Mark This! Podcast, Episode 21, Global Offshore
Host: Heather Dotchel, Corporate Communications
Guests: Andrew Thomson, Managing Director for Offshore Services
It is time to Mark This, a podcast in which we peel back the corporate 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 amazing things that are happening across our company every day.
These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them building opportunity, building innovation, and building community.
Aramark is in places you'd never expect. While most are familiar with our work in schools and stadiums, you can find our hospitality in all sorts of spaces.
We've served international sporting events, royal state events, and even amusement parks. The list is vast. Of all of these occasions and locations one of the most unique is our work in global offshore installations.
Our managing director for offshore services, Andrew Thompson is joining us today to satisfy our curiosity about offshore rigs and the hospitality we provide there.
Andrew, tell us a bit about yourself and your career path, please.
Hi, good morning, Heather. Thank you. Yeah, of course. Love to. So I think first of all, I'd say I joined Aramark in 2006 and I joined as an operations director at that point.
Prior to that, I graduated from the Robert Gordon University Business School in Aberdeen, which is where I'm coming to you from today. And my career prior to Aramark was branded fast food, fine dining, golf driving range, retail outlet. I was running a number of businesses in that area for one of Scotland's largest private family companies. And I was appointed as managing director back then when I was 28 years old.
So come 2006, it was time for me to look to do something else and I had the opportunity and I came and joined Aramark. So fast-forward to 2024. In the near 18 years, myself and my partner, Trish, live in a little place called Inverurie on the outskirts of Aberdeen, and our kids who were little when I started Aramark, are now grown up.
They're 26, 23, and 21. So we live out in Inverurie and I work in our Aberdeen HQ. And that's probably where I can tell you a little bit about the career path from an Aramark perspective.
When I started back in '06, I was an operations director looking after four contracts in the UK Continental shelf, so offshore in the UK. And then in terms of the sort of journey that I went on from then to now, was that I became the operations director for the whole of the UK business. Then I was asked to look after the Danish offshore business.
Aramark's been through a few iterations, I suppose structural changes in terms of how the offshore business was structured. I was the managing director for what was Europe, Middle East, and Africa for a number of years. And then really, I suppose the pivotal moment is in 2018 when Aramark took the decision to pull all of the global offshore services anywhere in the world under the one sort of banner, into one P&L, one structure, one team.
So in 2018 I was appointed as the managing director of that business unit. So that's, I suppose, a little sort of bit of background as to who I am and also the career path, sort of pre-Aramark and also whilst I've been here Heather.
All right, well thank you for that. So for those listeners who aren't exactly sure what we mean, what are we talking about when we say offshore installations?
So I've been asked this question a few times over the years in different forums, and I think I always go with the same answer. There's a technical answer, which is from an oil and gas perspective, and then it's a sort of Aramark answer. So go with the technical first.
I mean, I think if you think of an offshore location that are fixed production platforms, that's the first area, that are mobile drilling rigs, that are floating hotels. And then we've also got just basically marine vessels.
But if we come back to the first one, which is a fixed production platform, then if you think of the image that you might see, you see three big chunks of metal that are stood on legs in the sea. One of them is basically the topside, which is like the deck where all the quarters and all the offices and stores and so forth are held and that's where we are working.
You then also have potentially a drilling area and a production area. So ultimately just extracting oil from underneath the ground and then also processing it and getting it ready to go back to sea. So from sea rather through pipe to the beach and on to be used.
So I suppose that's the sort of technical. From what does it mean from an Aramark perspective, really one part of those structures is effectively a hotel on legs and it's in the middle of the sea. And inside that, that's where we deliver our services. So on the locations that we're on, whether it's a floating hotel, whether it's a drill rig or a fixed platform or indeed a marine vessel, ultimately we have team members providing hotel and catering services in some form of an accommodation unit.
So how long have we been in global offshore? About how many rigs are we on? Approximately where are they located?
