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Dan Grandfield: Embracing Hospitality's Highs and Lows with the Mastermind Behind Blue Crags Consulting
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From the rustic charm of Staffordshire to the vibrant heart of Glasgow, our latest episode wanders through the captivating life story of Dan Grandfield, an illustrious figure in the hospitality realm. Imagine steering clear from a place you swore never to visit, only to find it serendipitously becoming a part of your beat – Dan's cheeky anecdote sets the stage for a session brimming with laughter, candid revelations, and the kind of wisdom only a true industry sage can impart. As the founder of Blue Crags Consulting, Dan takes us through the rollercoaster ride that is his career, punctuated by moments of sheer resolve, like when redundancy turned into a launchpad for ventures spanning hotel management to health and safety enlightenment.
Picture this: a couple knee-deep in the hospitality trenches, juggling a symphony of Zoom calls and project collaborations amidst the tranquil backdrop of their home office. Listen along as Dan unfolds how his partnership thrives in a shared space, intertwining leadership, mindfulness, and hospitality into innovative learning tools. The intimate glimpse into their daily dynamics reveals how relationship and career meld harmoniously when both partners are navigating the voyage of self-employment, and how gaming, of all things, becomes a refreshing escape and competitive outlet.
Our conversation takes an unexpected detour to the rustic vineyards of Italy, where Dan's hands-on experience with WWOOFing paints a vivid picture of cultural immersion and sustainable living. This global adventure opens up discussions around the future of travel and work, teasing the promise of digital nomadism and specialized consulting to enhance hospitality experiences. As Dan shares the highs and lows of inaugurating a unique hotel brand and the valuable lessons learned from embracing failure, you're guaranteed to walk away not only entertained but equipped with a newfound appreciation for the rich tapestry that is one's professional and personal journey. So, settle in and let the infectious spirit of our guest inspire you to find joy in life's most unexpected paths.
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Subscribe now and embark on this journey through the highs, lows, and everything in between. Let's navigate our life journey together, one buzzword at a time.
Welcome everybody to the latest episode of Answer Buzzword podcast. We are delighted to be joined by Dan Grandfield this evening. Dan believe you are already familiar with Tristan. Yeah get your first question how did you meet Tristan?
Speaker 3:Remember is but is it rugby?
Speaker 2:Robby club? Definitely yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we're both rugby rugby people. I moved to Creef a few years ago now. I sat somewhere years ago and indicated a desire to help Creef because I haven't been a big spateal mystic. Yeah, I was getting on a bit and I'd retired from play. I did play to us 44 or 45, but a bit too long in the tooth to actually play, so I might help. I'm not actually sure how much help I've been. I think I promised to not have delivered a small amount. It's really a game.
Speaker 1:You also involved in the committee and the politics that's involved in that? Not really.
Speaker 3:I'm kind of on the edge on the press. He's in the WhatsApp group.
Speaker 2:He sees a peripheral member.
Speaker 1:I'm part of the committee for the choir that I'm part of. I think I'm in six different groups. Relentless, constant WhatsApps. I can feel Six groups?
Speaker 2:No, like others, I had to mute quite a lot of them. How many dozen octaves? Yeah, well, I think I'm in the middle of a lot of things, yeah.
Speaker 1:So, dan, by way of a quick introduction what do you do and where do you come from, please?
Speaker 3:I run my own hospitality consultancy called Blue Crags Consulting, and I come from Staffordshire, in the midlands of England. Not many people know where it is. We've never been to Alton Towers. It's in Staffordshire, home of pottery and beer, and that's about it. So I grew up in a rural part of England and sheep farms, all that kind of stuff, lifting sticks, so yeah, and now I'm in Creef, interestingly.
Speaker 1:Another far beyond place. It's north of the border this time. And how did you get into hospitality, Dan?
Speaker 3:When I was in school I went to a very traditional boarding school, roald Dahl. The boys about my school, everyone was Army Barmy, so the first thing was to become an Army officer. So at university I wasn't really doing very much, as I mentioned, I was kind of working towards that. I failed regular commissions board, which is for the entrance to Santerst, and I remember the letter now. It said Grammfield's Petulance is quite unbelievable and he's probably not suitable as he does not like being told what to do in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 3:So the dream didn't really work out and I think that's probably a good thing at the end of the day.
Speaker 3:So I was in Glasgow still having finished university, didn't want to go back and work in the pottery industry or the brewing industry, and I enjoyed my four years living in Glasgow. If you can imagine being an old boy's boarding school and then moving to a city like Glasgow it was like moving to a new playground. So I didn't want to move back to Staffordshire. I did four weeks of advertising sales for a police magazine which I now believe might very well have been a scam actually, and the magazine didn't actually exist. But you're kind of, you know, you're basically selling the fact it was a magazine for the police to get people to buy advertising in it. But every time I asked for a copy of said magazine you got this kind of thing that was put together with maybe some bulldog clips and things like that. So I decided that wasn't for me and it was in the Pentagon Centre in Glasgow. Then if you come across that, I think it was in there.
Speaker 3:It had a proper office. But it's the way they used to crack open the tins at 5. Yeah, before working even finished and stuff like that. So I thought, oh, it's not moving from there. So I took a job as a waiter in a Stackis Hotel in Glasgow City Centre. Stackis was the kind of original Scottish hotel group. A lot of people remember it if they're around. They actually had quite a few hotels at one point. It became part of Hilton in the end. But took a job as a waiter there, somebody I was familiar with because my dad had a bar restaurant in Birmingham that I worked in from a young age. So when I was home from school I didn't really get to docks around. I'd go and work in the beer cellar in the bar. And then there's a couple of factories in Birmingham that I worked in on the way.
Speaker 1:So when I came, back from school.
