#243 - Hospitality Meets Douglas Balish - Forged in the Kitchen

Walk for Well being began during one of the toughest periods hospitality has ever faced. Craig Prentice had an idea. Sean Wheeler said yes. Then the two of them attempted to map out a 20km walk along London’s South Bank… …and somehow ended up in somebody’s garden. A reassuringly professional beginning. Seven years later, Walk for Wellbeing has grown from a small gathering into a nationwide hospitality event, with hosted walks across the UK, people taking part their own way, thousands of walkers and more than half a million pounds raised for Hospitality Action. For this special edition of Hospitality Meets, Craig and Sean join me to tell the story behind it. We Cover How Walk for Well being began during the pandemic Why walking became the obvious way to reconnect hospitality Getting spectacularly lost while mapping the original London route Starting with around 20 people on the South Bank Growing from three locations to more than a dozen Why the event was eventually gifted to Hospitality Action The magic of bringing every level of hospitality together Walking for your physical and mental well being Why your dog’s name is easier to remember than its owner’s Wearing a superhero cape for 20km Charlie Hodson taking Walk It Your Own Way to another level Hospitality’s remarkable ability to pull things together at the last minute The moment the event passed £500,000 raised Sean destroying Craig’s carefully designed logos in PowerPoint Why they are, remarkably, still friends And why connection matters just as much as fundraising

At 16, Neel Radia had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Then somebody in a careers office suggested hospitality. What followed was a dream job at Walt Disney World, eighteen months backpacking around Australia, a temporary return to the family food business that somehow became 15 years, nearly two decades supporting the National Association of Care Catering, national television appearances, a hospitality pantomime and, eventually, a social enterprise built around cake. Which is quite some journey from “I’m not really sure what I want to do.” Neel is somebody who repeatedly comes back to one deceptively simple idea: If something matters to you, try it. We Cover Discovering hospitality almost accidentally at 16 Applying for exactly one gap-year job — Walt Disney World Learning from Disney culture and wanting to be part of it Having a five-year Disney management opportunity disappear after 9/11 Taking 18 months out to travel and rethink life Joining the family business “for a year” — and staying for around 15 Why family businesses are rarely as easy as outsiders assume Being effectively railroaded into his first chair role at 26 Turning a deeply painful family experience into a drive to improve food and drink in care Helping champion safer texture-modified food Almost turning down national leadership because he feared public speaking Going from media training to appearing on BBC News within weeks Getting comprehensively outside his comfort zone in a hospitality pantomime Taking one weekend every month completely offline Creating Cake for Kindness Why a piece of cake can mean far more than simply something to eat

What pairs beautifully with a £250 bottle of Californian wine? Apparently, a proper dirty kebab at two o’clock in the morning. For Bradley Dorrington, co-owner of The Wine Cellar in Bury St Edmunds, that particular combination perfectly captures hospitality: great drinks, questionable late night food and hours spent putting the world to rights with somebody else from the industry. Bradley opened The Wine Cellar at just 25, after abandoning the traditional university route, turning down an apprenticeship with a space company and throwing himself into hospitality instead. Four years and more than 50,000 guests later, the doors are still very much open (despite one Facebook critic confidently declaring that “wine bars are so eighties” and would never work) We Cover Why hospitality is an industry that finds you Turning down a career in the space industry for pubs, hotels and wine Building The Wine Cellar in just six weeks Not sleeping for six days before opening Launching a business at 25 and learning to ignore the noise The customer who asked Bradley to sort out her 26-year-old son Naming his daughter Margaux after Château Margaux - and attempting to make her tax deductible Drinking £250 wine with a dirty kebab at 2am Why genuine hospitality is about far more than service Imposter syndrome and remembering that you earned your place in the room Facebook’s Tony and his prediction that wine bars would never work Weddings, night porters and unexplained happenings at Chilston Park Why Bradley believes hospitality should be taken seriously as a career

Christian Wiens spent his teenage years working in restaurants where, on particularly frantic days, they occasionally dealt with the constantly ringing phone by simply ripping it out of the wall. Years later, after a career building and growing technology businesses, that particular hospitality headache came back into view. The result is Loman.AI - voice AI built to answer restaurant calls, take orders, make reservations and generally allow the humans inside the restaurant to concentrate on the humans standing in front of them. Today it handles millions of calls across more than 1,500 customers. The journey there has involved manually checking restaurant orders, walking around a zoo carrying three phones, personally buying customers’ food when the AI got something wrong and discovering that even the best sales process in the world is powerless against Mercury being in retrograde. We Cover Growing up working in restaurants Building startups before any of them actually worked Why modern AI has dramatically lowered the barrier to creating software The difference between an impressive AI demo and technology a restaurant can genuinely rely on Why Loman.AI tackled the difficult problem of order taking first Walking around a zoo monitoring restaurant orders on multiple phones Personally paying for customer meals when the early technology got things wrong The restaurant owner who finally got to take his children trick or treating Why Christian still personally gets involved in customer support Whether customers actually care if they are speaking to AI Hospitality as an innovation frontier rather than a legacy industry And the customer who refused to make a business decision because Mercury was in retrograde

Hannah Swarbrick-Done followed a boy to Thailand with dreams of an idyllic island life. The relationship lasted approximately one weekend. Hannah stayed for two years. What followed included living in a house made from bottles, running one of the world’s largest pub crawls, guiding travellers around Thailand and becoming sufficiently relaxed about footwear that she once wore two left flip-flops without noticing. Eventually, Hannah returned to Manchester with plans for her own hostel, including the uniforms, interiors and complete guest experience. There was just one minor omission. A business plan. Today, she is the founder of The Yellow Group, helping hospitality businesses align their people strategy with their plans for growth - while also building AI tools, employing a virtual non-executive director called Simon and developing a highly influential golf account with nearly 400 followers. We Cover Following that boy to Thailand - and outlasting the relationship by nearly two years Travel Designing an entire hostel before learning how to operate one The leader who asked Hannah one simple, career-changing question Why promoting somebody is pointless unless you also build the support around them The difference between holding a leadership title and actually leading Why hospitality develops skills that transfer far beyond operations Being told she was “not very good with data” How AI removed the barrier between Hannah and the story inside the numbers Creating Simon, her AI non-executive director Building The Yellow Group as a collaborative people consultancy Becoming a professional golfer and part-time influencer