The first one is so long that we're actually having a debate. We're always debating how long has it been since we actually started doing this?
So we've settled on 1978, which is a bit of a surprise for many people in and outside of the company because a long while. But this is 1978 because Aramark acquired a small company called Sea Hotels back in 1978 and began working in the North Sea, in Europe, beside the UK.
So 1978 is the first answer. In terms of how many locations we're on it varies and goes up and down a little bit because there is a degree of seasonality in there, but it's about 120 different locations around the world.
And then, just in terms of, well, whereabouts is that Andrew? Then within a number of countries here closer to where I'm sitting, coming to you from in the UK we have the UK, Norway, Denmark and Holland, which is pretty much all of the North Sea in terms of where oil and gas and energy production takes place.
We're also working across the US Gulf of Mexico and we're also in Mexican Waters directly. We've had business in Trinidad and Tobago. And then this last one's a little bit of a test, and I know Alaska is part of the US but also we actually have a rig in Alaska. But I always think of that slightly differently because it's definitely substantially colder there than it is in the Houston and surrounding area that I visit when the majority of our business is in the US Gulf. So that's how many locations and those are the different companies we're working in today.
Honestly, I had no idea there were that many. That's incredible. So you touched upon this in an earlier answer that we provide the hotel services, the catering services, but can you get into some more detail about those major services that we provide?
Yeah, absolutely. And now if you come back to that analogy where you think, right, so you said earlier, I think I said earlier, something like it's a hotel and legs and the sea, but it fundamentally is, it's not identical to a hotel, but it's very close. And suppose the core services, the catering.
So we deliver breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight meal to everybody that's on board. This is a classic 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year operation. There's a day shift and a night shift. And so we are in operation all the time, every minute of the day, all year.
So catering is the core, but then at the same time it's a hotel. So we are obviously looking after all of the cleaning across that entire building. That's cabins, that's recreational space, that's toilets, that's showers, it's everywhere you can think of if you're in a hotel. We are looking after the cleaning and the maintenance as well of all of those locations.
And then lastly, I guess the bit perhaps differs a standard hotel that you might visit on holiday or in business is that we are doing a fairly industrial laundry 24/7 also. So we've got personals for everybody who's, because people live and work here, the 24 hours a day for however long their rotation is.
So you've got your personal clothing that you take with you when you go offshore, but then also you've got your coveralls and your work clothes. So we are doing a big industrial laundry job on a rolling 24-hour basis as well as looking after all of our customers and clients' personal laundry, these are the core services, catering, cleaning, and laundry.
We do a ton of other things, whether it be electrical maintenance, gallery and laundry equipment maintenance. We do an awful lot of procurement on behalf of our clients and an awful lot of our staff are multi-skilling, Heather. So I might be working offshore as a chef, but I might also be an advanced first-aider. I might also be a heli-deck landing officer or a heli-deck assistant. There's a lot of multi-skilling going on in this environment.
So how many meals per year are we talking?
So somewhere between 11 and 12 million meals a year at this juncture.
So again, if you come back to the point I said earlier on, it's every day of the week, it's day and night shift, and there are four meal services that each day and every place. So it soon adds up. And as we all know, as a caterer, you're kind of as good as your last meal. So there's a lot of meals there and we've got to focus hard on our service, but there's a big scale there.
People wonder, is this a facilities business or is this a catering business? Yeah, I think it is core. It's a hospitality business. It's everything that you would expect from the moment you come in the door to the moment you leave. We are on point looking after you, but catering is a huge part of that obviously.
Well, and that's interesting too. You mentioned first aid responder, I believe we have some life jacket responsibilities, some firefighting responsibilities. Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah, certainly. I think the term I'd use is at Aramark we're always looking to make ourselves sticky in our client space. And that kind of means adding as many things and keep hold. Aramark keeps hold of this work because we're doing so many different things to such a high standard and that entrepreneurial spirit of saying, "Yeah, we can do that," we can literally do that, we need to do it safely and efficiently and effectively.
