#184 - Hospitality Meets Adrian Martin - Bridging Hospitality and Academia with Passion and Innovation

And a huge hospitality meets. Welcome to Adrian Martin. Thank you very much. Thank

you for having me. How are you? Yeah, very good, actually. We've had a great

day today, haven't we? It's been lovely, yes. And actually my first ever experience of

the edge hotel school, which is actually quite ridiculous that it's taken me this long

to get out here. I think this time of year is my favorite time

of year because the students are sort of finding jobs and then they come and

announce it. But I've never thought to bring someone from recruitment

into the mix and it's been a no brainer and they've gone down really, really

well. So we've got lots of companies that come in and

sell their jobs in their companies. We've never had someone who can do the whole

lot in one go and there's kind of tips that you gave them have been

really useful. Well, we'll see. It's too early

to tell, but. Yeah, well, I mean, tell the world who you are and what

it is that you do. Sure. So I'm Adrian, I'm the deputy head of the

Edge hotel school at the University of Essex. So our students,

they work in the webinar house, which is where we are currently as part of

their course. And so my side is to kind of organise the

teaching to make sure the students have the kind of business acumen and

knowledge. And then the Wivener House, which is our partner, which is the hotel

on the campus, a very nice four star country house hotel, trains the

students on how the hotels and events operate and gives them industry

experience. They kind of come in in the first year, they don't really know very

much, a lot of them some kind of can of beans and they go

in each different department for the first year and become sort of operationally

competent and they become a bit more confident. Then the second year they go back

in and they, they supervise, so they get a little bit more confident, they get

to boss around the new students and now they know what kind of know what

they're doing. In the third year, they either do an external event or they

duty manage and night manage, and that means strutting around the place with the walkie

talkie like they own the place right now.

Right now they're probably about as confident as they're going to be with us, as

competent as they're going to be with us, and they are ripe for industry. I

remember Michael Voigt at the Gorin said that our students are uniquely

oven ready and I love that phrase because they are ready to go straight out

into managerial positions. And I don't necessarily think that's true of graduates

at other universities, but the three years that they spend in Wyvern House, they can

put on their cv, and it just gives them that extra little bit of confidence

for when they do go out to the big wide world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is

that an oven ready deal like the Brexit deal? Still

waiting, but there we are. That's the podcast for another time. Yeah. Well,

I mean, before we get into your story, I kind of wanted to understand because

your profile also says associate professor. Yeah. What is an associate professor

professor? It's like a half professor, really. Half a demi professor. Not

quite good enough to be a proper professor, but on the way. Right. Okay. And

what does. How do you become a half professor then? Just get the other half.

You need to do research. I think for me personally, the bit that I'm missing

is to do research that has an impact on industry. And maybe I'll get a

chance to talk about that later in the podcast.

I think we're kind of getting close to that now. Dream for me, obviously, is

to become a full professor, but we will see. Yeah,

every time I hear the word professor, I just see Snape from Harry Potter. Not

that I'm saying you look like Snape, but there we are. Yeah. Right. Well, let's

go back then to the beginning. And how did you get

into hospitality in the first place? So, I mean, I

listened to quite a few of your podcasts, and they all seem to start the

same way, that they didn't intend to go into hospitality. And I was kind of

the same. So I was 18. I didn't have a clue what I wanted to

do, so I thought I'd do a management degree in Manchester, which I did, and

I got to be graduated, and I still don't have a clue what I wanted

to do. And then my grandmother got involved. My grandmother's quite a formidable woman.

We were very much a matriarchy in our family. And she phoned me up and

she said, well, you know, you've got this degree. You need to do something with

it. So I found you a job, and you're going to go and work in

a hotel in London. And I was like, whether you like it or not.

Exactly. And I was like, oh, man, do I have to?

And it was just so ridiculous to me now. But she said, you're going to

get a call from Beverly in about an hour, which is Bev King, who's

now CEO of Zhotels. Back then, he was a front office manager at a Cumberland

hotel, which is like a big four star hotel, a huge hotel,

800 bedrooms overlooking marble arch. So the next thing I know,

he's on the phone to me and I'm so embarrassed to say that. When he

phoned me up, he said, I hear you want to work in my hotel. And

I was kind of like, well, yeah, I guess, I suppose. Not really.

And he said, do you want to work in my hotel or not? So

I had to kind of win him round a little bit. And if he ever

listened to. I'm so embarrassed. I'm so sorry. So the next thing I

know about, literally a week later, I'm dropped off, kicked out the car with my

bags in front of this huge hotel right opposite marble arch. I went round to

the back to the staff accommodation, which is nice enough. I was

told, you've got three meals a day and no rent to

pay. I thought, this is great. And then I went into

my job the next day and I was just basically chatting to people

all day and making them laugh, and I just had to time my life. I

literally loved my time there. I was gonna say that was actually in the job

then. You didn't just go out on the street in London? Not randomly, no. No.

So I was waiting in one of their restaurants there and

they kind of threw me in at the deep end. I absolutely loved it. I

was just chatting away to people and I had to get the food and

take the orders as well. But the weird thing was, that shocked

me at the time was that if I did this well, they just left me

a ton of money at the end of the meal. And this seems like a

dream come true for me. So I was earning more money in tips and back

then than I was in my salary. And my salary was pocket money

because I had no food, no bills and no rent. And I

just thought, right, this is it for me. I finally found my calling. This is

what I want to do for my career. So I thought, if I'm going to

do this, I need a qualification or some sort of training, because at the moment

I know absolutely nothing. So I did it for a year and I managed to

save enough money to pay for a master's and pay my year's rent.