Speaker 3:We had longer holidays prior to schools, so 10 weeks in the summer I'd have plans to go off and see my pals all over the UK, and now I'd be packed off to work in a factory in Birmingham. So I took this job as a waiter at Stackis Hotel back in Glasgow, so I didn't have to go back to Staffordshire. And here I am, some 30 years later, running my hospitality consultant, and there's been a bit of a journey journey in between. So to be honest, I think hospitality was something that had always energetically been drawn to. While I was at school we had these work experience things, and one of them was to go and do work experience at Creep Hydra Bizarrely, but I was turned to hell for it. So I vowed never to cross over the threshold of Creep Hydra. Now I live in the town where Creep Hydra is, bizarrely, and I was also at university with one of the Leckie family which owned the Hydra as well.
Speaker 3:So that's kind of a strange, stranger thing. So I was always drawn to it.
Speaker 3:It's a fairly in those days it was a fairly tough route, a way to supervise a head balm and restaurant manager. I had a restaurant supervisor so I was a restaurant manager. I was at that hotel for two years it was on Hill Street in Glasgow and then the general manager, she moved down to open a new hotel in Islington in London. She phoned me up and said would you like to come and be bar and brash room manager of this new Hill Hotel in Islington on Upper Street? And I said, of course I probably wasn't ready for it, but in those days hotels do live in so you didn't need to worry about accommodation, which obviously is tricky in London. So I lived in this hotel. I still remember the room number, room 425.
Speaker 3:Lived in that for a year before the company that owned the hotel bought a house in a place called Banskring in London. Then I moved out of the hotel and moved into this house. So you paid a little salary but you had a roof over your head. Bills are paid and obviously you could eat food at work or things like that. But there was a lot of burning the candles at both ends.
Speaker 3:It was a bit wild, the hospitality industry in those days. You had industry nights where you wore your uniform with your name badge on. So you finished work at two in the morning, you'd go along to this nightclub and you'd be able to get in and stuff like that. So it's good fun. I got a bit bored with doing food and beverage just in that hotel for five years, buying a resume manager, food services manager, eventually food and beverage manager Good fun, looking at decent brasserie. In those days Hectoral food was a lot better perhaps than some hotels are now. There's all sourced from vans, from ComGuard and marketing and things like that. So it was a good experience. But I got fed up of it so I moved into health and safety, as you did.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, much more exciting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, much more exciting Different pace, should we say. So I looked after health and safety for two. Elton had a house in Mayfair which is quite good fun. It's quite different. Security was part of that. So you did deal with the odd celebrity and things like that.
Speaker 3:It was an interesting part of London to work in. It was a very boring job, mainly because the health and safety part of hotels is quite hard to get people to sign onto it. So you were basically the salesman for health and safety. So you were either popular with some departments and deeply unpopular with others. So I kind of got fed up of that. But while I was working in the Hilton, isn't it? The one of the managers of the Business Design Centre, which is an exhibition centre much like Olympia next door, said hey, you got yourself in health and safety and I said we said did, and he goes. Do you want to come and work for us? So I went to work in exhibitions and events for a year and then I got later done and redundancies happen to me twice and if you think about key moments in your life, redundancy creates them. It's never it.
Speaker 3:For me it's never been a bad thing, it's a very positive thing. And with those obviously I panicked a bit. I just moved in with my girlfriend at the time After only being together for eight months. She's now my wife, by the way, so it worked out. In that time I realised that I was a hotelier, a hospitality guide, so I thought about getting back into it. Premier Inn came calling. I got an ops manager role at the Premier Inn in Putney Bridge it was called Travelling in those days before it went through two brands kind of changes. Premier Inn in those days was a great company. Travelling was a great company. It was quite autonomous. The GM has got to run their businesses. Not many of the services are centurised. Then spent seven years with Premier Inn, I became a GM general manager very quickly. It's been a launchpad. So I did a year and a half at Putney Bridge and then I got my first GM role at Barking in London and then Premier Inn in Harvestmouth in London. My wife was working for Hilton at the time. She was a learning and development manager for Hilton in West London Decided she was Glaswegian, she wanted to come back to Scotland.
Speaker 3:So in 2008 I came back. Premier Inn at Glasgow Airport was vacant so I joined there. And then, for the second time in my career 2011 I was made with London. I moved 500 metres across the airport campus to be ops manager at Holiday Inn at Glasgow Airport, so into a full service, back into a full service hotel, which again was a great move, and then did that for a couple of years. I subbed in place three-in-a-bedrooms very busy and then Z Hotels I was reading Kater of the magazine, a very good magazine, saw that Z Hotels were moving to Scotland and there was a small, compact, affordable luxury service that Brandon was aware of. Then in London, reading an article that Beth King, the owner, was thinking about a hotel in Glasgow, so I emailed them and said that I would like to open it for them. I was successful so speculative, there wasn't even a job I had out and I got the job, spent a year and a half opening it it was a building site and I joined. It was a great experience doing a new opening, got that head off the ground, introduced it to marketing Glasgow.
Speaker 3:And then they decided to shelve their plans for expansion in Scotland, which would have meant I could have taken an area manager role because the hotel they were saying was quite a small role and that was to be bought off. They got cold feet in 2014, the Scottish independence debate and the vote. They decided to pull investment at that point and they never actually went back to it strangely. But they had plans for Edinburgh, aberdeen, etc. But they didn't do that in the end.
Speaker 3:So I decided to move 800 metres away to the Mercure on Ingram Street because I've not done hotels technical pricing, seasonality, revenue management we call it revenue management systems processes. I hadn't had a full service hotel revenue management experience so that was why I moved to that hotel. I did that for four years. Difficult hotel to manage, right in the middle of the merchant city, all sorts of challenges and things like that. And then the decision came. I was sat there, my wife had made the decision to go self-employed some 10, 12 years previously and I decided to stay employed at that point. I hadn't really thought about becoming self-employed then and in those final couple of years I was thinking about should I set up on my own? So January 2020, I set up Blue Cracks Consulting Limited Company and all that stuff and then little did I know there was a global pandemic in March 2020.
