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TYPSY LIVE: FIND YOUR NICHE MONOPOLY, INNOVATE, AND SUCCEED

Announcement posted by Typsy 18 Oct 2016

Melbourne Based Start-Up Holds TED-Like Event for Hospitality Industry

Typsy Live 2016, an annual TED-like event for the Hospitality Industry, was held last week at the Roslyn Parker Theatre in Sydney. Well-known hospitality experts were gathered to share their inspiring stories, and attendees say they walked away armed with insights and the motivation needed to pursue one's dreams in the industry.

Typsy is an online training platform for the hospitality industry, meeting the need for on-the-job up-skilling with bite site courses that help owners, managers, teams and individuals learn the hospitality skills they need to be successful.

The hospitality industry in Australia is on the rise; new businesses are opening alongside the growth of a demanding foodie culture. It is fundamental to stay creative, and anticipate where the industry is headed, and so Typsy identified Innovation as the theme for 2016. Each of the speakers and panellists shared a unique insight; a way to innovate.

Consumer psychologist Adam Ferrier, known for being a panellist on TV shows like The Gruen Transfer, Planet, Sky, and Ten News, shared a handful of his most successful marketing strategies.

With a screen behind him that read “innovation fucks with convention” Adam described his “Steal Banksy” campaign for the Art Series Hotel, that reinvented the experience of staying in a hotel by adding a challenge to it. A work of Banksy is kept in the hotel; and guests are challenged to steal it! If you manage to remove the Banksy from the premises undetected, you get to keep it, if not, no harm, the art work is returned to the hotel for someone else to attempt.

This is a great example of innovating with guest's experience; Rather than the typical hotel experience of having a drink and heading to bed, guests are immersed in a game with mystique and financial reward.

These sorts of interventions need to be appropriate for one's brand, and your brand needs to be consistent throughout your guest's experience. This was a core take away from Fady Hachem, who runs the creative studio Hachem, undertaking architecture, design and branding projects around the world.

From the point of view of an interiors fit-out, Fady discussed the importance of aligning your brand identity with the visuals of your business, and how sometimes a brand identity overhaul is needed to bring the brand specificity needed to achieve consistency.

Following Fady was Yossi Ghinsberg, who reinforced the importance of specialising, by analogy with the way organisms carve out niches to survive in the Amazon jungle, rather that compete directly with one another for limited resources. A strong example of innovation with brand specialisation in this way, would be the way Hachem identified a then unfilled niche in the Flinders laneways of Melbourne to create the world's first desert hotel for Adelphi Hotels.

Yossi, the author and adventurer who helped open the Chalalan Ecolodge, came to view the way organisms thrive in niches as a metaphor for how to find success in business, after a misadventure in the Bolivian jungle where he headed into uncharted territory with three fellow adventurers, got lost, separated, and survived alone for three weeks against all odds. Typsy Live attendees were lucky enough to catch a sneak preview of the poster for an upcoming film starring Daniel Radcliffe based on Yossi’s compelling story!

Sally Irwin followed with a heart-wrenching insight into modern day workplace slavery. Sally is the founder of The Freedom Hub, a charity that helps survivors of modern slavery in Australia through support, job training and work experience, and runs a social enterprise cafe and shop as well.

Sally described how she became aware of the problem of human trafficking while living in Europe, and upon her return to Australia was shocked to find out that slavery happens here as well. Sally became determined to work towards its eradication. She needed to find a way to provide personalised help to survivors without government funding, and developed an innovative business model to fund her charity through a cafe and shop.

Sally's story is integral to the success of her café and shop brand, which is a point Nick Bowditch drove home in his talk about the importance of telling a story rather than selling a product. Constructing a sales pitch for the clicker in his hand as an example, Nick demonstrated that consumers don’t really care about your brand or your product – they care about how you make them feel. In the hospitality industry, he stressed, a story about kindness and generosity is the real key to success.

Nick Bowditch is an entrepreneur, social media thought-leader and the only marketing expert in the world to have worked for both Facebook and Twitter. It can't be understated how huge a role social media is playing in the hospitality industry. In the panel discussion that followed the talks, two of the entrepeneurs, Paul Fischmann and Damian Griffiths have stories that centre around the innovative use of social media in the success of their businesses.

Paul is the founder and CEO of international hoteliers 8Hotels. He created something unique with 1888 Hotel, by using a social media platform in an innovative way. Paul designed the heritage-listed property to cater to Instagram users. Every room, from the top floor to the lobby, is arranged so that guests feel inspired to take photos. There is a selfie station near the front desk, where guests can snap a photo as soon as they check-in (using the hashtag #1888Hotel, of course). This concept takes advantage of the app-users' desire to enjoy their experience online as much as they do in the flesh.

Damian is founder and CEO of Doughnut Time, an artisan doughnut enterprise that specialises in unique flavour combinations. Customers often select their doughnuts based on their playful names that relate to online trends, and are encouraged to share pictures of their doughnuts online, feeding into the social memeplex. Damian worked closely with bloggers to help define Doughnut Time's brand in this way.

But innovation isn't all about being high-tech! Both of the final two panellists, Brooke Adey (restaurant manager at Yellow and Typsy instructor) and Kernard Koh (a recent hospitality school graduate), offered insights as front of house specialists.

What makes each of their stories relevant to innovation is the way they have approached career progression. Brooke and Kernard stand out as highly skilled professionals in an industry that suffers from a damaging perception of service being temporary work. Brook described her career progression from temping to full time service via winning the Appetite For Excellence Award, and Kernard through tertiary education, as opposed to the traditional path of working up from the service floor.

The panel were asked questions from the audience, that provided and interesting insight into the sort of concerns attendees had, representative of the industry at large, notably the skills shortage in the service industry.

Typsy itself is committed to address the skills shortage, and perception of service as temporary work. In a way Typsy embodies the innovation it wants to inspire, carving out an online habitat that serves a specific set of users with the service they need. Typsy Live was a tremendously successful event to draw the industry together to this purpose. As Yossi Ghinsberg said, “Find your niche monopoly, innovate, and succeed”.

If you missed Typsy Live in real time, footage of the talks will soon be available online. In the meantime, check out behind the scenes footage on Typsy's Facebook feed and Instagram.

 

About Typsy

Typsy is an online training platform for the hospitality industry. Typsy’s courses help owners, managers, teams and individuals learn the hospitality skills they need to be successful. The bite-sized courses are presented by the world’s best instructors, including the World Barista Champion and Electrolux Young Waiter of the Year. The course library consisting of over 200 titles across a variety of topics is ever-growing and accessible on mobile and desktop. Learn more at www.typsy.com or download the app in the Google Play Store or App Store.


 

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Typsy Live Photos

 

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