Mark This! Podcast, Episode 5, Collegiate Hospitality
Host: Heather Dotchel, Corporate Communications
Guests: Jack Donovan, President and CEO for Collegiate Hospitality & Sasha Day, Chief Growth Officer for Collegiate Hospitality
It's time to Mark This, a podcast in which we peel back the curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs, and projects that are happening all over Aramark's varied lines of business. I'm Heather Dotchel. As a member of Aramark's communications team, I see and hear about all of the amazing things that are happening across our company. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them, building opportunity, building innovation, and building community. Mark This provides a space in which we can explore these initiatives with our audience.
We are chatting with president and CEO Jack Donovan and Chief Growth Officer Sasha Day to explore what sets our collegiate hospitality group apart from others in the business and how our philosophy drives us to be so much more than a food provider on campus. Welcome to you both, and thanks for being on the program. Jack, who are you and why do you love higher education?
Well, Heather, I started my career in hospitality as a very young man in high school, in a pot sink, working in a commissary operation in a small town in Georgia. Actually the people that I worked with even at that time warned me that if you spend a little time in the hospitality business and you're working around people whose principal mission in life is to serve others, that's a hard thing to replicate. They're great people to work with. Through my career, even though I spent time in other places, nothing ever felt the same to me. I especially like the collegiate hospitality marketplace that we're in.
We're serving students that come to a place oftentimes leading all of their friends. The services that we provide and the hospitality ecosystem that we run helps them connect to each other, helps them connect to the institution that they're a part of, connects them to the community they're in it. It's just a satisfying feeling to know that the things that your organization does help support others in living their dreams and becoming all they can be. It's just a great place to be in my eyes.
Sasha, what was your path into collegiate hospitality?
Early in my career, I had roles in finance and consulting. When I moved to the Philadelphia area, someone made an introduction to me to a VP at Aramark and that was my introduction to Aramark. I joined in 2003 in finance and from there took on a lot of different roles in our organization and really had the privilege, I would say, of working across a couple of our different businesses. I started in our leisure parks and destinations group. I moved over to our sports and entertainment sector, and now in collegiate hospitality. While we had different customers or we have different customers we serve, it's all been about hospitality.
It's been about service and really providing great experiences, whether it's to a visitor at a park, whether it's to a sports fan, or now college students. I've loved that experience of service of hospitality and really being a catalyst for an experience. I think that's what I've loved most about this business and about the hospitality business. I think like Jack, serving students who are in their college career is a really exciting time for them. We know it's a pivotal time in their life, and so having the ability to be part of that for them I think is a really, really exciting time and an exciting place to be.
Jack, you and I have talked a bit about the idea of the hospitality ecosystem, which is what you bring to each campus that our business services. This is your sound bite chance. Give me your best elevator pitch as to what you mean by hospitality ecosystem.
When a student comes to campus, everything they experience, all of those things that are part of that experience impact the way a student feels and connects and, frankly, helps enable their success as they walk through their college career. This is a time of great change for a student. They are literally different people because of the experiences they've had even a month into their college experience. We tend to think about how we approach the university is, first of all, understanding their mission and values and approach. What are they trying to create for their students? Who are they attracting? What are their graduates doing? It's a much more comprehensive way of thinking about it.
Based on that, we look at the campus, virtually all of them have some sort of a physical master plan where they know where the engineering building is going to be, where the Greeks are going to be, where the academic components are going to be. We look at that physical structure and go, "This institution divides itself into neighborhoods because the students gravitate together. How do we serve those neighborhoods in a way that creates gathering places with customer satisfaction as the core component of it?" When that happens, the gathering place becomes a community, and the community creates affinity, and the affinity creates lifetime membership and lifetime friendships for those students.
If you think about that underneath, I was once told early in my career that hospitality experiences are personal, they're memorable, and they're ever changing. We tend to think in terms of what is the emotional reaction to the hospitality ecosystem that we're creating. We know that students have certain sets of desires when they approach a campus. Yes, they want an adventure because they've gone off to school, but they also want to feel like they've got a home away from home. Yes, they want to see foods that they've never seen before, that are different, but they also want to see that thing that comforts them and demonstrates freshness and this is kind of my kitchen.