Speaker 3:So it's quite a tricky time to set up business. Luckily, and again, probably an energetic thing. When I set up the business I was thinking about doing things like recruitment, commercial reviews. I didn't set it up. I didn't set it up with a sole focus, I just thought I would do hospitality. And then you look back now and go what does that mean?
Speaker 3:I'm just going to do some hospitality consulting. But I knew something in me. I set myself I think I can be of service to somebody for some hospitality businesses. So I built up a little bit of capital. To be fair, I had some savings that I had done on purpose to get me through the few months after we started it. And then I had shared. I started charitable activities. I was a trustee of Creef Community Trust, community Development Trust, so I do some charity stuff voluntarily. And one of the other board members was John Laurie who was managing director of Benteur Distillery and he phoned me, knowing I was a hospitality guy, and asked me if I knew of a good agency to do recruitment and I said, well, I'll do it for you. So that kept me. I think I've delivered about six or seven positions for the restaurant at Glen Turret, which now about is just when it's second star yeah, second star on Instagram.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So we have well done to them and it's cracking spots. A lovely discovery. You know still the old buildings and stuff like that. Fantastic business, good level investment from the league, the new owners not new now so that kept me going in the period where everybody was at home.
Speaker 3:And then I got a call from Rex Bosson-Miner said could you help me out? Mcew Livingston, a friend of mine and a colleague who unfortunately was termed the ill. I had to take some time off work, obviously. So I said I would look after the hotel for him on an interim basis. Really tough because a team you know been there for 12 years. He was a really admired guy and also the hotel was going through a transition between two hospitality management companies, from what we used to call jubilee hotels to Aembridge or Interstate, which is a much larger hospitality. So it means all your systems have to change over payroll, finance, revenue management, pms, all those things. So I quite enjoyed, I didn't.
Speaker 3:During COVID it was quite tricky, you know. I had people on the social housing ladder in the hotel. I had delivery drivers and had army vaccinators. The hotel was actually full and operating, even though to a world everybody thought everything was closed, but actually it was a backbone of things going on in the background and people have to stay somewhere when they move around the country. So I mean, bizarre really. You know, if people did turn up I had to get a piece of paper from them proving they were a key worker or that they're allowed to stay in the hotel. You know, normally it's all, anybody come stay. You know, give us your money. So it was an interesting time.
Speaker 3:But then interims became a thing and I've really quite enjoyed that. You know I've done quite a few of these interim appointments now on a self-employed basis. I've done some commercial reviews for a couple of places. So when you look at their profitability, sales, recruitment, you know how they're performing. I found that my hotel career has really given me a real generalist, as the job title general manager has given me a real generalist set of skills. So you touch on marketing, you touch on finance, you touch on all those things and you have an autonomous. Sometimes you have an autonomous singular business unit that you're kind of accountable for. So you have to flex your kind of knowledge and your muscles in those areas. So for that reason there's a beautiful thing about Hotel Management. For that reason it's a unit with all the functions in it. Some might be centralized, but generally you've got this building and you've got to make some money out of it, and that's the way it works.
Speaker 1:On an interim basis.
Speaker 3:I've learned even more. You know that's one thing I've learned as well. You know, I'm 50, 50 years old. I'm still learning. Every time I go work for a different brand, every time I go work in a different environment, and I'm learning something. You know it's been fantastic. Now the crossroads, what's next? I've been doing it kind of energetically. So I'm in a period now of reflection and I'm thinking about I don't know if there's an organisation called Atollo, which was a startup hospitality I don't know how to describe it educational agency. So I did some mentoring for them and I did some delivery courses, designer delivery courses on LinkedIn for people looking for jobs and you know, employability skills, things like that. I've done some of that. That's as a volunteer as well. But I'm thinking that now I might have a look at some learning and development stuff.
Speaker 3:I don't think the industry is changing fast enough and I think leadership into the emerging future is something that we really need to have a look at. You know, I've managed some hotels, the new generations of young people coming through. It requires a different set of skills, in my view, to get the best out of the new generations coming through, because not everyone's going to do what you say, just because you've got a job and you're the boss, it doesn't work like that anymore. It's just you need to actually deliver a lot more of an engaging workplace for people to really get engaged by it, and then you know, help the business deliver what it wants to deliver. And I think a lot of leadership skills or leadership training is still in the past. Yeah, it's real soft skills now, really important listening, coaching, all those things. Not classroom. Online training is a bit of a scourge for me. It's very, very good for processing procedure. You can't teach someone how to look after a customer on a computer program yet.
Speaker 3:One day, I'm presuming, we'll have robots, anything that we can, you know, with AI and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Now.
Speaker 3:So I think, something in the learning development field. Is that right?
Speaker 2:Said, robots will be the customers.
Speaker 3:Yeah well, you just don't know. We're like terminator rise of the machines, so yeah, so working on something at the moment actually leadership in the emerging future. I keep saying 21st century, but my wife keeps reminding me we're already 24 years in. So that's a bit of a ass. So the emerging future, so kind of three horizons thinking and all sorts of things. So we all need to be, you know, a lot more entrepreneurial in a way, but we also need to be a lot more human focused and not task focused.
Speaker 2:But sometimes I feel it's going the other way and becoming more task focused, I think with the I was going to say with the almost like lack of leadership skills, the natural kind of desire to control. You know, when you're not getting the traction or engagement you want, the kind of worst thing you can do. But the kind of natural density in my experience is people go down the task focus because they're trying to either justify their job or to show that they're, you know, doing their worth and it doesn't help anyone because they lose, get even less, your team is even less engaged and they're, you know, psychologically in my experience you kind of end up in this mindset where you're not focused on value creation but you're focused on task creation, almost like being really busy but not for much value.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Enforcing your kind of formal authority on people which doesn't have any benefit at all. It makes you feel like crap because you won't get the validation you want, and it makes the other team feel crap because you're just, you know, demanding something rather than working with them.
