Hospitality Industry hopped into Tech Industry
Sigma School
7th February 2024
Watch the full interview here:
In this episode of Stories of Hackers, we talked with Jack. He's been working his career on hospitality Industry and he worked several based overseas at Vietnam and France too. With all the knowledge he gained through overseas, he decided to come back Malaysia to set up his own development company. We hope you get your motivation from Jack's stories, enjoy!
I'm Jack. I've worked most of my career in the hospitality industry, so I've worked in several places overseas like Vietnam and France. From all the different experiences and knowledge gained, I decided to come back to Malaysia to set up our own beverage development company.
What we do mostly is creating menus, helping with product launches for big brands, and also providing consulting on-site for restaurant setups and cafe setups. On top of that, right now we are trying to develop a so-called point of expense software, an expense management system. This system actually helps small businesses to put things in place, organize different expenses, and also helps them sort out where they spend their money.
So, I did my bachelor's in hospitality management and after that, pursued a culinary diploma in France. That's why most of the time I was in Europe working and training there. Actually, my own goal all the while was to open up a restaurant, and that is why I was trying to gain more knowledge on both the practical side and also the management theory of it so that I know that when I come back, I'm able to run the whole thing.
Well, I guess food represents your culture and your history. When we talk about food, why I'm interested in it is because it's your daily medicine; you are what you eat, right? So, that is a very important part of our life. Even if we forget all the tech and all the materialistic stuff like cars and houses, we still need to eat and sleep. Hence, that's why I mean the hospitality industry, at least this industry, wouldn't die. But I don't know, it's hard to say after the epidemic now. The hospitality industry is sort of essential; it used to be. This term came from "hospitality is to care, to give care," so it comes from hospitals. Later on, influenced by the royal family, so that's why it has become a luxury right now.
Well, it's to build sustainable F&B businesses that it's not the kind that is very pretentious but it's something where you can go to spend money everyday and you feel comfortable that that sort of thing is what I want.
it's a very good it's a very good thing that they do that in fact um on the on the other hand yeah um cafes turn into supermarkets also because we as small restaurants we because of this pandemic we pre-pack our food we pre-mix our drinks and like we make our own sausages we make our own things that is frozen yes and we already have our clients right they love our food oh why not you just buy this frozen version and you can prepare yourself so it's both it works both ways yeah supermarket that are setting up cafes also want to increase the time spent the customer time spent within there and yes i guess at the end of day is still a big chunk of the remedies still come from retail for supermarket because I think it works better if cafes has a retail section and a dining section.
I think that first we need to have our own sort of technical knowledge in whatever field you want to do then later on you can learn or apply more business sense into it then you turn it into business. If you do not have a core skill or capability at first, your business will most likely be easily replicated or highly competitive.
It's to get your customer to return the second time so when you are new definitely they will visit you yeah but what makes them come back the second time. So most likely, if you are able to show that you have much more right, you are able to create more then that gives them a reason to come back to your place that's why I say that's when the knowledge comes in, if you are able to twist a lot of dishes, create a lot of different flavors then that gives a reason for them to come back.
Actually both also can make money right so it depends if you are more in it for the money. Okay if you're talking about money right then definitely the mid-range high production packaging frozen goods that that direction is the best. You pay a bunch of money to develop a very very good patty right like maybe impossible for starting but yeah that sort of stuff. Then basically you have one or two or three products and then you just push heavily on marketing to like keep on selling those products. The other side of things is like those where you see Gordon Ramsay, that is the more chefy side where you are more passionate on your cooking and that is your brand instead right like for example if you're buying something more commercial like maggie mee, you don't know who is behind that right but you know it you know that brand yeah yeah so actually I see that has a longer term growth because that brand won't die if there's no reveal of who the people behind it.
Definitely, the problem is to do with manpower. It's not just about hiring normal labor or whatever, but you need to hire the right people that suit your ambiance and your style of service. Sometimes, they are not robots; they are humans, yes, and they come in sad or sometimes they come in happy, which is good. So, you need to manage people. My job is to make sure everyone who's working with me is happy so that they can give good service to our customers. I have a spot; that's why I don't really speak to customers anymore for the past like one and a half years because I'm mostly dealing with all the staff and the team, making sure they are happy. If they are happy, I believe that everything else will be fine. All we hope is that people don't leave so fast because, of course, when I say take care of the team, I mean not only on the monetary side but also on your health side and what you love to do, making sure that when you continue to stay here, you still see a path or you still see things to grow on. People normally leave because they feel like, "Okay, I think I learned everything here. I can't grow anymore, so that's why I need to leave." For my team, I hope I train most of them to become more entrepreneurial as well, saying that look, you need to do this and this like this so that next time when you start up your own cafes or whatever business, this won't happen again. That's how I usually teach people.