When we look at the hospitality ecosystem, we think it is all that the university does to create that sense of community. That approach leads us to really thinking about how we deliver service in a very different way. We work very closely with student services. We work very closely with housing. We work very closely across the university. We call it intentionally interwoven into the university's infrastructure so that we're helping them augment every aspect of the interaction that students have with each other and that the university has with the students. That's a little different mission than just, can we serve food well?
Obviously we have to serve food well. It's a baseline requirement, but we think our mission is much more important than that. We think it is fundamental to helping a student they call it persevere to graduation, but actually thrive. That helps us frame the why we're in business in a much more powerful way. Frankly, it's not only important for our customers. It's a motivator for all of us. It's a way that we understand the importance and the impact of what we can do on a campus.
Do you have a concrete example that you can share or maybe some favorite thing that we've done on a campus that illustrates this?
To be honest, I've got so many, it's hard to get down to one. I was just with a colleague yesterday. If you can reminisce about a pandemic, we were reminiscing about the pandemic and some of the things that we did as an organization to keep the hospitality ecosystem alive in what anyone would describe as very challenging circumstances. In many, many cases, we were supporting students who were in quarantine, and oftentimes our catering staffs were helping out in that effort. And that catering events were pretty much shut down because of our inability to meet together.
We had several different catering managers across the company that I discovered they're putting handwritten notes into a student meal that they would send to the student's dormitory where they're in isolation just to say, "Hey, my name is such and such. I'm the catering manager here. We hope you like this meal. If you have any questions or if you need anything else, here's my cell phone number." And that kind of personal touch helps keep a student connected to the broader notion of what they're trying to do. It gets them through that tough moment in such a way that we've supported them emotionally and also nourish their body.
There's a bunch of them. I think the other thing that is telling about the experience that we create is we have many students who come through our programs. Because if you think about what we do, all aspects of business happen on our campus. We do inventory management, production planning, marketing, human resource functions. We're a tremendous business laboratory on a campus for a student to have experiential learning approaches.
The number of students that come through that work for us, go through internship programming with us and become student managers, then become managers in our organization through time, I think it's a testimonial of the fact that they get engaged in all they can learn in the hospitality ecosystem and all they can deliver through that system. For me, those are the two things I'd point to.
Sasha, you visit any number of campuses in a year's time, both Aramark campuses and those that are not yet Aramark campuses. Why is this outlook important to you? What differentiates what we do from what others do?
Jack was just sharing his perspective on the hospitality ecosystem, and I think having that perspective takes us so far beyond being a "food service provider," which is what a lot of people might describe ourselves or our competition as. It gives us the permission and the ability to think well beyond the table stakes, the hot food hot, the cold food cold, and to think about how we can get creative and really help accelerate the culture, the goals, the strategic priorities on each individual campus. I think we get really creative in looking at... I mean, we're a large company, so we have a lot of resources, we have a lot of expertise.
Where can we draw from our broader organization and really have a great impact on that campus for those students and for our clients? And that's what I think really differentiates us when we think about what we can do and we think about this intentionally interwoven, Jack mentioned that term, interwoven into the fabric of the university and how can we take the notion of a partnership with a little P to a partnership with a big P, which is really showing up in a much bigger way and a different way for our clients and in a way that really helps them beyond feeding students.
And that's where I think when we're able to unlock those opportunities, and sometimes they're small and sometimes they're big, we can really add to the experience that students have and provide a lot of value to our clients. That's what this notion of hospitality ecosystem and what we can bring to a particular campus. I think that's the impact we can have. Jack, as you were talking about some of the education programs and some of the things we do on campus, there's a story that came to my mind. We serve at a lot of institutions that are tackling food insecurity or trying to solve for food security on campuses.
We play a big role in that. Obviously we can donate food, we can provide meal swipes, but I was at a particular campus who talked about how they have a food pantry. They also have an on-campus farm that is managed through their ag program and they take a lot of that produce from the farm and they provide it to the food pantry. They realized after a period of time that students coming there to get food from the food pantry, it was great that they had this produce, but they had no idea what to do with it. That's where our team stepped in.
Next thing you know, our chef is doing cooking demos over at the food pantry. You could call that small or you can call that big, but it's a way that we can really look for those opportunities to make a small or a big difference on campus and leverage the resources that we already have on campus to do that. When I heard that story, I just loved that story. I thought it was fantastic. That's really tying and threading the needle across different things that are happening on campuses and adding value and solving for need on campus.