Speaker 3:That thing as well. If you have one thing as I can tell you that I've always you know I don't want to hear it's not my job and I hear that a lot more now. So it's almost like contractually contracts and things need to be even more detailed about what people's responsibilities are, whereas when I come into it, you hit the ground. You know you hit the ground running. You do everything to try and learn, try and develop, try and move forward.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's quite an interesting change. It's almost reactionary. It's always, you know, coming backwards a little bit, obviously not everywhere, just an experience in one or two games.
Speaker 2:Was there a particular experience, Dan, that kind of pushed you to starting your own business? Obviously, you said earlier, you kind of felt that you could do it and you could add value, you could be at service. But was there a particular moment where you thought, no, I need to do this.
Speaker 3:I think it was a build-up over a couple of years. Myself and my wife are decoiled in a work. You know what's important in life. You know, not almost an existentialist crisis, not all the time, but kind of examining stuff like that and doing that kind of thing, you start to realise I realised that I was institutionalised and I've kind of blundered from institution to institution so heavily institutionalised school, environment, university, not kind of so much. But hotels are quite institutionalised. Things are still going the same way. You still have the budget and the years block and you still the KPIs. You're all the same. Wherever you go, you become institutionalised.
Speaker 3:And I realised that I wasn't really, I wasn't operations director, material.
Speaker 3:I didn't really want to go at the next level, not have a hotel and look after 12 people running other hotels. I'm an operator and actually working from home and things like that has kind of reminded me that I'm an operator. But hospitality if you imagine 30 years not knowing whether you're going to spend Christmas with your family, whether you're, you know that is off, not hours. As GM, the buck stops with you. And even on some of my interreploitments in the last couple of years I've still put in days where I've needed to do 16 to 18 hours, vips, staff calling sick, the kind of challenges that hotels often have and it was actually to take back a little bit of control into how I structure my life, rather than being, you know, kind of cap in hand to an institutionalised structure, and that's been quite refreshing. There's some aspects of the institutions that I like, but at the moment I've got I'm touching in and out of it and I've got a lot more freedom of choice related to follow other things and develop myself in other ways.
Speaker 2:What is the work-life balance been like in the dynamic with your wife then? Because you're both worked in hotels. So I guess my expectation was when you're both in the industry it's quite complementary in some ways. And now, when she started her own business or doing self-employed, did that dynamic change? Was there things you had to adapt or change to Interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, interestingly, if you imagine. You know when we first got together I was a shift worker, if that's simply so. You know, a typical shift 7am to 3pm, 3pm to 11pm. I didn't work nights, although I'd sometimes worked nights, just the night team didn't turn up, which, again, I've done a couple of 24 hours 3pm to 3pm. That's tough, lad, that's tough.
Speaker 3:But Susan was very much a learning and development still is an office place, as in good old Henry T Ford or Henry Ford, whatever his name was introduced the winter to Friday 40 hour week or whatever it was. So learning and development is very much operating in that kind of world. I was kind of senior, starting to get more senior as we got to get an old Spanish. I didn't have to do quite so many nights but still had to do quite a few, still had to work quite a few weekends. It worked fine because Susan's job we should become self-employed she was away a lot so she'd be away delivering training experiences all over the UK and laterally in the Middle East, usa, europe. So when we first got together, there was, I was a shift worker, susan was quite often away. So we got together with that at the beginning and it kind of remained like that. For the next 15 years Susan was away an awful lot in the Middle East.
Speaker 2:Did you enjoy that?
Speaker 3:Well, actually strangely, gave me the freedom of mind to just worry about work and not to worry about my relationship. We don't have any children, which I know is a major factor for a lot of people in decision making, and a lot of decisions I've been able to, we've been able to make have been because we haven't got kids in the responsibility of children, so that has if you're thinking about the way I'm talking, it's made it sound easy. There is a factor that meant we hadn't more flexibility, to know most people do, although some people would say that's just a mindset. I'm sure it's not just a mindset. We didn't got two other human beings there.
Speaker 1:You are, I would say I'm not sure about that.
Speaker 3:I don't believe that anyway. So, yeah, our relationship season understood that I was a shift worker. She was a stacker graduate management trainee, so she was a staff colleague as well. By the way, the question no, me studio. I was a deafening with me together, but she was a stacker graduate management trainee, so her first working, proper working role was in a hotel company and she did some coaching stuff. She did all those things that they made graduate trainees go through. So she was, she had experienced it, even though she went into learning and development. So, yeah, it was quite a few, a lot of understanding that.
Speaker 1:Would you both know, being self employed, any tension, any different pain.
Speaker 3:We see a lot of each other. To be fair, it's interesting, it's kind of odd. I think it's odd. It's strange if a season and it is for me she was used to an empty, quiet house. Now she's got me lumbering about downstairs sometimes getting in a way. To start with I think I was getting in a way of her routines yeah, the routines. Routines, you know you can change routines. The text will be at work and again, mindset, you know work to change routines. Programs, season with call up. You know programs are quite often what institutions give you the way you think about things and the way you operate. So I wouldn't say there was tension. I think she would like it if I was away a bit more of the main books. I've been at home for quite a long period of time, is she?
Speaker 2:trying to get you into positions in hotels.