I did my masters and I found that if I went

anywhere asking for work, I just said I'd worked at the Cumberland

for a year and I had a bit of experience and they snapped my hand

off. So I worked as a student and so on, and then I did a

grad program with thistle hotels a long time ago. They moved

me here, there and everywhere, but taught me all about hotels and

management. I ended up as an assistant manager in Bedford somewhere,

and then I saw this job as deputy manager of a Bournemouth hotel

and I can remember having this. The pause where I thought, can I do this

job? Should I apply for it? But I've always been a bit, kind of

jump first, think later. So I just kind of went for it and I got

the job and I trundled off to Bournemouth thinking that I kind of. I was

24 years old and I thought, it's just incredible. I'm 24 years old, 100

bedroom hotel in Bournemouth overlooking the sea, and I'm deputy manager of it. To

my horror, on the first day I met my boss

again, he deposited me. Thought you were going to see wafer. And,

yeah, he was. He was completely clueless. He had no

idea how to run a hotel. He thought his job was to kind of

just sit at a bar getting drunk with the regulars, which he did on a

regular train. Yeah. And so all of the staff started turning to

me almost on my first week, and this hotel had a

lot of problems with it and was losing a lot of money and the owners

were kind of exasperated by it all. And so I ended up kind of

semi running the place and then almost actually running the place

with my boss in the bar, kind of getting. Just drinking every day.

And then after a year, the owners of the hotel kind of.

They'd seen a turnaround. A lot of the problems that I identified got fixed

and it started to make a small profit and so they kind of rewarded me

by sacking the manager and giving me his job. So now

I'm 25 and a general manager of a hotel.

25? Yeah. And I'm looking back, I must have been mad to do it, but

again, I jump first, think later, but

if anyone ever asks me why should I go into a career in

hospitality, I always tell them this story. So my nan, remember my

nan, she used to have these pictures on a mantelpiece

of varying sizes, with the biggest one in the middle. Whoever had a

grandchildren and children was the favorite in the family. And it was always my

cousin lisa or my brother sometimes, or whatever, and we always shuffled

in position, depending on how popular you were. Well, I invited

my nan and my granddad down for a week to

Bournemouth. No expenses paid, dinner, bed and breakfast.

The staff made a fuss of her and she had the time of her life.

Never paid a penny the whole time. She insisted and I wouldn't take any

money. Next time I went to see my nan, I'm there, center stage,

in the middle of the mantelpiece, the biggest picture of the lot. Now, normally, I

was quite naughty when I was young. I was on the side table, out of

the way somewhere, like a torn up photo. We've also got him as well, the.

Black chief of the family. But all of a sudden, I was a fan. I

do wonder whether there is any other trade out there where you can, with

such perks, where you can treat family friends. It's a conversation

starter at dinner parties. If you're an accountant and you tell people you're

an accountant at a dinner party, that's kind of the end of the conversation. And

I don't think my other cousin, who was a dentist, could have said, nan, come

down to me and I'll drill your tea for a week for free. And had

the same kind impact. That's off to the coffee table, that one,

isn't it? And I loved that job and we had some success with

it. We ended up selling that hotel. The owners gave me a share of the

hotel and then we ended up selling it. And I kind of had enough

money at that time to pay my mortgage off. And I wrote

a book for a while. And then my wife, who was then my girlfriend

at that site, saw an advert for a lecturer job at Bournemouth

and Poole College. And I thought, I could do that. I

think that'd be fun. So I turned up on Friday for the interview.

They said, can you start on Monday? And I said, yeah, ok, I'm free at

the moment, and your first lesson's on Tuesday. And I was,

if anyone in the trade is listening to this, you don't actually need a

qualification in teaching to start teaching at college and university

level. You can do it as you teach.

So I went into my first lesson and got absolutely murdered

by these students. I didn't have a clue how to control them,

how to teach as such. So I thought to myself, right, if I'm going to

do this, I need to see who does this the best. And there was a

guy at Balfour Paul College called Dave Boland, and he was

renowned as the best chef lecturer in the country and was for

30 years. And so I asked if I could go and watch him teach.

And I sat at the back of his classroom and he just had a manner

about him that commanded respect. But at the same

time, he was teasing these kids. He was laughing a joke with them, but

he could just silence the room with a look and it was just

incredible watching him work. Well, what I took from that was

he came and spoke to me at the end and he said, well, what did

you think? And I'm like, four days into teaching and

this guy, who's a legend in our industry, in education,

asking me my opinion of his lesson. And I

said, I just think it was perfect. And he said that

there's no such thing as a perfect lesson, Sam. He said, if you didn't find

a fault, you weren't looking hard enough. Yeah. And I thought, I suppose that's the

same with anything, isn't it, really? Yeah. And I thought, oh, yeah, actually,

that's why you're the best, because you will take feedback from

anywhere and you're never satisfied with what you've delivered. You don't

think you've ever delivered a perfect lesson. And I took a lot from that, so

I will take feedback from anyone, no matter what. I always

try and teach in a better and better way every time I can.

So I carried on teaching there for quite some time. But

after, like, a year, that just the maddest thing happened,

that an ofstone inspector came to visit Bournford Pool College.

And they basically said that. And they'd heard that the Bournfranpool College was the best

place for hospitality, along with Westminster and Birmingham. And they wanted to

see what was so different about these three particular colleges. And so they

observed the best chef lecturers, and Joe Pearce was an amazing restaurant

lecturer. And they saw practical elements and said, yeah, that we can

see why. But your theory classes actually weren't

that great. Can we see something tomorrow that is. Is great.

But the theory side of stuff. So unbeknown to me, I

get this phone call at 06:00 at night from my boss, Nick, and he

said, sorry to do this to you, mate, but tomorrow at 10:00 I

need to put an off state inspector in your class, and that lesson needs to

be the best thing you've ever delivered. Sleep well? Yeah. I'll see you

tomorrow. Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. So. And I was like, who have I got

to tell? Oh, my God. It's like 20 receptionists and a

real handful. And I thought. So I had to sit down and

I've got a bottle of wine out. And I just thought, right, what do these

kids actually want from a lecturer? What do they want to

learn? And it kind of just came to me that I've kind of been

delivering stuff at them. I hadn't really been involved in them.