But then I suppose if you strip it back and think about it from this perspective from we've got a person working offshore, they are working a 12-hour shift and therefore you need to fill the 12 hours of the day to be as efficient as possible. And so then consequently you do then end up looking after signing off and getting trained and being capable of signing off on emergency response equipment.
We've got a lot of responsibilities in relation to making sure everything's path tested or electrically tested. And that in itself wouldn't be a full-time job. But if it fills one hour of one person's day every day of the year, all year round, then that's how we kind of build out our matrix of services.
So from that core that I've mentioned, then there are all sorts of little things that we do. Additionally, we are, I mean some of the weird things that we might be doing today, we've got somebody who's skilled and able to maintain pool tables because obviously in the recreational space you've got pool tables, snooker tables and so forth, and you're not going to lift that up and take it back to the beach to fix it, are you?
So getting somebody out to do that service, however small and niche and strange it is, we look to see if we can do it. If we need to be able to do it right though we don't want to add services into our mix that we're not actually able to do properly. It's a better reputation at that point.
So whatever we do, we make sure we know exactly how to do it. But that's kind of the answer. There's all sorts of things that we do maintain and look after. Somebody has to, we're very keen to make sure it's us.
Well, that actually makes a lot of sense. I mean leisure has to be very, very serious business on a contained vessel, a contained platform.
What do the populations of these installations look like? How many Aramark employees, how many in the general population? Because I imagine these multitasking roles play a part in that too because you can only fit so many people.
Absolutely. So it's a huge factor in this environment. Any one of those locations we talked on earlier has a maximum number of people that's allowed on it. And therefore the client is looking, obviously, they're doing the engineering work, they're doing drilling production, they need to get as many people as they can onto their location to look after their core services.
So we are optimized and we are, I wouldn't use the word restricted, but I suppose you have... Optimized is the right word. And to answer your question, the smallest locations we are on, there might only be 15 people working on board and there's one Aramark person who's looking after all of the elements of the catering and the cleaning of the laundry.
On the flip side, at the high end we maybe have 500 or 600 people on a floating hotel, and then we have a crew of maybe 40 people on board. I suppose it's a broad rule of thumb, it changes by geographic location.
What is happening in Norway is not the same as what is happen happening in Mexico. The services are slightly different and the cost base is different. And the multi-skilling we've been talking about is also different.
But as a broad rule of thumb, I'd go with 15 to 1. So for every 15 client personnel that are on board, there'll be one Aramark person, 150, and hopefully if my math is any good, that's 10 Aramark folk. And then if there were 90 people on board a drill rig, you're going to have perhaps six Aramark people.
So it is the case that we can't flex that up and down too much in the day. Like I said earlier, people work on full days, 12-hour days on a rotational basis. And the number of people that we have on board, at any given client location is defined, yes, by the contractual terms, but ultimately by how many people the client has in the first instance and what the actual scope of service is.
Okay, so let's explore that a little bit. So with Aramark, we provide hospitality all over the world in just about any venue aspect, however it looks.
So not the hospitality itself, but what makes providing hospitality different in this sector? So I know there is all sorts of transport and training and lengths of stay that really set this apart. What does that look like?
There's a good question. I could take a wee while to answer that. I'll try and focus on the key things.
So what makes this different is the location, fundamentally it's at sea and therefore how do your staff get on board in the first place? So the vast majority of our crew members, team members top up by helicopter to get to these locations. How do stores get on board? How do you get your food stores on board? Well, they come, they're containerized on the beach, they're lifted and craned onto the back of a vessel out to the location we go and then they're craned on board and our team have to handball the stuff in from however close the crane ops can get to the back door of the accommodation unit.
So that's the biggest thing. It is properly remote and you are within that environment, onshore environment, and many difficult strange places in the world, difficult to get to, difficult roads.
