What does it take to build a hospitality realm?

Be it a film or a business, your audience is everything. They will decide your fate. It is not that every change or alternation I thought or implemented got rave responses. NO! To be a successful entrepreneur, it is necessary to get into the skin of the end user – customer. If you can empathise on their choices and demands successfully, then no one can hold you back from becoming a top player of the industry.

Building a hospitality empire is not a day task. It is actually an accumulation of years of hard work, persistence, patience and finance. Being an entrepreneur, I too understand this philosophy and adopt it stringently to achieve desired results. Every business requires expertise, human behavioral understanding and knowledge to surpass your targets and even your strong competitors. Hospitality is no different. Starting a business is a different story altogether if compared with transforming the same ideology into a big, humungous empire. It is never easy to create and maintain such heights in the market, especially when there is no financial funding involved.

Hospitality is one of the few businesses where you meet people every day and receive instant feedback. Sometimes, people demand services that stumbles our whole philosophy in a moment. At that time, instead of losing our calm, you need to understand other’s point of view. This is the time when you can take your business to maximum heights. In the service industry, customer satisfaction and feedbacks are crucial factors defining your future. It is always advisable to understand the ever changing demands of the market.

You can find tons of write-ups on the web telling you how to make your business big and successful. Some of them say that these couple of tricks and tips would help you to grow your business to greatest heights. I would not deny that those principles and guiding tips would not help. They do. At some point of time, I even adopted some principles and techniques to grow further. BUT, one foremost thing when you think of making your business big and great is to identify your target audience and their choices. Nowadays, like any other businesses (Offline and Online), number of strong competitors have popped up to eat each other’s businesses. As an entrepreneur, I have witnessed such struggle. You can find several hotel chains offering cheap and affordable services. In India, people are price-cautious. They don’t want to spend much. They have a tendency to spend less and get more. Even when they go to a grocery shop, they look for products giving extra (in quantity) / any promotional offer. We have to deal with such customers every day. You need to have a very deep understanding of the human nature. You should be open to change. I personally believe that being pro active rather than reactive to such demands is the key to long term success.

It is also important to keep the economics viable while being acceptable to change. In years, I have learnt that people often get carried away with the initial success in this industry, thus hurting the economic viability. This is a strict NO for aspiring people foraying into hospitality industry. Concisely, you need to be bendable (in terms of making immediate yet constructive changes) accompanied with sound planning and organizational skills to reach greatest heights in every business including hospitality.