And that kids like to. They're quite competitive. They

like a game element to it, but they also want to learn stuff that is

of use to them out in industry. And so by 01:00

in the morning, I'd invented this game. And the game was based

on the hotel that I managed. And that first week when I arrived,

when I put my head in my hands and just thought, oh, my God, there's

so much wrong with this hotel. Where do I even start? And so the game

is about presenting this exact same scenario and then asking

the students to decide these eight major problems with the hotel. Which are you going

to fix first and how are you going to fix them? And then there's eight

turns to the game and there's a winner at the end and a big celebration

anyway, so. And I remember walking towards that lesson with the Ofsted

inspector waiting for me and 20 receptionists thinking,

you haven't tested this game, you don't even know if it works. And

you tested it with the ultimate stress test, which is. Wait. Yeah, well, true.

And at 01:00 in the morning seemed a really good idea. 10:00 the next morning,

not so much, but again, I just dive in and think about

it later. So I just, oh, hell, I'll just go for it. So I delivered

this lesson and honestly, it was just incredible.

So there were like four teams and they were all competing against each other. The

offset inspector then joined one of the teams and started playing the game as well.

And then without any prompting, when I was kind of built it up like an

x factor delay, then the winner is long delay. They all started

this impromptu drum roll and these kids were just

so, their eyes were just lit up and I just knew

I'd cracked it. And after I delivered that

lesson, the officer inspector said, lots of nice stuff, but he also nominated me

for a national teaching award. And about two months later, I get this

letter invite and I went and won because I was nominated by an off stage,

of course I won. Right. And then that kind of launched my

educational career, really. So I kind of got promoted three times, I think, in

the next four years, which is quite quick in education. And what would be

the promotional position? So you start out as a lecturer?

Yep. Then I was team leader. Then I was

head of all hospitality for Bourn Pool College, and I finished with kind of

a director of apprenticeships. So I had about 2000 apprentices across the whole

college. It was a big old college and I was kind of running all of

those apprenticeships in all different categories, not just hospitality.

So that was fun. And we had a lot of success there.

We won awards and all sorts. And then I just happened to see

this newspaper. I think it was a caterer, did an article on the edge

hotel school that this new place was opening up where students would work

in the hotel as part of their course. And it's kind of based on a

swiss hotel school, but it was in Essex. My wife's from

Essex. And I just had this moment where I thought, yeah,

this is my dream job. This is absolutely my dream job. It didn't

take much convincing to move the whole family over here. And I knew Andy,

who's the current head, I worked with him in Bournemouth, so that was always

easy. I came and saw the hotel, just thought it was just amazing, this place.

I mean, you've seen it. It's a hell of a standard for just

to be trained in students in. And then I came

over to Colchester for the edge hotel school.

And I'm still here to this day, eight years later. Eight years. I was going

to ask you how long. Yeah, so, I mean, we basically are

sitting in a real live, working hotel. How does that work,

then, in terms of the split between students

working and I suppose, full time employees, as it were?

So, I mean, a lot of people think it's a student hotel run by students.

No, no, this is a. This is a very high standard hotel with a general

manager, deputy heads of department, deputy heads of department. It's when you go

to supervisor and sort of operational level

where there are less staff, because the students are filling the gaps.

So our students in the first year, take home, might do a wedding with

twelve staff, and ten of them are students. And then in the second year, maybe

one of them is leading the event alongside the supervisor. And then

in the final year, they do the duty management side of stuff. So it is

a fully up and running hotel. We prefer the customers not to

know that there are students involved, so that they don't get this. Oh, it's only

a training hotel. Most of our customers

say 90 plus percent never know that they're served by students.

Students get a realistic experience. Events go wrong.

Sometimes customers get crossed, sometimes customers are delighted. Most of

the time it's a true life experience. And I think

industry has recognized that. They know that Ed that we were speaking

to earlier said exactly the same thing, and I've heard that a hundred times, that

when you get an edge graduate, you know, you can start them from day one

straight into the job and they will be able to cope. Yeah, well, as

Michael Veit has put, he's written your marketing plan, isn't he, for the future of

oven ready students?

Yeah. Or air fryer. Let's get up

with the times. But I want to go back in your story just a little

bit because I want to talk about this transition, I suppose, from

being in operations and in the industry that way to moving

into academia, I suppose, or education, at least.

Was there a point whereby you thought because you started out,

you still got your head very much in the hotel, as it were. But was

there a point in that process where you thought I. Oh, actually,

this could be the direction, actually, that. I really want

to go in terms of teaching? Yeah. I think, to be honest, when I was

younger, so the 18 year old in me did want

to lecture at some stage, but you can't just become a lecturer at

that kind of age. I need a specialist subject, really. I

think I had a couple of teachers at school that were just amazing and had

a lot that were terrible. And I think I was inspired by the great

teachers that have taught me over the years to try and be great

as well. And seeing. Seeing David teach,

I think, was quite life changing for me because I just thought it all kind

of clicked because I think a lot of teachers think that and a lot of

presenters, a lot of trainers think that it's all about them.

And you have to have this mind shift where you realize it's actually all about

the audience. Because I watched another great

teacher teach, Jo Pearson. She. She was teaching something

and it was clear that a section of the room didn't quite get it. So

she went back and taught it again in a completely different way.

Unplanned. Just did it off the cuff. And I said to her at the end,

I noticed that she'd done that and she said, well, that's because it's all about

making sure everyone in the room is understood. And if

they don't, then you go back and take them all with you. And I love

that. So I always try to make sure that everything I teach is not

about delivering all the content in the time that you've got. When I

observe other people teach, sometimes I see that it's kind of rushing through to get

to their PowerPoint in the time that they've got. You're wasting your time.

That last 20 minutes, nothing has gone into. The people that you're delivering to, they're

not understanding, as you were talking about earlier, the people who use kind of high

vocabulary and start pulling big words from

nowhere, that's about them, that's about their ego. It's

not about delivering what you. The message you want to deliver to the people in

front of you, it's about making yourself feel better. So I think

that I did have a desire to teach, but I

mean, that first day, I literally had no clue what I was doing whatsoever. I

can only imagine the Feeling. That's what first shift

blues in any form, right, is still this kind of rabbit in the headlights moment.