Speaker 3:She has someone who wanted to run with recently, so maybe that's there. But you know, there's kind of a couple of things across the desk I've decided not to do. And you know, we're working together Because Susan's learning and development professional has stayed in that area, especially coaching, and again she's obviously we're developing leadership and the emerging tutor together Because Susan has a master's in mindfulness coaching background and a training and delivery background. So we're putting something together. We're using hospitality as a test case, mainly because I've been in it for quite a while. They're like saying I'm an expert. I've just been working in it for 13 years, so I know a lot about it. But yeah, so we're trying to put that together. So we're working together on that, collaborating. So that's interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've got to say I've got two questions, Sure, and the first one is if you are taking on an interim role and it requires you to be away for an extended period of time, do you take your Xbox?
Speaker 3:I don't, can I tell you I had a bit of an Xbox guy journey.
Speaker 1:Okay, what's your?
Speaker 3:name. I'm a big core of duty. Modern world three guy yeah.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:I've played all of them since I if you imagine, if you're my age. When I was a kid, pcs were ridiculous that x8, spectrums, that x81 and BBC Micro, these things you could just about write a few things in color on your screen.
Speaker 3:That's about all they did and you loaded games in a tape that made. This is screeching noise is loaded on, so and half the time it didn't work and it took 25 minutes to load whether. So at university one of my pals had a second megadrive. Yes, yes, an hour's on that, another panel had a PC that had the original game game on it and stuff like that, so got into gaming there and I've had each Xbox through history, so it's actually for me. I find it a great extraction from anything.
Speaker 3:And it ticks, is it ticks quite a few boxes. I'm very competitive and there was a bit of a gap when I stopped playing rugby, so help me fill that gap, and it's also visually stimulating you know, I've also got one of these.
Speaker 1:The VR, the meta questions.
Speaker 3:I take that away with me Because quite often TVs and I know this because I do TV's are knobbled to prevent you from getting your stuff into it.
Speaker 2:So what do you play on meta quest? What do you do on it?
Speaker 3:I call it juicy. It's a little bit like Call of Juicy you can fly and involves you have to flap your arms when you fly. You don't. You do have to hold them out.
Speaker 2:I can visualize you playing it right now.
Speaker 3:It's a very handy one for a hotel room.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're playing online or just like the campaigns online?
Speaker 3:No, I'm not. Yeah, oh yeah. No, I've got a game attack and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've got a lot of group. That made me the last one. I played a lot of One more for three it was zombies, the zombies level that we did. That was like our break it during studying the two of us Splits. You'd end up at the top of the house, and for the Reagan, because I would just take out the new version, still the same sort of set up for Reagan.
Speaker 1:I don't play the zombies, I play the multiplayer and was like we'd set ourselves a study break and it was like we just keep going until we were obviously that it would die. For that was the challenge. How long thing between revision?
Speaker 3:break up. It was everywhere, of all ages.
Speaker 1:And, like you said, then I do so. For me, the moment, it's the switch that I'm playing. I'm playing the switch. I came called astroneer but I've served one of the goals I set myself this year. I am where, I try and complete it. So, astroneer, the difference with cod there's no violence, there's no, there's no fear in this game. It's just like an empire builder, but there's nothing that's going to come and get you and I do. It's just nice to zone out, to structure a little bit.
Speaker 3:It's a bit of a mindful activity. You know, if you think about mindfulness, about you know what am I thinking about when I'm playing this game? I'm just playing the game.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Because you have to concentrate.
Speaker 1:I'm not thinking about the stimulation in the goal I like. What time are you playing? Like it would keep me up, I like. And with cards, I knew that I was playing too much when I was dreaming that I was playing.
Speaker 3:Right, no, I've not got. No, I can switch off on it fairly easily. I'm not going through that. I do get a bit of a drawn up, and not too.
Speaker 2:You're talking about you and Susan working together and applying kind of mindfulness L and D to hospitality and your experience. Does the meta quest come into that in terms of using that as a tool to where you've?
Speaker 3:just you've just given me that idea. Yeah, this millisecond a little light bulbs gone in my head. A little light bulbs got in my head about interactive training as well. Yeah, I've got this thing sat in my thing, but you know you could develop something for it. The country be quite quite useful actually. Yeah, Thanks for that.
Speaker 2:No worries and especially like maybe obviously it can't replicate work experience, but maybe teenagers or people that can't can't maybe actively get into it they could have an experience is for distilleries and like, almost like industries that are maybe also not relating to hospitality, but industries are very high risk or high danger. I always think, like it was before, meta quest is about if you're able to create some sort of learning or interactive experience where they can get a flavor or taste of officially doing the job. You know. You think of a nuclear power plant and you're picking up hazardous substances, you know, through a digital platform. I think that's always interesting, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a panel of mine worked at Hunterston nuclear power station as a university and he would be paid an additional job to do a reactor shift. And you're really allowed to do a reactor shift once every I don't know six months or so. You got paid about 500 quid and learning about things like that, we can't actually go in as well to do it. It'd be quite interesting, but you know, thinking about it now, can you imagine an interactive? The biggest, the hardest thing to get stuff to do is do role plays without laughing or the nervous, the ones with more nervous disposition, feeling uncomfortable doing it, which I'm not keen on. It doesn't work.
Speaker 3:If people are under stress they do not learn. You know, we know that, know that from language learning, all those things are. People need to be relaxed and stress free to learn anything you know. Learn from your mistakes and not learn from big, high level mistakes, yeah, but you don't learn from little things that happen to you while you're under pressure. And I'm just thinking about you know you could have an experience where you're actually serving a virtual customer as the waiter or waitress or bar person. It's not the actions, it's not the. You can train anyone on the processes and systems. It's the dialogue and obviously AI's development will mean that you'll now get I mean chat GPT, you can have a conversation with it. So if we can actually get a virtual character that you can communicate with, which you probably can put on, I'm going to go away and dig it out and see what's out there, so thank you for that.
