On today’s Hospitality Mavericks podcast, Trail co-founder Joe Cripps sits down with Michael Tingsager about everything from Trail’s mission and culture to the most prominent issues facing hospitality businesses today.
Listen to the Hospitality Mavericks Podcast
Joe tells us about how his background in hospitality — helping businesses improve their back-office systems — was an inspiration for Trail. He saw an industry full of innovators, working hard to drive change, but being held back by the (understandably) busy nature of hospitality. As he puts it, “Driving change from a head office within its relationship with multi-sites, is quite difficult in this industry.”
The biggest deficiency he saw was in the disconnect between head offices and sites, and all the communication methods teams were using in the attempt to bridge that gap. Unfortunately, many of these methods and technologies (paper, email, frequent site visits) were inefficient, costly and prone to human error.
“What you’re looking at is a problem of communication between head offices and locations, and really showing them the critical stuff there is to do in a day.”
Trail was built with better operations practices in mind, but underneath that was a desire to get managers back on the floor with customers, where they can make a huge difference to the customer experience, and enjoy their work.
With the hospitality industry facing disruption — business rates tripling, food costs rising and staffing difficulties — only the most efficient operations will survive.
“If you give people very simple tools, then profits will increase, because it’s easier for them to do their job, and therefore they have more time for customer experience, and if customer experience improves, profit improves.”
If you’d like to hear more about the inspiration behind Trail and hear a couple of industry vets discuss the current environment, you’ll definitely want to give the podcast a listen. If you’ve got questions after giving it a listen we’d be happy to answer them, so don’t hold back!