I know that's a logistical challenge for Aramark and many places. In our environment, you're holding to the sea state and the wind and the weather and the conditions change and then stuff doesn't happen on time so the boat doesn't sail and so on and so forth.
You get told by the client that, "I know you've got six containers worth of food stores coming out on this next order, but we only got room on the boat for four containers. So can you go and decide which stores you're taking offshore and re-pick and re-pack, get your distributor to redo the whole thing because you're only getting four containers on our boat today."
So that's the thing that makes it so different, the logistics. And then the second part of it is from our people. And how does that feel? Because you are away from home, literally one half of your life, that broadly speaking, the rotations that people work are two weeks on at work and then two weeks off or variants of that.
So three weeks on, three weeks off, so forth. So half your time you're not at home and after today you maybe go home or you may be at home right now. These folks are away and you're away from home, you're away from family, you're away from everything that happens in everybody's lives. Every week, every day, every year you miss anniversaries, birthdays, you miss all sorts of things because you're, you're rooted offshore and that's a huge factor.
And because of the rotation, there are also, if you think about it as the operator for a moment, you also got two or three staff filling every individual role. So it's not that we've gone out and recruited a tremendous chef who's working for us. You need three chefs to cover that role because that person maybe does two on two off. You've got a back-to-back, that's what it's called in this environment.
You're back-to-back, you come on board and you inherit it. If you're a baker, you inherit what the baker has just been doing for the last two weeks in front of you and you have to manage that and deal with that. And then when you come into your shift, you're leaving that for your back-to-back. And that handover that back-to-back process.
When you think about trying to deliver a consistent service, it's not just about having one great person, it's two and three persons just to fill the one actual client role. So that's a big factor. And then there's so many other things, honestly, Heather, I could go on forever, but I'll just give you one or two examples.
You are sharing a cabin. I mean you are sleeping in a bunk bed. So the first time you go offshore and you think, well, is this my room? Yes it is. Why is there two beds? Because you're sharing. And so when you think about that, in all seriousness, this either fits people or not.
People either love working in this environment and do it for a long time, or you do get people who go offshore one time only and say, "Oh, this really just isn't for me. How do you sleep?" How weird is it is, by the way, when you don't also even potentially even meet the person that you're sharing the room with because if you're on day shift and they're on night shift, when you get to that cabin after your shift, at the end of the night, they might already have their curtain on and be trying to sleep.
So these sorts of things make, whether you're visiting for the first time or whether you're employed in this space, it makes a big difference. The sort of camaraderie, the teamwork, how it feels to be in this space.
And I think the last thing I would say is that on some of the locations, when the wind is up outside, you can feel the thing moving. So that's a standout for me that keeps me awake when I'm in that environment. So it's a little different. It's a little different.
All right. I want to shift the focus a little bit, but I mean that is a lot to think about. I can see how you need a very particular kind of hospitality provider who enjoys that challenge and that atmosphere.
But I do want to focus a little bit on safety, in particular. Safety is a central priority for all of Aramark. It is something that we have centralized in the enterprise to make sure that we have an extremely high standard that goes across all lines of business, all industries.
What does safety look like at these remote locations? I imagine that is also very unique?
Heather, I think this is the number one thing. This is from the first moment you get into this environment.
Well, I'm coming up on 18 years in this environment and realizing just how big a focus this is day one, and still today, every day, our clients are working, doing complicated, really clever, smart things, pioneering stuff that gets done in this space.
So process safety is the first part of this answer, I guess, because the client is mega focused on process safety and the systems and how their operation runs to make sure it's safe. It's a massive focus every second of the day.
And then alongside the process safety, which is you can have the best system in the world, but it's the people that actually operate the system. So then you sort of begin to move toward personal safety. And that's where we are.