Yeah, yeah. But I think if you've got a trade experience,

you've got a hell of a leg up. And I would say, because the degree

I did in the masters, I did in Manchester, I remember we got so

disappointed with it, really. We asked every lecturer, how much experience have you had in

the trader? Not a single lecturer had any experience in the trader whatsoever. And this

is on a hotel and catering management masters here, it's

complete opposite. You can't work in a hotel school without industry

experience. So there's guys here run cruise ships,

there's people who run the Brits, there's people who run bars and restaurants and all

sorts, all that are still academics, but they started their Life

in the industry and I think that's a such a leg up.

So for the first two or three days before I had a clue what I

was doing, I just basically told stories about the trade just to keep people happy.

But that time runs out sooner or later. Yeah. So that's what's known

in the trade. There's blagging it, right? Absolutely. The blag only can last

for so long before the integrity of the content

becomes important, as it were. Yeah.

I see similarities in terms of, basically, from what you've just said

there around. If you're a hotel GM, you're doing

everything you can, obviously, to ensure that your guests are having a great experience.

It's the same principle, but just this time, your guests are your students.

So it's about their experience. It's not about your experience, it's about the experience

that you're giving them. Yes. And I think that that's a hard

message for educators to hear, if I'm honest. In a lot

of places that I've worked, they don't like to see students

as customers. I think we're very good at it. At the edge

hotel school, we listen and we respond and we adapt and we change the same

way that the trade does. But I think there are a lot of educational places

that are kind of. Well, they don't really. They don't know what's best for them.

That might be what they want, but it's not what they need. I hear that

sometimes in other areas, and they're quite stubborn

almost, and not responding to change. This generation

can be quite demanding. There's no two ways about it. And sometimes

they don't know what they. They need. For instance, in here,

the least popular department for students to go

into tends to be housekeeping and the kitchen. And yet when

you do surveys at the end of the year, the most popular departments is housekeeping

and kitchen. They're terrified of going in the kitchen, but they

love it. And they don't see the point of housekeeping, but then they love it.

So sometimes you do have to do what you think is best,

but at the same time, you should treat students like us, particularly at university, because

they're paying a lot of money to study here. Yeah, yeah. I wonder

if the perceptions, or where these perceptions come from in terms of your housekeeping

and kitchen. I don't want to do that. I mean, I can kind of understand

the kitchen thing because there's so, you know, rightly or wrongly, there's so much reporters

about, you know, what a high pressure environment that can be. But, yeah, I wonder

where these perceptions come from. I think it's because, you know, they

didn't come here to learn to be a chef, but it's important for them to

go into the kitchen so that they understand the impact of

everything around them. So like the event guys, for instance, they need

to know that if they miswrite a function sheet and get the numbers

wrong, the absolute havoc and chaos that creates in the kitchen and

a real pain and cost that that creates. And that means that when

you're selling a booking over the phone, you make damn sure you get that function

sheet right. So it's not necessarily learning, teaching them how to cook, although they will

to learn a certain amount, but it is about how a function gets

sent, how food gets counted in and counted out and so on.

And the same with housekeeping, that sort of attention to detail and that teamwork

and people checking and you going back to the room and recorrecting all of this

is good stuff. But I think they also learn here to shine

your shoes, correct uniform, be professional, give your best, be on time,

ask questions, all of this. I think every shift they go into, they

gain something. They might not realize it, but they do. But also, having three years

on your cv, nice reference from me, nice reference from the general manager at the

end of this three years of work experience, some places still ask for two or

three years experience. Absolutely. Yeah. And plus,

there's nothing more resilience or character building than chopping

a bin full of onions as part of

your life learning. I remember in the trade, I dropped a

load of foie gras all over the floor, and people went nuts. And

my punishment, because I was in the kitchen, part of my graduate thing, they

made me cut and dice garlic, this whole huge

amount of the stuff. That was my punishment. And I went on a train from

Bristol to bath the same day. And I must have

stank because I went onto this train packed train, and I stood in a corner

and people started moving away from. And then these seats opened up. And I was

thinking, oh.

Yeah, well, I suppose that's the. That's the adult equivalent of lines,

isn't it? When you get lines at school, you get. You have to go and

chop your veg or chop your garlic or whatever. No. So,

well, you're. We talked earlier in the chat

about you're an associate professor. In order to become a professor, you need to do

a body of work around research that

affects the industry, or certainly is involved in the industry in some way.

So what. And I know the answer to this, of course, because we've spoken about

this, but what is it that you are doing? Because honestly

speaking, when you came to me with this, my mind was blown.

Okay? So I think this came from my time in the trade.

There are two aspects to my research. So one was I would kind of work

a table when I was a waiter because I knew that the tips would be

great. And every now and again, a table that I thought I was going to

get a huge tip from, I'd get nothing. And another table that I kind of

neglected a little bit, almost would give me a big tip. And I thought that

there's something going on here that these people just look, there's no

distinguishing factor here. Some people just feel very differently about

tipping and whether they tip or whether they don't tip. And in my time

as a general manager, dealing with lots and lots of complaints because the building

that I managed was kind of falling to bits, been a bit

neglected. And I remember if the rain came in at a certain angle, the

front ten rooms all leaked. And I can remember, like, two or three of them

would come down and just go help the lever at the desk. Two or three

of them would come down and just kind of mention it just in passing, and

the rest would kind of never say a word. And you'd find a bin underneath

the leak and a nasty review or a nasty letter in the post or

nothing at all. And I thought, well, something's going on there as well. Why are

people acting so differently to the same circumstance?

And so I wanted to, this is, this is what I wanted to. The question

I wanted to answer is, what is different about people

that makes them act in different ways? So I surveyed about 1000

people, long survey, about an hour each with a

psychological test on the end. And I've got lots of interesting data. I now know

how often people tip, how much they tip, how often they complain, how much compensation

they get, all the rest of it, which is all fascinating. But what jumped out

was the fact that people who complain the most have a

distinct personality set. They have three characteristics that make them more likely

to complain and two characteristics that make them less likely to complain.