That's a really wonderful example of how our teams go beyond simply making sure that people are fed, which is no small task, but really giving them the skills that help them move forward in these periods of exploration in their life. We have these examples. But when we look at the macro level, Jack, how do we capture the impact that we make on campuses in this way?
Heather, let me take you a couple of places on this because I think it's interesting and core to what we do. By the way, I have to shout out to my teammates because executives like Sasha and others in our organization have really taken us on this journey over the course of the past couple of years. As you know, I came back to the organization several years ago, and we really began by asking ourselves the question, what's important to a student, what's important to a client, what's important to a parent, what's important to our own team, and trying to think about some ways to meaningfully capture the emotional outcomes that we were trying to create.
We engaged in some survey work and some study processes that was a little bit of a departure from traditional customer satisfaction work. We're big believers in understanding customer satisfaction. It's kind of your scorecard of how well did we do. But unfortunately, the shortcoming of that approach is it tends to be almost rear view mirror driving. It's how did we do last week? We wanted some ways to think about not only best practice, but next practice. What's going to be important to a student tomorrow? What's going to be important to the university a year from now?
We engaged in a process where we looked at the emotional components of the hospitality ecosystem by breaking out all the functional aspects of what we do and trying to discover a way to measure the emotional reactions and what those emotions contained. Now, we started this process in the middle of a pandemic. While we were trying to understand behaviors and our impact on campus, what we discovered is that we really had done a great study of how the pandemic impacted students and the feelings that they were having about their college experience. Two things really stood out. Students really missed and had a longing for better connection.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. A student comes to school, they're anxious to meet new professors, new classmates, explore this new environment, and we're telling them, "Hey, according to the COVID protocol, you have to stand on this dot six feet away from each other. You have to wear a mask. Please go back to your room or sit at this table that's socially distanced from others." This feeling that I want more connection makes perfect sense. The other one that surprised me maybe a little more was this notion of stability.
If you think about how rapidly we were changing our operating protocols in order to keep our students safe and to make sure that our clients understood that we were on top of the latest practices to keep the environment safe for all involved, sometimes that looked like things were changing awfully quickly in the mind of the student. We used that information. When we began to emerge from the pandemic and we knew we were going to have a return to campus, we talked a lot about all the programming designs that we've got. We have to make sure we're building in things that help our students feel connected to each other, to us, and to the university.
We have to give them very stable kinds of approaches. Be very open and frequently communicating what they can expect if it's a hospitality operation or what they're experiencing on campus. And frankly, our clients tapped into this as well. This was not just programming that was about us, it was about the entire university and its approach.
Many of the emerging issues that universities deal with, we think we have an important role in helping support, whether it's student wellness, something as simple as Take 15, which is a program that we've designed to help a student and say, "Hey, take a break. Engage in these kinds of activities. It's going to re-energize and rejuvenate you and help you keep your attitude, your spirit, and help keep you healthy." When we look at all that, there's the obvious traditional business ways that we capture impact.
We understand the financial impact that we have in terms of revenue that we can generate, how we can support the university and its pathway going forward. But there are many other things that we look at as well. Are we helping the university build its retention? The fact that you're here and have been welcomed into this hospitality ecosystem, it makes you more likely to come back here for your sophomore, your junior, your senior year. We look at those kinds of things. We look at what is the ideal experience a student wishes to experience, and how close is our current hospitality ecosystem matching up to that experience?
Because by the way, we also know that that's going to change over time. I think the other one that's been very, very I think helpful to us and is a next frontier for us, we've always understood this notion of centralized hospitality, bring people together, great food, great service, a great hospitality experience that's going to help them connect to each other and connect to the school, but we also are in an environment where it is very routine that a student may be studying in a room, in their dorm room, or they may be studying across the world for remote learning.
Can we think of ways that we can distribute that hospitality touch to all the places that the university touches its constituents? Sometimes that's delivery programs. It's a variety of different things. By doing those things, our ultimate impact is how well do we support the mission that the university is on. By the way, if you go to our campuses, it's very likely that you wouldn't see our name anywhere. We are completely part of the university's hospitality offering.
All the financial metrics and all those things that we measure, yes, that's part of it, but we're also looking at interesting and creative ways that we can understand how well are we fulfilling our mission and what's the next thing we need to do to keep this program enticing and relevant to the students and the constituents that we serve, whether they're faculty, staff, or members of the broader community.
