Mark Simpson talks with Simon Sor, CEO of the Jersey Hospitality Association, about keeping hospitality businesses afloat during the pandemic. They push back on misinformation, stress that employers need to tell staff what's happening with hours and contracts, and point to caterers pivoting from private events to family meal deliveries as a model for finding new revenue.
Questions this video answers
May 29, 2020
Chief executive of the Jersey Hospitality Association
Chapters
This is season eight, episode one. The coronavirus has taken over the world. Something that started in just China back in January of 2020, has now spread globally and is now affecting our industry, the hospitality industry. This episode I am chatting to Simon saw Simon talks about containment, he talks about busting myths, he's talking about opportunities to arise on the back of it.
Thanks, Mark. Evening all. My name's Simon Sor. I'm the chief executive for Jersey Hospitality association talking about the myths. So we've got a number of things. Number one, I think it's understanding about coronavirus. A number of health experts will come out. I would advise people to be careful about what they read on social media. If you have say there will be a few businesses out there with a good staff base, it may be worth at this stage having a conversation if they are all on full time contracts, 40 hours etc. If you sit them down together, present your business, plan forward, explain that you'd like to keep them all on the big thing I'm talking to my members about right now. Let's be creative. I will use an example. I've had some outside caterers come to me, very successful outside caterers over a lot of small private parties, high end private parties, everything has disappeared. I mean they've gone from, you know, lived off this for a while to they haven't got a single cooking left and they all disappeared overnight. What do they do? They become creative and so right people are self isolating. We've got the ability to create food. Normally we're creating on this level, absolute high top end. What we're going to do is look at creating family based food that can be delivered for up to four people etc. Per meal.
Two options right now. Number one is you can procrastinate and you can waste all of your time on social media bitching and whinging and whining about this or you can be proactive and you can save your business. So what I want to do for the final part of this podcast and the final part of this interview is I want to be sharing opportunity that you're seeing that could be arising from this.