Speaker 2:No worries, thanks for the post, thanks for the post Second class. Thanks. The second question I referenced is another curveball of information. I know just from knowing you, but why don't you tell Jeremy about your experience withing? I hope I've got that right. Is it with it? Yeah, we're with it. We're with it, yeah. No, actually tell me which means with it.
Speaker 3:The thing about it is it sounds very close to talking.
Speaker 1:It seems a very different island, as long as you've got stories about that, we're fine.
Speaker 3:There's worldwide organic farm farms, something along those lines. So if you want to be a woofer and there's a lot of woofers in Scotland you basically join. You pay a fee for about a year 30 quid, something like that. Obviously, min Susan, she likes Italian culture, italian food. We're also learning Italian, so we joined, were woof Italian and then on that you will see a number of choices of places that you can go and work, and then we'll provide you with bed and boards. Why do you work? And the deal is you work four hours a day, five hours a day, and they will probably be hard to know, but it's quite hard work.
Speaker 3:These farms, vineyards, sometimes it's household, looking after kids. You go and help a guy build a shed there's all sorts of different scales on it. So we went to a natural vineyard in northern Italy, which surprisingly managed to get there by public transport all the way Bust, perth, perth to London, nearestar, to Paris, paris to the Milan on trains. And then we got picked up in a place called the P&O there, just down from the vineyard. Beautiful place, really kind of rough around the edges. This is wine making. This is not a big French chateau with, you know, driving around in golf carts and things like that.
Speaker 3:This is, there might be a tractor, there's a very old van. You get up at six in the morning. There's the family the parents and the son, and there's me and Susan and maybe another woofer, and you go out, you pick the grapes and then you come back and you press them, you put the juice into vats, because it's a natural vineyard. There's no chemicals, none of that. It's all done with water and it's a great experience. It's a great experience of how not to do stuff, because the family just seemed to row. I might be here for showing each other and you know I could have helped them sort out the processes and procedures and save them about six hours a day, every day for 365 days of the year. I don't think they were really game on that, you were just there to do exactly what they did, but they're beautiful people.
Speaker 3:It's a beautiful place Really and I would recommend it. If you all want to go somewhere, do a bit of work. We did two weeks. I think you can do anything from a week to four weeks to six weeks. There's potential, you can do it. And there's our friends who are studying up in Little Blanchie, a place called Burmiston. It's a bit of an organic farm stroke venue. They have woofers there, so they have people from UK and abroad coming to do a bit of work and staying with them. It's a great system. There's insurance involved. It's all above board. There is a process where you go oh, I'd like to go there to start to communicate with the owner of that business. You both decide whether it's right for you and then you just go and do it.
Speaker 2:Nice, so I recommend it to anybody, especially for something different. Do you have any plans for another adventure? The last time I spoke you guys weren't sure, but has there been developments?
Speaker 3:I'm not sure. We're kind of like I said. We're both in what we call project season, project dance, so we're both looking at what we're doing at the moment, deciding how to move. So I'm not sure we might have an extended period back in the UK just to put some more shape on that before we do. We'll definitely do it again. I mean, I'm learning Italian, so you know which is hard, especially when you know there's no one really Italian to converse with. So it's quite difficult language to learn, although it may just and you know just difficult to learn.
Speaker 2:Just watch rugby in Italian as long as you can Exactly that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you know, spend a bit of time over there. I'm sure we'll be back again. I'm not sure what do vineyard might do, organic farm might do. You know some of that, so we'll see. It's a great experience.
Speaker 1:So do you pay to do it or you're being paid or sort of like your free boards for the work type thing.
Speaker 3:Free van and board. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very good, they don't pay for your travel, sure.
Speaker 3:And there's no money involved. But we were fed three meals a day. Wine, virtually, with three meals a day. Which natural wine people want to try it. Try it Because it really doesn't give you an over, it's not causing stuff in the future.
Speaker 3:It's quite difficult to get, but yeah there's. You know you're pretty well looked after. You do get free time to can explore where you are. I mean Susan bolted it on to spending four or five weeks in Bologna. You know, just booking Airbnb in like six or seven weeks out of there, managed to do a little bit of Susan did a little bit of work while we were away. We can these days. You know. We asked the Airbnb guy. We stayed in it two years in a row and said to me, can you sort the Wi-Fi out? It was about nine megabytes per second. We went back and it was about 2000 or something. So you know, if you work, you work with people. You work with people that you come across. You give them advice and say, look, you're going to get a lot more traction If you, if you do a couple of things, because you can go move into the digital nomad world world.
Speaker 1:That was my next question. Would you consider yourself a digital nomad then?
Speaker 3:Not yet, but perhaps moving towards that point We've touched, so I think it's developed there.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'd like to work abroad in the host diet industry, which as you run as you thought about building a late kind of managing, or maybe not managing, but just consulting on Airbnb properties with owners and then be getting to travel the world Staying in them.
Speaker 3:Funny, you should say that just because I'm working with a property company that wants to get into a kind of an apartment hotel thing in a moment. So I do a little bit of a bit part consultancy, days here, days there, where which is you know. Again another tip take care of your LinkedIn page. People do actually get bona fide business from it, especially if you're especially some particular industry you know, get asked to help with it. We cut things quite often that they can turn into actual, you know, some paid business things like that, as well as quite interesting products.
Speaker 1:Look after your LinkedIn pages. I need to know, I need to like. I'm posting regularly but I need to do a bit of profile updating for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I know a bit of consulting in that kind of in that kind of area A gentleman setting up a glancing site and with pods, geno, domes, things like that. I do do a little bit of that, mainly because the main thing that people miss is revenue management. So how you price everyone prices too low because we don't want to charge people too much, and when you're on there they go I don't know when it in shop. Quite often if you let me look at it, I'll probably tell me you need to double it to make it to a make it worse and wild Because the amount of labels quite underestimated. What's what's involved. And especially if you've got one property and you're doing the laundry, the cleaning, all that stuff, there's a lot of work involved. If you're renting out a six bedroom house and you've got eight beds in it they've all been used and you were to turn it around in a day, whether you're not of linen or you're going to spending hours washing your own pressing limit.