Sasha, you have a little bit of a different perspective as the chief growth officer. As you tour campuses across the nation, what do our partners say about our philosophy, or what do our potential partners say about this kind of philosophy that resonates back with us when we hear it?
That is a great question, Heather, and I think a couple things come to mind. I've been out recently at a lot of different industry association events that a lot of our partners or potential partners attend, and we've been talking about this. I'll tell you first is this is a conversation that hadn't been happening. The notion of hospitality ecosystem, the notion of the measuring of the student ideal experience and really trying to unlock the emotional element of that, those are just not conversations that had been happening in this space. They're very new conversations for a lot of partners. I will tell you, it's been a lot of fun to have those conversations.
We've had some different round tables and different presentations. It's interesting because you can see the wheels turning where clients start to think about, well, you guys are serving my students with hospitality and food service, but the notion of what we're talking about extends far beyond that. You start seeing them think about, well, should I be measuring the ideal student experience and the other facets of their experience? Should I be thinking about the other pieces of hospitality? When we uncover those elements to really integrate, to be interwoven on campus, when we find those opportunities to get creative and bring new value to campus.
The types of things we hear are things like, "They really know us. They know my students. They know my culture. They know this institution." They'll say things like, "They are part of our brand." Jack just mentioned, we don't typically show up as brand Aramark on campus. We want to represent the brand of that particular college or university. When we really represent it and then live their brand, they're like, "You are part of our brand. You are part of our brand. You are the face to the students." We're able to really help them solve their problems and accelerate their strategic imperatives. That's what's so crucial to our clients.
They have a set of strategic imperatives. They have goals that they need to meet. They are very focused on enrollment and persistence and student retention. When we can play a role and help them, it's a win-win. Clients, they'll see that and they'll understand where we can play a role. That's, again, beyond the plate, so to speak.
Jack, what do you want to make sure that we cover before we close this episode?
Sasha and I have the great honor of being part of a team that has diverse, talented, and dedicated executives that have weathered some storms together and really grown close. The team cares about each other and they care about what we do in the marketplace. You can feel it and it shows up in our performance. As our lead growth executive, Sasha felt very strongly that we needed to think about our branding and the way we represented ourselves, so assembled a group that had some inside folks and several folks to do the diligent work of thinking through our brand promise. Frankly, I was right on board with her and supportive of it.
I think the thing that probably surprised me the most, we had an opportunity this past summer to introduce our brand promise to the broader group of employees. While we thought about it and designing it from the customer's perspective, the excitement and the energy that our own team felt around this messaging was really quite satisfying. It was just a fantastic experience to see. If we can give our folks the why we're in business and the what we believe, then they are great at thinking of creative and innovative ways to execute that in a way that delights customers, and that's what we're all about.
I'm very appreciative of the team that we work on. I know Sasha feels the same way, not to put words in her mouth, but we've talked about it enough to understand that we're fortunate to have that kind of group around us. The other thing that I would say is I think a lot and we think a lot as a group around the notion of innovation, what is next? And frankly, we've embraced innovation in some of the ways that are pretty traditional. You think of technology innovation, whether it's touchless point of sale, whether it's robotic delivery, whether it's production methodologies that can go 24 hours a day because they're not staffed, they're mechanized.
We think all those things are important. We need to understand how we build that innovation around technology into the customer experience that we're trying to create. Not solving for technology's sake, but solving for the customer experience that we want to build in the most effective and efficient way. The other area that we're looking at, we have a friend who has a favorite quote that says, it is talent to be able to hit a target that no one else can hit. But it is genius to be able to hit a target that no one else can see.
We truly believe that our investment in forward-looking approaches to understanding the hospitality ecosystem, the impact that it's having on employees, our customers, our clients, and anticipating what is next, is the place that's going to drive us to create the next innovation, the next practice that's going to help keep a student engaged, that's going to help the university connect in a more robust way with its community, frankly, to help us all fulfill our missions to live in essence what is the Aramark approach, this notion of be well, do well. We need to take care of people and planet.
It's our job as hospitality people. That's the thing that I would add as an underlying thread or a core of what we do day in and day out.
Thank you for elaborating on that. I really appreciate it. Thanks to both of you for coming on the program today. Want to learn more about our guests today? Visit our newsroom on aramark.com to access more information. As always, I'd like to thank our listeners for tuning in to Mark This.
