STARTUP STAGE: Otolo is helping hospitality employees develop their careers

Otolo

Otolo is an online community for hospitality employees to receive mentoring and develop their careers.

The company launched in April and recently added a Careers Club enabling hospitality companies to list vacancies for free and helping potential recruits through the application process.

What is your 30‐second pitch to investors? 

Otolo is the go‐to online community for hospitality people to connect, share and develop careers with peers and mentors.

Behind the scenes, we use the power of Otolo’s global community to create amazing paid‐for mentoring experiences and programs for individuals and organizations. They use Otolo to seek guidance on live work projects or professional development, and Otolo uses matching technology to identify new connections with answers, offering certification and live performance tracking.

We can also power private communities for businesses, teams, alumni and students, encouraging further collaboration, offer partner promotions including events and host a new industry recruitment service where applicants receive real‐time career mentoring. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup. 

Otolo is a global community connecting people with a passion for hospitality. Otolo is on a mission to develop passionate hospitality professionals to reach their potential.

It is powered by a growing community of expert mentors from leading hotels, home‐rental, dining, events, suppliers and technology organisations, sharing their guidance and experience with an industry they love in group and one‐to‐one online sessions.

Initially using a no‐code community platform, we’re working behind the scenes to build mentor matching algorithms that learn from how members are progressing on their mentoring journeys.

Mentoring is a little like dating, and while the human touch will always be important in hospitality, as we scale it’ll be important to help people find the right mentors for the best guidance for them, fast. Additionally, we’re building scheduling and video tech so that members can link up digitally at a time and place that suits their busy lives whether in a hotel, restaurant, event venue or office. 

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company. 

• Strengths: Otolo is the only global mentoring platform for the hospitality sector with the five leading hotel chains and 20 top education institutions onboard 
• Weaknesses: Getting mentoring programmes right takes time and effort, so our team is working flat out to build our programs, get customers interested, attract mentors willing to share their time with us and find funding all at the same time! 
• Opportunities: The global hospitality sector is made up of 320 million colleagues with very few of them offered formal mentoring 
• Threats: The industry is just getting back on its feet, and training budgets have been cut back. Mentoring is traditionally free and informal, we have to prove the value of assembling the best mentors in the industry to offer their guidance when and where it matters, then produce engaging programmes that people will pay for with measurable outcomes to disrupt traditional classroom and video training. 

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective? 

Amazing hospitality experiences are delivered by people, but hospitality is not an aspirational industry to work in, which means it has issues attracting, retaining and developing people.

This problem has been exacerbated by the COVID‐19 crisis, with thousands of unfilled vacancies.

Eight out of ten staff have received no training or development with the vast majority of having only local networks and opportunities to tap into.

Hospitality needs a global mentoring platform that levels the playing field to help everyone passionate about hospitality to build skills to deliver better customer experiences, and play a part in rebuilding the industry.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

In addition to always looking for new partners to develop team members, and appealing to individuals with our fresh looking platform, Otolo’s growth will continue to come from the members of current partnerships. The 20 university partners ‐ have hospitality students totalling more than 130,000 that present a steady flow of early‐career professionals. The five partner hotels – Marriott, Hilton, IHG, Accor and Hyatt ‐ have more than 2.2 million colleagues from across every function and career stage. We’re just getting started! 

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Otolo evolved from a pro‐bono online mentoring platform offering support to peers and younger professionals who were out of work, furloughed, or working in a fast‐ changing situation during the COVID‐19 pandemic.

Our research showed that prior to the pandemic, hospitality was behind other key sectors in attracting, retaining and progressing staff. Mentoring is emerging as a key pillar of development – alongside on the job and classroom training, which is a huge global market of more than £13 billion annually, reaching £17 billion when you include recruitment costs and onboarding training.

Hospitality has no single place where teams and individuals can access mentoring, because of this Otolo was awarded a UK Government grant to develop this into a full service. 

How and when will you make money?

Global annual spend on training and recruitment in hospitality totalled around £17 billion in 2019, but is based on traditional methods, relies on industry agnostic tools or is highly fragmented.

Otolo will charge a small platform fee for teams and individuals to access premium features of Otolo Mentoring, and in time our Careers Club will produce a strong second revenue stream from recruitment services.

It will be profitable from December 2022, but we’ll continue to invest heavily with a plan to be a £1 billion revenue business in 10 years making £170 million a year from learning and recruitment services. 

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Founder James Lemon is a hospitality expert from corporate, startups and technology, previous a Series B hotel‐tech COO and strategy director for IHG.

Glenda Mills‐Webb formerly worked at Citizen M and Hilton and has a track record of huge global commercial partnerships.  

Aman Gaddu is ex‐Expedia, John Lewis and TUI product as well as an ecommerce whizz. 

Bill Price us ex‐Selina. He's a senior marketeer, event and community builder. 

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far? 

Against the backdrop of the pandemic affecting the industry we love so much, we’ve put huge pressure on ourselves to build, launch and support hospitality people fast while they need support and guidance from leaders of the industry who live to share their experiences.

This has definitely caused extra costs and stress, and we’ve missed a couple of opportunities to plan and think through options before pushing ahead.

As for many, building a team remotely, with all the personal and professional challenges that the pandemic and lockdown has meant for many, has also been a challenge we have had to manage, but we are not alone. 

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact ‐ so why are you going to be one of lucky ones? 

Our mission is to unlock the potential of people passionate about hospitality, and with mentoring we have a service that people are naturally interested in, that leaders have some personal experiences of and taps into the culture of serving others that is hospitality’s DNA.

Our impact will be driven by our ability to show that mentoring has a positive impact on engagement, retention and productivity, faster and at much lower cost than traditional training. 

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

In 12 months from now Otolo will have 6,000 members, 400 live jobs and 1,000 mentoring participants and approaching profitability. 

What is your end‐game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.) 

As our mentoring programs grow across the globe, and our partnership model expands with businesses and organisations across hospitality, we would love to put foundations in place to become the industry’s go to community for everything to help people shape and develop their careers.

Behind the scenes, our proprietary matching technology could be used to help provide more equal access to people, careers, education and more.

With 320 million people working in hospitality, we will be able to rival the largest professional networking sites, by staying true to our mission of supporting hospitality’s people.

It’s a huge global ambition, and we’d expect to take these big steps forward with large injections of private funding from partners investing in the future of hospitality and its people, or we could look at going public and giving hospitality’s people a chance to own a piece of their own community.