Speaker 1:So simple, things like that.
Speaker 3:The people get into that and realize can you understand? It's quite different from domestic to commercial as well. And what some people think is is clean isn't, isn't. Just people have different, different lives. So it's a simple that they're being fantastic. I won't criticize it. I mean it posts a great deal of competition. I tell especially places like Edinburgh. You know it's expensive and probably deserved a little bit of a competition. Glasgow never really took hold because Glasgow hotels weren't overly expensive.
Speaker 1:Well, no, I'm looking this week. I'm always quite surprised that I've prepped your. In Glasgow center town is very affordable.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I'm pleasing it will be, unless there's something on. There's a lot of hotels in Glasgow now If you notice there's a lot of. It's all property companies and owners putting hiding money. It's not always because there's a hotel needed, it's because it's a good investment. There's quite a few tax breaks on refurbishment and converting old buildings. That's why you've got a lot of people building hotels in the premium law and then you've got ones like the Virgin Hotel in Glasgow and then last fair, actually before they went bust, not Virgin but the owners of the hotel.
Speaker 3:So then they had to say unfortunately I have to close the hotel a few months after open, and I'm sure we open again Someone some canny hotel here will will have a Virgin standard hotel to operate, so just got to get the right price from the administrators. So it's all about competitions now. But Glasgow has got thousands of premium in rooms. It's well served by premiering. And I'm out of the break and I'm trying locations. So you knock George Square, you know they're everywhere yeah.
Speaker 1:And the glamping. Do you think there's still a growing market?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's not glamping itself, it's experiencing. And now if you want to sell a hospitality type business, you want to offer an experience. If you're not going to do a standard hotel that just offers rooms for people doing other things, then these glamping sites are like an awesome experience Out one with nature. The most successful glamping sites every pod will have a hot tub sitting area out the door, pizza oven Projector you can pull down when you're sat in the hot tub, with an oven and fire stick so you can watch your content on the screen where you're sat in the part with the dust of champagne that kind of stuff Camping, nomadic camping, people that get married.
Speaker 3:You didn't get married anywhere in Scotland so can't be crossed. You get married in the woods. You can have your service in the actual forest there and then go down and have your reception in that kind of barn type thing. So there's a lot of experiences. Are the new thing? I would say? Glamping is still for a lot of people and new experience.
Speaker 3:But quite often for adults and the weekend you need a little bit extra. So it needs a kind of outdoor spa or a wood burning hot tub, not just a tent. Then the failed. There needs to be some selling point.
Speaker 1:Got it there on a King camper myself. Oh yeah, I've got a big Bell tent, wood burning stove, pets love it.
Speaker 3:Oh nice, I've done a bit of wild camping in that I went with a small one man tent. Nice and the camps in the Himalayas were in Big Tent, oh wow, In 2013. That was Susan. Never really camped before. We should have enjoyed it. But you would enjoy it when you've got some guys and horses and it's carrying the stuff Setting it up for you.
Speaker 1:You're quite an experienced person, right? Because you're paying quite a hefty turrets tax to go in like a day include the tour.
Speaker 3:But that's your that pays for everything.
Speaker 1:You guides your food.
Speaker 3:So you know you've got this thing about. It's not tax, it's a fee that you pay. So when you go to Bhutan, it might be $250 per person per day, which, to be fair, it was a lot of money to go there for two weeks, but that's all in Right. Okay, so spending any money off of tips for the guys you go with and the who?
Speaker 3:we, you know, and they don't their names are quite complicated Say they call themselves horse man, lunch boy lunch boy, I think, is older than me and hook. And then he got the guide and men says we just we went over there. It wasn't a private tour, but there's no one else booked for that that week that we're doing the trek for. So we're on the road with these guys and they've stopped, stopped campsites. You're just in the in the Himalayas. You know these guys will dig the toilet hole and you know heat water up and stuff like that. But the doesn't cost you. You barely need to put your hand in your pocket. Once you've paid for your holiday, got it? Yeah, just a remade. So it's not really a tat. It's wrong for them to describe it as that. They've talked to them about it. This is actually an all in travel price. When you pay, your money goes to the Bhutanese government. Once you've left, having enjoyed your holiday, the travel agent can then apply for their fee to the Bhutanese government. So it's very safe transaction as well.
Speaker 1:It's a monarchy.
Speaker 3:So it's actually, you know, it's still a king and he says goes, but it has their, it's a Buddhist country, so they're all they're into, they have. They don't talk about growth, they talk about happiness, happiness.
Speaker 1:Happiness consciousness. Well right, but times work like a yeah.
Speaker 3:No, interestingly, they don't claim to be the happiest country they will, but they claim that that's their key focus.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:So we actually say happiness is a key KPI for the Bhutanese. My favorite Bhutanese story is everywhere you go, the stray dogs. The stray dogs are not malnourished. Their buddies will feed them. They'll put shit with dogs. Dogs are quite often seen as past relatives and things like that, so dogs are what they're looked after. So you'll see a lot of stray dogs, well-fed, looked after. So during lockdown those dogs weren't getting fed. So the king ordered the Bhutanese army, the Royal Bhutanese army, to feed, to go out and feed all stray dogs. Different world.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So that's much, much different. It's a great place to go to get the opportunity.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 3:I said on the way you go through Kaman Deer, which in a while would say you know, cut my nicey, cut my name. How can your eyes and dick as well?
Speaker 2:Sure, what was your favorite hotel that you've worked in Brand and location, and why?
