go. And for years, Teresa has quietly turned every hire, promotion, and award across the portfolio into Yedla's public voice, untrained.

"This was me doing this with no social media training," she says. "I'm just doing stuff."

That is her being modest. Anyone who has done this work knows social media is not easy, and turning a company's people into something others want to read is harder still. For Teresa it was a natural extension of the thing she already does best, telling the story, except now she is doing it on top of everything else. When a program goes out, she works it down the line herself, from GMs to AGMs to a personal roster of proven hands, giving each one a home hotel and a backup so nothing falls through when she is on the road.

A general manager once told her that beds are beds and eggs are eggs.
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"If all you're talking about are beds and eggs, you've already lost."

The clearest picture of her talent came at a middle school career fair, where her job was to help kids connect what they loved with what was possible. A boy walked up, deadpan: "You ain't got nothing for me." He wanted to be a marine biologist. She asked him for a moment, then told him about ecotourism, where research could be funded from the tours themselves. Just as directly, he said okay. She counts that okay as a win.
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"You can put anybody in front of me, and there is something in our industry that fits what they would love to do."

Whether she is talking to a guest, an associate, or a sixth grader, the job never really changes.
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"If they don't remember your story, they're not going to remember anything else."

"Everything is rooted in the ability to construct a great sales call," she says. That is what stays with you about Teresa: she finds the connection no one else does, between a sixth grader and marine biology. She is a born storyteller who can also carry a revenue number, and that pairing is rarer than it sounds.
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"I am still telling the same stories I have always told. I just have a whole lot more information now."

😌 Thank you, Teresa, for nearly four decades of storytelling, for the care you bring to every community Yedla is part of, and for showing us this company from the inside out.
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📌 Years with Yedla: Nine, on her second tour 

📌 Started As: An hourly associate at Yedla's first hotel 

📌 Where to Find Her: The Huntsville Office, a job fair, or a school career day 

📌 Current Focus: Yedla Cares, workforce development, and associate experience

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🐾 Off the clock

So much of life is lived in hotels, and catching a glimpse of those moments is a gift.

Ask Teresa where she'd travel next: any zoo, anywhere. Her childhood nickname was Possum.

Home is Sunday family dinners and big Thanksgivings, ideally with a little Mexican flavor and a good murder mystery waiting for after.

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