Jun 15, 2016
In the Beginning
By no means have I had a textbook career path. I left school planning to to be a chef and spent my first year out of school enrolled in a TAFE course – Certificate 3 in Business Catering Operations. Although I loved the cooking and business side of the schooling, I had difficulty in dealing with the hierarchy within a commercial kitchen and the excessive hours of physical endurance. My only real pre-requisites for a career was that it had to be exciting, meaningful and lucrative – my experience with cooking unfortunately met none of these requirements.
So I had a change of approach the following year and went on a more generalist path enrolling in a Bachelor of Business up in the newly formed Southern Cross University, formerly University of New England. My friend Rick Nassar convinced me that life on the north coast of NSW, studying in the Coffs Harbour Campus, was too good an offer to pass up. He was right!
What I loved about the degree was the generalist nature of it which really gave small but significant insights into different disciplines and career paths. Ironically the subject Statistics was probably my least favourite and I barely scraped by with a Pass, but now market research, demand and trend analysis and guest satisfaction surveying is one of the most important facets in my current career. Perhaps more predictably consumer behaviour and the psychology of decision making was my favourite part of the degree. What I learnt then and something that is reinforced consistently in my work life today is that you do not have to be technically brilliant at everything (I still suck at Excel) but to do well in business you do need to understand what drives consumer behaviour particularly in the pre-purchase consideration phase. My personality is instinctive, perhaps too instinctive at times, and although good business people do need to take risks they also require discipline. University set me up with some of the foundations for learning these lessons in real life.
The Real World
Speaking of real life, after leaving uni I did my best to avoid real life for as long as I could. After a brief stint in advertising sales I decided to leave overseas on my rite of passage. What was supposed to be 6 month back packing trip turned into several years of adventures and basically walking the earth. I found some rhythm in seasonal tourism work and lots of very odd jobs to fill in the gaps. Probably the most quirky was my three winter-season stint as a hot tub maintenance man! From all of that I identified my knack for capturing peoples attention so a career in guiding was formed.
On returning to Australia I had various guiding, trip leading and program directing roles with iconic businesses such as BridgeClimb and much larger organisations that most people have never heard of such as Grand Circle Corporation and Education First. This work was always exciting as their was plenty of travel, it was meaningful as it really positively impacted people on holidays but was far from lucrative so it was back to the drawing board. I decided to become a property developer, get Certificate 4 in residential construction and become a licensed builder who would cash in on the burgeoning real estate boom. I did all of that which was great and then 2008 came around and the credit crunch caught up with us and the rest was history…
A friend sent me a link to a job posting with the email subject ‘recession buster?’. I loved travel, loved tourism and this was an ad for the only growing sector of tourism: cruising. But wait, this was potentially a moral dilemma. Isn’t cruising for newly weds, the nearly-dead and the over-fed? I can’t take my years of meaningful, custom travel experience and apply it to such a singular industry determined to shake the pockets of all of their guests prior to them disembarking? I mean these are floating casinos, malls and fun parks with no moral integrity right? Well let’s just say I maintained that belief for at least the first three years in the industry. Now in my eighth year I have come to realise that some of those perceptions do have some basis in reality but largely this industry has evolved into something far more socially conscious and dare I say it, meaningful. With strong leadership from individuals like my long term CEO Ann Sherry who has been able to harness the immense financial power and the unique mobility of these giant floating holiday vessels that can bring huge opportunities to remote communities that would otherwise be devoid of much opportunity at all, while providing the customer with access to places and experiences that simply could not be accessed any other way. This month the newest brand Fathom was launched, a social impact brand that historically has become the first cruise-line to run trips to Cuba. This is only the beginning of an exciting new era of cruise tourism.
So after meandering the longer road than most I finally found my career path that ticked the three boxes: my work life is never shy of adventure, is meaningful in so many ways to so many people and it’s a little more lucrative than cleaning hot tubs!