I mean, to be honest, last time my goal was to really just work to become the general manager of a hotel. That's usually what they trained us to do in school. That's why when I started my job in hotel groups, I learned a lot about how there is some politics in place, where you know you need to do certain things to move up the ranks, and I don't really like that sort of bureaucracy, that sort of work environment. But what I would say to your audience is, it is definitely necessary to see that side of the whatever for whatever industry you plan to work in, right? It's necessary to work in corporate first so that you know how to talk to people, you learn how to deal with different types of people, and at the same time, you learn how to create an organized business. Because in large companies, there's so much documentation and so many SOPs. Actually, that's why today you are able to run an efficient business because you took your SOPs and knowledge from there to apply it into your own business. Without that, you can't really run your business properly.
After the large organization, I switched into a multi-outlet independent restaurant group, so there was these family owners who had like three or four restaurants, semi-fine dining to casual upscale dining restaurants that was in France. So then I saw a different management style so you were working as what were you doing that was as a bartender and as a server so from there because in the large companies you were only delegated one specific task yeah and when you moved down you had to do several responsibilities because there were not enough people and you get to learn more things yeah not in specific sense but the concept of many different things yes yes and that gave me the confidence that okay now I feel like if I run my own business I think I can do it because I've seen it with my own eyes like if you said you work in a hotel and then you plan to open your own hotel like it's so far-fetched.
Actually it's events beverage catering side of it okay and then we have a operation side of it which is half of it is a cafe half of it is a cocktail bar and then right now we are trying to create this expense management to expend the system. Everything is known as a dissolved solid that's our company yeah and everything we do there it's more like we are still trying to find what we are very very good at and when people talk about us, it's that right now because we are still doing different services like like I said beverage beverage development which is what which is if you are nestle you have this uh let's say the coffee capsules yes you'll come to us and you'll ask us oh we are doing a product launch roadshow next two weeks come up with something so we what we will do is we will showcase to the users like okay you can extract the coffee and then also you can maybe put in brown sugar or put in some peanut butter into it. We do also advise our clients on how to promote their beverage to consumers to make it look user friendly, because they may know how to develop the machine to create coffee capsules right but for consumer side so what do they do with it you know that's the question.
So, how we came up with this idea is mostly based on my experience, also, back to what we talked about before because I worked in corporate before, and because over there, they have many systems in place and they have specific people to do specific tasks, yes. And when we started to set up our own business, then that is where you see the difference. Everything you have to do it by yourself because you don't have the necessary resources to hire these people. And that is when you need to seek help from software, you need to automate certain tasks, you need to do what you need to serve your customers while still having to do the paperwork. And that's when it takes a lot of time and it becomes tedious. So that's why it gave us the idea that, you know what, maybe since F&B businesses, they have a point of sale system, right? That is to track their sales. And actually, last time, F&B businesses tracked their sales by just paper, right? Yeah, they don't even bother if they all businesses were just yeah, paper last time, yeah. And they just put in money in the register, that's it, okay, right, like how in the market store, yeah. And now you see more and more new cafes opening up, and each one, uh, how is it they definitely, they will have an iPad, the POS system, yes. So that's why we say, what about on the expenses side of it, right? You organize and sort everything in your sales part, how about your expenses? Okay, the common practice is, okay, we collect a bunch of invoices, send them to the accountant by the end of the week, and the accountant would probably give us a report at the end of next month, yes, if we are lucky, right, yes. And with that report, we still don't know what's going on because, uh, it's just telling me how much I, like, spent together with the maintenance and stuff like that, yeah. I don't know, I bought how many milk, I don't know, I bought how much beef. So that's why we want to do the same for the expenses as what point of sale systems are doing now for the sales.
I would like to say that work smart, not work hard! Just like businesses when they work smart, they use software to automate something, but when they work hard they are draining their physical manpower constantly which may cause mental health problems.
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