And if they've got the personality, in the

worst case scenario, they are a prolific complainer. And if they got the complete

reverse, then they were a never complainer. And so I

then used those five personalities and I tracked

100 customers for a whole year everywhere they went. So like some mad

stalker, every time you let out, you had to fill out a survey and you

would tell me what was the meal like, was it good, was it better than

you expected, worse than you expected? Did you complain, did you tip? And so on.

And at the end of that it was very, very clear. And I did a

full on psychoanalysis of all of the hundred

with these five personalities in mind. And then it became incredibly

clear that these personality sets will determine people's behaviour. So

it's basically down to you. You have a certain amount that you're going to put

up with, faults that you're going to put up with in a restaurant meal, that

will be different to what I put up with, will be different to what somebody

else puts up with. So I could work this

into a formula and I could backtrack it and think, well, I've got the formula

now. And if I go back and look at all the hundred thousand, I looked

at how and it was very accurate and I'm thinking to myself, okay,

I've got something quite cool here. I now can get into the head of

someone who complains a lot and as someone who never complains and then goes home

and complains on Tripadvisor. And that was kind of

where I was going to leave it. But there was a bit of a breakthrough

in psychology where people started to find

people's personality scores via their social

media and digital footprint. And so this is not my research, it's somebody else's research.

They are basically now going through people's social media

activity, coming up with scores of what they think their personality would

be without ever meeting them, then testing them separately and comparing the scores, and they

are getting really, really accurate. And what's even more,

I want to say scary, but I'm going to say. Exciting, is that there's that

fine line of progress. AI has

just supercharged this, so now you can use AI to go through

people's social media and digital footprint and come out the other end with scores

that are becoming more and more and more accurate. So I thought to myself, you

put these two things together, I now know what I'm looking for. These

researchers can find it for me. Is it possible that at the point

of making a booking, you could book into a restaurant and

I take your details, your name and your mobile number or your name and your

email? That's all the other researchers need to do this profiling, which is what you.

Would hand over when you're making a booking anyway. Naturally. Yep. And throw it through

the formula. Come out the other side with an indication of whether you

are someone who regularly complains, never complains, or is

making a judgment. Those would be the free boxes to effectively almost rag rate

customers in advance of them coming to your business.

And I looked at that and I thought, would that have been useful for me

when I was in the trade? I thought, oh, my God, yeah. Oh, my God,

yeah. Because, and I was thinking, what could I use it for? And when I

go out and I do training now at all sorts of places, the Goring

Cliveden house, and I tell them about this system and I ask them, what would

you use it for? And they come out with things like,

who works the table? The most experienced person gets the more

discerning guest. Maybe we don't give the more difficult

customer to the apprentice on their first shift. Maybe we flip the tables around,

maybe we flip the order that the food comes out, we let the chef know

that some food is prioritized over the others, possibly all sorts of different ideas

of how we could adapt so that people get what they

want. And I thought to myself, this is great. I've

really invented something in. And I made a fatal error

at this point because I went and boasted about it to my wife

and she said to me, she went, well, do you want me to be

kind or do you want me to be honest? Here comes a pragmatic approach.

I have a very similar wife. In fact, I've

learned from this that you'd

be better off just saying honest, because you're going to get it anyway. So I

just got out of the way. And she said, you're kind of treating people like

numbers on arrival and then outcomes as numbers, but you're not really looking at

the bit in the middle. What about how they were treated? And did that have

an impact? And I kind of thought, well, no, I haven't really looked at that.

And then she said, if it helps, this is how I do it.

And this has stuck with me. And I tell my students this as well. So

if instead of seeing people as people, she works in a special education school,

all autistic children, some of them with quite extreme behaviors. And she

says that if you treat people, don't treat people as people. Treat people

like bottles of wine. I can get on board with this. That's a good start.

I'm okay with this. And she said, but, and if you, when you interact with

a bottle of wine, you effectively open a bottle of wine, drinking and seeing what,

seeing what it's like. And said if, if your bottle that you're

interacting with has been dropped or badly treated or something's happened to them

during their day and it is a white wine or a red wine or

whatever, you would never know. Or maybe a great sommelier would

know, but nobody else would know. But some people have got a little bit of

fizz. People with a little bit of fizz. When you open those, if you just

open those the same way you open every other bottle of wine, they are going

to explode in your face. And so you need to be a little bit gentle.

The way we open a bottle of champagne at the table. So there's a hard

ear little. And you open a bottle of wine in such a way that someone

with that fizz just gets dealt with differently, treated

differently, and doesn't end up exploding it. And I just thought, that

is so cool. I can use that. So then I went back

through all of the data, and I took a

microscopic view then of how was that guest actually treated? And

luckily, I asked these questions. Were you made to feel special? Did you build a

connection? And I found that where some

customers had built a connection with their server, they become a lot less

likely to complain. And also those who never complain,

actually, you can tease out of the problem and fix it there and

then. And I was also able to prove that if you do fix the

problem there and then, one, the tips go up. Two, the customer actually ends up

happier than if they never had a problem at all. And so the training that

I do now is trying to get even the best places, like the Goring

hotel, to be on the lookout for tables that look like they're struggling

and to proactively go in. Francisco at Clifton House, he

encourages his staff to be on the front foot if there's a problem, that if

you go to a table and say, we know the food's not coming out particularly

fast tonight, so I'm going to do this for you, you take charge of the

complaint, and that's a much better way of dealing with them, to wait for it

to explode or not explode, and then they go home and they tell the

world. So I kind of found that element.

But the thing that seems to have grabbed everyone's interest is the

pre profiling people with the AI and then using it

through the formula to give people a pre warning.

And whenever I talk about it, I get this look that you're giving me now,

Phil, which is like a really, really, can you do that?

Well, but these are the questions I suppose you have to answer, right?

