WayUp Office Hours: Food & Hospitality

Missing WayUp Office Hours is missing out on some incredible ice cream provided by Shake Shack: this week, NYC interns had the opportunity to enjoy free dessert and learn invaluable advice from leaders of the Food & Hospitality industry. Among the panelists were Basu Ratnam, Founder at INDAY, Dani Wieder, Sr. Marketing Manager at Starwood Hotels, Cory Sullivan, Operations & Development at Crafted Hospitality, and Allison Stadd, Sr. Marketing  & Communications Manager at Shake Shack. Here are some highlights from last night’s event.

The small, basic tasks are the ones that will get you noticed.

“Do the basic stuff right,” said Basu, who majored in Political Science at Brown, and has now started his own Indian, healthy fast casual restaurant. He added that when someone is rock solid on the details –  even with menial and mindless tasks – he knows he can trust them with more responsibilities.

Cory, who studied economics at Wharton and is now the right hand man of  Tom Colicchio, one of the leading chefs in the country, urged students to “start at the bottom” because menial tasks and roles can give insight into the ins and outs of the business. “You will be so much more dangerous in your career [later on] if you do.”

It’s ok to make mistakes – but correct them in a big way.

Allison, who studied English at University of Pennsylvania, prides herself in receiving constructive criticism and then never making the same mistake again. “It’s easy to make mistakes, but it’s hard to recover really well in a memorable, impactful way,” she said.  One of her internships involved fact checking for a magazine, where she made a mistake that caused a lawsuit. She used it as an opportunity to make an impression of how she dealt with it: for the rest of her internship she came early and stayed late, and is still in touch with her boss at the time.

Get comfortable saying no.

Most of our panelists tell students to ask for more responsibilities, but what happens when the workload gets to be too much to handle? Dani, who studied business at the University of Michigan, urged students to get comfortable saying no because otherwise, tasks will fall through the cracks. “I tend to overwork myself and stress myself out and get nervous to say no, and I would freak out about meeting deadlines and how I could appease everyone,” she said. She soon learned that she had to get comfortable saying no to people’s asks. “You can’t be the master of everything if you always say yes,” she added.

Now that’s some food for thought.