I mean, one of the first acronyms I learned in this, and my, we have some amount of acronyms in offshore, it's like a separate language, I think, actually. I'm reasonably proficient, but I've still got lots to learn, I think. But it was ASAP, which we would all know as, as soon as possible, but it was a big focus in Aramark as I joined, and it was Aramark Safety and Performance. And it is literally that everything that we do, every task that we do is to the best of our ability and knowledge mapped out and the training and the focus that goes into it to make sure that our staff are competent at it and that we can do.
Because if you think about services we're doing, we have loads of repeat tasks that we are doing literally hundreds of thousands of times a year. But to do it safely is the only option here.
And to be serious for a moment, there are a couple of thousand people that I am responsible for working offshore across this whole business. And every year we injure people. And I'm thankful to say that there are very minor injuries the vast majority of the time. And we have literally, we have a world-class safety record.
If you look at our output safety performance, it's amazing how small the number of injuries we have is and how many people do return home at the end of their hitch and hopefully in better condition than they were when they went out actually.
So safety is just, it's literally everywhere. And if we were not as good as we are in this space, we wouldn't have the business we have today. It is just a fundamental, it's a prerequisite to be able to operate in this space, your team, yourself, the company, everything about you have to be focused in this space.
And I suppose that's the first thing I'd say about it. The second thing I'd say is that's not just, that's everywhere. So if you go back to the numbers we talked about earlier, so if we think of 150 people on board, a platform, 10 Aramark people, the other 140 people are also just every bit as focused on safety as we are.
And one of the really brilliant things about this business is that everybody's looking after one another, it doesn't really matter what company you work for. Once you've gone on board this client's platform or drill rig, everybody together, one team, to make sure everybody's safe. And because it is a relatively dangerous environment, fundamentally, I think it keeps everybody sharp and focused. And if I think of all the client meetings that I've done in the time I've been at Aramark, I honestly would tell you that probably 50, 60% of the time, on average across all those years, is in this area.
What are we doing about safety? How are we dealing with any of the things that have come up that are that nobody got injured, but observations and things that we've noticed, unsafe acts, are just relentless in a good way. And such a hard topic because we never crack it. If you start to think that you've got this crack, you're in trouble. It's like pushing the huge big boulder up in the hill, isn't it? You've got momentum and you imagine it's moving, but if you stop to catch your breath, there's a fair chance it's rolling back down on you. It's just, it never stops. And it's difficult dealing with somebody who gets an injury that is not going to heal quickly or it's going to leave somebody with damage is such a hard thing to have to deal with. And it's my responsibility and our whole team's responsibility to make sure that that just doesn't happen to anybody.
So I think I got all the way back to my first day. So first day, day one, turning up in my car, parked in the car park, didn't reverse park, didn't know that was a thing, was new to this, went into the Aramark office part of my induction, and I was really politely asked if I wouldn't mind going back out and moving my car around and reverse parking my car because that's a thing that statistically fewer accidents happen if you're reverse parked in the first instance.
So you know you're in Aberdeen, by the way if you go to a supermarket like what I would call a Tesco's or one of these places, you're in Aberdeen because almost all the cars are reverse parked.
But safety is huge topic. But then you can translate it into your performance to come back to the acronym to the ASAP. Because if you are that good that you're focused on your task and you've got it mapped out and you've got people trained, you can get efficient and you can stay efficient.
And I think I love that acronym. It's 18 years old for me, but I've still got it in my head most all the time, safety and performance. Because if you're organized and you know what you're looking to do and you're trained and you're doing it, odds on, you're doing a better job than the alternate option. So yeah, huge, just a huge focus.
We have fun with it too. I think it's a good way to bring people together. And the last thing I would say about it is that because it's so prevalent in our culture and it's been there for so long, that when you arrive into it, you quickly adapt and understand that that's what it is.
Would you like to know more about Aramark and its varied lines of hospitality? Visit our newsroom on Aramark.com to access more information.
I'd like to offer a big thanks to Andrew for joining us today. And also, as always to our listeners for being part of our conversation here at Mark This.