Especially if you're doing something that has not really been done before,

people will automatically ask moral questions as well as

all of the other questions. So you've obviously had them. So, yeah, unleashed

your responses. The only way I can, and whenever I present this,

the only way I can really prove that it works is to actually analyze

someone. So that's what I've done, Phil. I've analyzed you,

I've been looking through your social media content. Oh God, I'm

gutted. That thing last week. Now, the photos that you've

posted, there's ways to score them. I mean, I'm not an expert on this, it's

not my research, but I've gathered enough from what they're doing to be able to

score in an amateurish way myself. And it's things like your

photo on Facebook, for instance. The problem is actually your dog and not

you. So one of the things the dog. Actually dominates the fourth in all

of them.

And your posts are quite kind, actually.

They're very supportive. And the fact that you're doing this podcast, to be honest, to

get young people into the trade and help them make a decision on their career

is another sign. So it was quite easy to analyze you

in terms of four of the characteristics, but one characteristic jumped out of

my, which is empathy. So you have a very, very high score for empathy.

The charity work that you do, and some of the comments that you make, the

likes, the shares, the photos, you ridicule yourself, for instance, you put

somebody else in front of you dog in this case. So that shows a high

level of empathy. Now, people with high levels of empathy find it very hard to

complain, however, so I would guess

from the formula. The formula is saying that you are unlikely to complain if you

find a fault. If you came to Wyvernhausen, we treated you to lunch, which we

didn't. Constraints university, you gave

me food. I'm happy with that. You'd be unlikely to complain,

however, if you were at the table with someone else and

they were showing signs that they were distressed or unhappy about their

meal, then your empathy starts to balance

off against the empathy of the person serving you versus the person that you're with

who's unhappy. So I'd add a caveat. I would say if you're out on your

own or out with business with like minded people, you would be unlikely to

complain even if there was a fault. But you would if there was, if it

was a really bad fault. However, if you're with someone who finds a fault and

you can see that they're distressed about it, you could be encouraged to complain. I

would say that you were most likely, in my experience, of doing this a few

times now, you would take charge of the complaint and deliver it in quite a

kind way to avoid either the other person delivering it in a less kind

way. Now, you could at this point, completely destroy all of my research

by telling me that's totally wrong. This just dawned on me now that I kind

of dive straight in without thinking yet again. But go on, Phil, tell me, how

accurate was that? I have a massive smile on my face because you. I mean,

you've quite scarily nailed that. Because actually the thing when you

started there, talking about the fact that I'm high empathy, I think I've

always known that about myself. That's not really a surprise to me. I have to

tell you. It's exhausting being highly empathic,

because exactly that situation that you then described about being with somebody

who wants to make a complaint about something, of course I

experienced the empathy for their situation as well. So

you've absolutely nailed it. And I could. I could recount. Oh, God,

I could recount so many examples of things

exactly as you've just described. And the one that I always come, that immediately

springs to my head is my wife and I were on holiday once in

Greece, and we had booked a room based around photos that we'd seen on

their website. We got in the room and the photos did not match the

website. I would have been quite happy with the room that we had,

but my missus, bless her, to her credit, said, no, that's not what we paid

for. We don't have this. We don't have this. So then I have to. In

my head, well, if we. If the only outcome here is that we complain

about this, I'm going to be the one that does it. Yeah. Because

I. I always feel. And this. Maybe this is a trade

thing as well. Having been on the other side,

of course, you know that it's not the individual you're about to speak to fault

that that's happened. Yeah. And I always keep that in my head. And so I

always. I just. I'm trying to. I just showcase some facts and say this is.

This is what we paid for or this is what we thought we were getting.

This is the difference doesn't really marry up. What can be done about

it? I'll tell you what's interesting is I found that and this was part of

the research and I need to do the number crunching on it. People who worked

in the trade seem to go in two directions and they go in your direction,

which is. I feel sorry for the person. I've been in the end of a

few complaints myself. I'm just going to calmly tell you what the problem

is. Another whole section of our trade, when they go out and eat

or worked in our trade in the past, seem to. They spot errors that others

don't spot. And they are quite. Almost

like one upmanship. They tell you about it. It's almost like this wouldn't have happened

if I was managing here, but here's the fault that you've made. So they

can actually be lovely or quite difficult. There

doesn't seem to be much in the middle. So people, when I've been going around

these places, there are people in the audience that I'm training that

actually go out and complain a lot. And that was quite a surprise for me.

I thought I was going to be talking to people who couldn't possibly complain, but

actually some of them do and quite a lot. Yeah, I

mean, that's actually. I mean, it's thrilling in some respects

that you've been able to nail that down just by doing a little bit of

positive stalking at the end of the day, using that as a

methodology. I think a lot of companies do that already anyway, in terms of trying

to, I suppose, improve the experience. I remember, in fact,

it was the pan Pacific. London was kind enough to be invited to their

soft opening. We arrived in the room and they'd pulled some

pictures off of our Facebook or whatever, and there was a picture of the dog,

of course, next to the. To the bed and we thought, that's cool. I

like that, you know, so that's when it's used for positive effect

in terms of what you've done so far, because you're. You're not at the end

with this, are you? You're kind of, you're still progressing the

research. So I'm writing it up now. But there's, there's this.

I keep hearing the same kind of questions back, and they're right. They're

absolutely right, because they say, well, but you're only looking at the person who's made

a booking. And what if the person who's made a booking has got seven people

behind them that are avid complainers? So the next

stage to this is to start using facial recognition

and to start using cameras, which the technology is already there.

And the cameras could then pick out people in lifetime and

know exactly who they are. And one, they can spot people who are

struggling to voice their complaint. And they could flag to

restaurant manager, for instance, you've got a table over in the corner that

is unhappy and that he didn't

even know, and a great maitre D, I guess, would know, but we're not all

great Maitre D's and maybe he's completely unaware. I tell you, the terrifying thing that

came out of this research is that I assume, like all good researchers, you should

never come in with a pre misconception by did I assume that staff knew when

a table was unhappy? Or rather, they didn't know and

until they got home. But actually, they do know that a table is unhappy. They're

just choosing not to tackle it. And because I interviewed staff

as well as part of this research, and some of the staff, even in five

star hotels, were saying things online, oh, if I know a table, I asked them

questions. Can you tell if a table is unhappy in the restaurant? They'd say, yeah,

yeah, yeah, we could all know. They all knew. But I don't tackle it,

because if I go over there and ask them, they're going to complain at me.