Speaker 3:Because, if I think about the job, it could probably be the Z Hotel, because it was a new brand really clever If you remember the old.
Speaker 3:Primworks, which is a pub in Glasgow, but Primworks is a bar and club on North Frederick Street, so it was that building which was an old Primworks. They managed to create a hundred and four bedroom hotel with the concept. There's a lot of them about now, but some of the rooms are only eight meters squared, let's say, your traditional Premier Inn's 2019-20. And to put that to a very small room, but beautiful 2000 pound mattress, natural mat, bed, shower, big glass shower cabinet in toilet, which is the bathroom, basically Massive TV with all sky on it, so movies, sport, a lot, and you could connect with your phone as well. And they did free cheese and wine. So after you checked in between five and seven, you invited down and you could have a bit of cheese buffet, cheese buffet, so heaven for a lot of people. And white wine, rosy wine, red wine, and if you asked to get a beer instead and a soft drink, just like that. So that was all part of the deal compact, affordable, luxury, but still kind of a Premier Inn price 70 quid hey, you quid Word. And it was great.
Speaker 3:Introducing a new brand into a new country and a new city is a great experience, especially a smaller group, because you were involved in every step of it. I was involved in the builders contractors coming in a wider reception desk. They put all the internet together so that the phone's worked and the PMS worked. It's a great experience and it's also the race against times. I get it open from the Commonwealth Games. Unfortunately, we didn't achieve that, but I opened up on after it. So challenging fun, learned a lot about myself. I was able to build my own team, so I think we're still there. This is 10 years ago. The fact to have the employed reception is the area management app, so I really, really enjoyed it. It was great, but for a short period of time.
Speaker 2:A short snapshot Okay, I'm conscious of time. Jeremy, do you have one last question?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, one more for me Experience of failure and how you're covered or what you learned from it.
Speaker 2:That's usually my forte to focus on failure, yeah.
Speaker 1:Given the week I've had. I hear someone else's.
Speaker 3:I don't see. I don't use that word. I think I'd change it for experience. So failure, have I failed? Relentless is not failure. Jobs have I failed?
Speaker 3:The more things I've failed out or I've not done a particularly good job, especially my early years, but it wasn't failure, it was part of the journey. I've got a big focus on the journey, not the end goal. I'm not working looking forward to the time when I'm 65. I'm going to call it a day and see it on the TV watching old reruns of Lions tours. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to keep going enjoying the journey of life, and if that involves working, then I'm going to continue working. Do you see what I mean? Failure the things I could have done better in the past. And from a business perspective, you have tough moments, don't you? There's nothing coming in, your costs are still going out and you're going cranky I'm not going to pay that bill and stuff like that. And then you deal with it and you learn something about every time you deal with something like that. So I don't have the word. Failure is not an option, Jeremy.
Speaker 1:Nice, I like it.
Speaker 3:It's a learning experience. It's a learning experience. Sometimes it's stressful and a negative experience. Failure you just keep moving. I'm flexible, adaptable. If that doesn't work, I'll daft and do something else. And I'm not going to get too much into the energy of things, because I kind of believe in that as well the attraction of energy, the things you're attracted to. Now, when you work with it, you need to feel right and things like that. But things will also present themselves and the more aware you are, the more opportunity you'll be able to take. If you close yourself, you mind off to things, things won't happen.
Speaker 1:I like that about the energy. The energy bill is good. I enjoyed that. The energy doesn't feel right. Goodness gracious yeah.
Speaker 3:There you go. Remember those voices in your head. You're a monster syndrome. I had that all my career down in. You're no good. Someone's going to turn up, chuck you on the shoulder and go. You're awesome mate, you can't do your job and of course it's not true. So all those little voices, there's little egos. If I've got a number, susan says she only has one. I've got about six or seven, positive, one, negative one. Yeah, that's right, that's one. And you know the kind of the one that gets very, very annoyed is that that?
Speaker 3:And then you've got your inner being, which is the way things feel, your energy, you can feel it, it feels right. Yeah, the voice in your head is not interrupting.
Speaker 1:It just feels right. Yeah, I like that a lot. I'm going to have to follow up. Then you came from. What are that insight? And, susan, do you want to wrap it up this time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's wrap things up. Any final thoughts or messages for our listeners now that you want to impart before we close?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think I'd like. I'd like to stress the inner work. You know you've got to if you want to achieve what you want, to achieve the life that you want to achieve. We're going to talk about the work. You know you want to build a business that you. You know you need to start with yourself. You know you need to not fly into something with some mad plan, everything planned out, because half of it won't work. So my experience would be half of it may not very well work. So when you've got half a plan that doesn't work, you go, oh well, that's not, that is it. We actually have an idea of what you might want to do, see how it feels and then and then work from there. Don't you know business plans? You know I did some facilitation for Grobe. I said big on business plans and as Tristan is a strategy, finance strategy guy, it's probably big on some planning and you do need some. But I don't think this should be so detailed, I agree.
Speaker 3:They forget the rail that becomes a battle.
Speaker 1:They don't stand up to a battle right the. As soon as they're battle tested, they're out the window.
Speaker 3:That's it. That's the one, yeah.
Speaker 2:I've learned something. For everything I learned something.
Speaker 3:Positive, negative, the neutral. You know it's all that. So much resources now as well, everywhere you know books, the internet, like chat, gpt you get that to like your adverts now and stuff like that. You know it's kind of crazy. It's one and we're at the cost. We're at the cost of that. So, our generation will be taking advantage of it before it becomes the norm and they'll have detection systems that detect that. It was written by chat GPT, probably when you have.
Speaker 1:You know he's already do for the essays.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:Brilliant. Thank you very much, Dan. It's been very insightful and it's been great to hear a bit more about your passion your journey and really appreciate you giving up time to be with us. So thank you very much and we'll be back next week with another episode of insert buzzword.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