And I just thought, well, God, they do actually know. And another one said,

I strategically wait until they've had a mouthful of food and then I go and

ask. And that's the bizarre thing, because when I interviewed the customers, they were saying

to say, it's almost as if they wait for you to take a mouthful of

what some people out there are. And I wonder how many teams out

there, even the best places, have got one or two people that don't like

difficult conversations and they can see a table is unhappy. Or struggling,

and rather go over and fix it. They stand back and watch. And do you

know what? Statistically, they are right to watch, because the majority of customers

won't actually raise a fault unless it becomes medium to

major. In fact, a lot of customers never say a word, no matter how bad

it gets. Someone in the research had a piece of glass

inside a piece of chicken in the middle of their meal, so

they ate around it. My life, that's someone who cannot

complain. When I interviewed them, they wouldn't make eye contact, stared at the floor,

and it was all, I don't want the fuss, I don't want the attention, all

this kind of stuff. Somebody else in the survey complained 14

times in 15 restaurant visits and got compensation eleven

times, totally more than 300 pounds. And they complained. One of their

complaints was about someone who served them, put two pieces of ice

in their coke and they thought that a decent restaurant would have at least

four. And they didn't complain to the person who served and they complained to the

manager, and the manager gave them a free round of drinks, right? So

I think there's a lot of compensation being given out unnecessarily and there's a lot

of odd behaviour out there. So the next stage of the

research is to. Is to use facial recognition so that we can

now know what's going on at the table, but also know every

single customer who walks through the door and what their profile is. Now, I'm not

saying that this is imminent, but normally at this stage, people start talking about

GDPR and do you have to get people to sign something? But all I'd say

to those people is just think back to five years

back when, if you just said to me five years ago that we'd all have

a device that was listening to us in our own homes, which an iPhone does,

it's in the terms and conditions. If you look hard enough, you can switch it

off, but nobody ever does. Listening to you in your own home. And if you

talk about things for long enough, you will get an advert as what's happened to

me many times on Instagram in particular. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the greek holidays

and my feed later. So

that's already going on. And I think in five years time, there will be facial

recognition everywhere. People's data will be even more wide

open than it currently is and this will just be the norm. And I think

we'll go into shops and there'll be like a little picture or hologram that pops

up and says, Phil, you might want to look at this new jumper because I

know you liked it last time. And what about this tie to go with a

suit that you bought the time before? This is going to become the norm in

the future. So my question back to people who say, well, hang on a minute,

people aren't going to accept that. I think they will accept it. My question back

to them is, are we going to use this technology? Because we're not great at

picking up technology and using it. Are we going to use this and use it

for some good or are we just going to watch all these other industries

employee AI, employee facial recognition, employee profiling

and just wonder whether we could. Well, I think we can use it

and I think that in the future it will be acceptable use of it and

we will have a method to. Somebody at the master in holders conference said

technology enhanced service. That's what I think we could use this

for. It's part of the training that I deliver. I mentioned that it's

about people already do this. So if you watch first dates with Fred

Cyriax, he talks to the camera as someone approaches him

and he's telling the camera, oh, this person, this,

that. And then when he welcomes them, he has a big ooh la la,

welcome to French. Then I can't do impressions, ooh la la.

That dress is fantastic or whatever. That's their welcome. The next one who comes

in looks quite timid, quite shy, completely different body language, and he

talks to them in a very calm manner and he takes them over to Merlin

and he said, we're going to look after you. And it's all completely different. So

we are doing this already with our emotional intelligence.

What I'm suggesting is we employ AI, we employ profiling, we employ

a bit of intelligence behind it to assist all those non

Fred Ceriax who haven't susticed after 20 years in the trade so

that they can do it as well, effectively. What we're talking about is

taking something and using it for good. You

know, there's nothing, nothing bad can really come of

this kind of technology in a service environment. Because really all you're trying to

do is enhance the experience of the guest.

Because as we spoke about before as well, if you do get a

red flag against somebody because they're a known complainer or

their personality profile says that it allows you the opportunity

to get ahead of it as opposed to waiting for it to

all explode. And so what's not to love about that other than the

fact that I suppose really maybe you're taking away the one thing

that they live for, which is to complain.

Yeah, it was interesting because when I was interviewing, I was asking,

in the professional language, I was asking, are you out for compensation

here? Because the staff are all saying that there are some that kind of complain

because they want to help us and want us to be better and so it

doesn't have to other people, we actually think they all want compensation.

Nobody would admit to wanting compensation, but they did admit that they

like it when it happens. So. And I don't think this is a problem with

research. You're never getting someone to be completely honest with you. I think there are

people out there that are looking for ways to get compensation. They see an error

as a way to get money off their bill. I know for a fact that

there are, because I've had conversations with people who have openly admitted it, that

there are some people existed, you know, just to, I don't know, get back as

much as they can. But what I'd say to that is if. If you

build a connection with the person that you're serving, that

these, these complaints go down and compensation goes down.

So if I can get you and your wife to the table and I have

a bit of a laugh and a joke with you and I give you some

advice on the menu and I'll give you a top tip of what wines.

And we start to connect, then those little errors that might wind

up your wife, normally, she'll start to forgive.

And if you do complain, it's, you know, Adrian, do you mind if you. It's

this kind of way. So building a connection with a customer, I think,

is far, far more important than we ever realized. And it starts with the greeting,

the seat now at the Wyvern house here that we allow the students

to do greet and see. And I kind of trained the wivener

House staff as well. And I'm saying that's probably not. That needs to be a

final year thing, because actually that position is far more important than we realise.

Because I've kind of got these videos, I've got the students to act it out

of what happens to an entitled person if they don't

get recognized, if they're not known as a regular, if they're not given kind of

a big welcome, they get kind of ushered in and forgotten about. They're already in

a negative frame of mind. And what happens if a kind of a scared and

intimidated person doesn't get calmly reassured to their table? Then they

already tighten. And then where you sit them, you sit the

entitled person in the center of the room because they want to be seen. You

sit the timid person in the corner because they want a defensive position. This is

all what I train in now, and it's kind of using a

little bit of common sense, a little bit of body language training to do what

I hope the system will be able to deliver in the future anyway. But I

tell you what I love about this is I will train my

students on a Monday, and then I'll go to the goring and train goring

staff and exactly the same thing on a Tuesday. And how cool is that? That's

very cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Well, and I've been lucky enough to meet some

of your students today as well, and you very kindly invited me to give

a little talk to them as well. Yeah, they all look oven ready.

No, but there is definitely, there's a confidence about them, and

obviously that's a sweeping statement. Of course, there's always the measured ones that don't maybe

speak as loudly as others. But I suppose that to you that must

be, and I've just assumed this within an inch of its life, but it

must be quite enriching to see

these people that you're basically training to be ready for the industry and then the

feedback that you're getting from industry about what they're like. Yeah.

And I would add to that, seeing them progress. I mean, I think. I think

we're quite quick to put our industry

down, if you think. I mean, I've listened to a few of your podcasts, and

I've heard people talk about. Thank you. It was me, by the way.

You're the listener. That's a standard joke that you have to make in the

podcasting. So I heard a young lady talk

about that. She was 23 when she took over beefy, and I've won 24. And

they. But they're using the same language, and a lot of your interviewees use that.

They were lucky in some way. We use this word, and I got fortune, I

got no, we need to stop doing that. This industry

is bursting with opportunities. I wasn't. I don't think I was lucky.

When I became GM, opportunity presented itself and

I took it. And if I hadn't taken that one, another one would have done.

And that is not true in other industries. If you're in a car manufacturing plant,

you might have to wait ten years for your boss to leave and take it.

That doesn't happen in a hospitality. Hospitality. Opportunities pop up all over the place. So

I think we to do ourselves a favor. We need to stop talking about luck

and start talking. Talking about opportunities. And I see this with the students after they've

gone. We did a conference at a Grosvenor and there was a young

lady that she was a past student, she's been promoted six times in seven

years, and that just does not happen anywhere else.

So I think seeing them on the first day, where they can

be low confidence, they can be a bit rough around the edges

sometimes, a bit like Kevin and Perry and Vicky Pollard,

and then they grow and get more mature and more confident, and then they start

to think they get a bit mouthy in Wyvern house. Hang on a minute. I

wouldn't do it this way. That's great. That's great. If they leave Wivenahouse thinking that

they could do the job just as well as the people they've been working alongside

them. Perfect. And they go out into the trade and then they just

fly up the ranks. And we've had GM's within four or five years

of graduating people all over the world and, yeah, that's great.

And we do this event every year where we invite them all back again and

some of them who are available come back and see us and we have this

kind of big reunion. But I think, you know that there are lots of reasons

why I went into education. I think, firstly,

it's the older days.

Secondly, I'd say that it's the freebies, so I

can phone up a student and get a discount

in lots of different places. That's nice, too. But I think what tops it

all is just seeing someone quite nervous,

quite intimidated on their first day, on their

last day. Be very confident. I mean, you saw Lucy today. She's back

chatting, she's totally confident, she's totally ready for the trade,

and then I will thoroughly enjoy seeing her go out into the trade and fly

up the ranks and rip it up. And I take absolute pleasure in

that. That's the best part of my job. Yeah, no, that's. That's my kids. I

mean, did you ever think that 18 year old kid didn't have a clue what

he wanted to do and was forced into the world of

hospitality by his nan, that you'd end up doing this?

I think she and I thought that crime was my

future.

I had no clue. I had no clue. And, yeah, that's a generational divide for

you, isn't it? That your nan phones you up and just orders you and within

a week you're somewhere else. I mean, that just would not happen with. With this

generation. They would kick back far harder than I

kicked back and I just went with it. But no, I didn't ever think that

I would end up in hospitality. I certainly didn't think that I'd be a hotel

manager so young. And I never thought that I would be a

half professor. You're quite tall for a half professor.

No, that's great. Look, I wish you all the very best. With the

continued research, I'd imagine there's more to do

and more to try. Yeah. I mean, anything that we can do to kind of

pump that message out. If you're looking for subjects and things like that, then.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, at some stage, I probably will be looking for. To test

what I've. What I found. People in the industry have been brilliant

about that. So Sally Beck and Danny Pecorelli, all very keen to be

involved. They want to see it. They want to see it in action. So I

would. The first thing I did when I finished the research, I turned into

a training package and I went back to the places that helped me with the

research and I trained their staff, the goring and Royal Ancaster and Clifton house,

for instance. And that package, now I'm delivering to everybody else,

to anyone who wants it. And that is about everything we just talked

about, emotional intelligence, body language and all of the data behind

complaints. And I think what's nice now is that I get to see a room

full of people from industry who are not in an agreement, which means that the

research has hit the nail on the head. But also they sit back and they

think for a little bit and the penny drops, then that actually, yeah, it's good

to take charge of a complaint. It is good to proactively take charge

and to do something about it. And we would have better Tripadvisor reviews if we

did what this idiot at the front is telling us to do.

Excellent. If people want to reach out to you, learn about this

or anything else that you've got your head in, what's the best way for them

to do that? Yeah, sure. So probably LinkedIn for some reason, it says associate

professor Adrian Martin rather than Adrian Martin. Associate professor? Yeah. It's difficult to find you,

actually. Adrian doesn't work. No, it doesn't know

that. Or you can email me if you're interested in the training. For

instance, it's a martil. So there's another a martin in

the university, and I haven't got around to killing him yet. So it's amartill with

an l at Essex ac UK. Great stuff,

Adrian. Thank you so much for sharing your story. No problem. Wish you all the

very best. Yeah. Cheers.