Profile Leader - Inside Profile

A PRESENCE IN CHINA

Five years ago, Profile ventured into China and Southeast Asia, appointing seasoned hotelier Winnie Chiu to drive things forward. It was a well-judged move.

On the banks of Shanghai’s Huangpu River, a new five-star, 14-storey luxury hotel bearing the refined Peninsula name makes a spectacular debut on the Bund. It is March 2010. Not yet a year ago, in summer 2009, The Puli Hotel and Spa in exclusive Jing’an launches itself as China’s first ‘urban resort’. Meanwhile, its boutique near-neighbour, the eco-chic URBN Shanghai, has not stopped winning awards since its inauguration the year before.

The inventory of new hotel openings in Shanghai and the rest of the Middle Kingdom is set to go on for months and years to come, a fact not lost to Mark Norris, Profile’s long-time Chief Executive, who could see it all coming years ago when he decided to set up an outpost in China.

‘We were eager to show our commitment to our clients in the region by being physically present there for them, which we have been since 2005,’ says Mark, newly arrived from a road show across China and Hong Kong with Profile Area Director for China and Southeast Asia, Winnie Chiu. Indeed, the heart of Profile’s success has been the global luxury brand, the likes of Mandarin Oriental, Shangri-La and InterContinental, all of which have been firmly established in Asia for years. An Asian office was inevitable.

Land of opportunity

The prospects for talent engagement and development in Asia – and China in particular -- are enormous. There are now well over 10,000 hotels throughout China. It is the fifth largest tourism country in the world – some 26 million foreign visitors arrived in 2007 – propped up by an industry that employs close to six million people.

Although the global financial crisis will have affected overseas tourism since, long-term, the tourism legacy of the successful 2008 Beijing Olympics won’t harm China’s hospitality industry. The tropical city of Sanya, on once remote Hainan, is already a tourist hotspot, coaxing the likes of Mandarin Oriental, Ritz-Carlton and Banyan Tree into opening signature upscale spa resorts. The developing regions of Xian, Guilin, Guangzhou and Hangzhou are eagerly waiting to be tapped and explored.

‘We knew even before 2005 that China and some parts of Asia had become the new ‘New World’. Because of this shift, owners and managers of hotel properties were looking to attract greater numbers of the best expat talent to help run their growing businesses,’ says Mark.

Fortunately, Profile’s talent pool for Asia runs deep and wide. Partly it’s owing to the fact that for those people wanting to work at the top-end of the market – Profile’s niche for the last thirty years -- a stint in Asia and its culture of hospitality and service is akin to attending finishing school or a plum posting. It depends on where you are in the career cycle.

Good business sense

Doing business in China has other distinct advantages. Its robust economy and financial clout have also found expression in the strength of the yuan, which some suspect will one day rival the dollar as an official trading currency. In fact, it is already traded officially in Southeast Asia.

‘However way you look at it, I think this means that China is increasingly seen as a good place to own or run a business because of the earnings potential,’ says Mark, ‘So for hotel companies wishing to be there, Profile offers itself as the gateway for their talent. And I don’t think we could have chosen anyone better to do it for us than Winnie.’

Tireless worker

The indefatigable Winnie Chiu is Profile’s woman in Asia. Twenty years in the global luxury hospitality industry, Winnie arrived at Profile via a variety of senior executive roles with Mandarin Oriental and Peninsula, having jump-started her hotel career at Four Seasons. Her career footprint covers three continents: North America, Asia (Hong Kong and Beijing) and Europe (London).

Winnie leads an enthusiastic team: Nixon Chung, who recently joined as Managing Partner based in Shanghai, consultants Rachel Jiang and Tracy Yu and associate Willy Chan, who is also CEO of Talent Bank Asia. All have hospitality management pedigrees.

For Winnie, the business of finding the right people or the right position can be all-consuming. She handles almost all of the critical and demanding ex-com and senior corporate appointments. Travelling continuously for the job, she ventures into the inner reaches of China to meet with clients and makes a point of introducing herself, whenever possible, to people new to China’s hotel scene. ‘It doesn’t feel difficult at all because people are my passion,’ she says.

Then and now

China in 2010 is a very different place to the one Winnie first encountered in the early 1990s during her stint in Beijing. Then, it was the aftermath of Tiananmen Square.

‘There was no electricity in many areas and everything seemed dark,’ she recalls. ‘I can still smell the coal and remember a sense of fear. Compared to now, it was a very primitive time and there was much I had to learn about the culture. And you certainly didn’t see many good branded hotels. Once, I tried to wear a fur coat thinking it would make me look stylish, but as you can imagine that didn’t go down too well!’

Memories evoke a period that seems far more distant. ‘From where I lived I could hear the sound of a gong stirring people from their sleep for their ritual morning tai-chi. There were very few expats like me at the time,’ she says.

However, while in Beijing she did work with the likes of Peter Finamore, now Managing Director of two Rosewood hotels in Riyadh, and Pierre Jochem, who in 2008 was appointed Regional Vice President for Operations for Raffles Hotels and Resorts in Asia Pacific; he also runs the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.

Filled with a desire to help the local people in some way, Winnie decided she would informally mentor some of her younger staff at the Peninsula.

‘I aspired to do everything I could to contribute my knowledge and help educate them further,’ she says. ‘I discovered a wide generation gap in China then in the sense that parents did little to provide practical guidance to the young, not having had the education themselves. I felt that young people had nowhere to go to learn except from someone at work, and I tried where I could to fill the gap.’

Today China is altogether more confident, as befits a nation that in the political, economic, technological, environmental and cultural spheres is beginning to influence the global rulebook.

‘So much modernisation has happened during the ten years I was away from mainland China, working in Hong Kong and London,’ Winnie says. ‘Now I think all the hardware has been built up. In this sense, China has caught up with the world and is even more advanced than New York in some ways. It’s a new world.’

Tomorrow’s talent

And therein lies opportunity. China may have its high-speed trains and blossoming skyscrapers, but the soft underbelly – at least for the hospitality industry – is still the level of technical education and skills found among home-grown talent. Here Winnie believes there is plenty of scope for companies to develop their talent management and leadership offering.

If Profile can play a part in the evolution, it will; she will see to it. ‘The international five-star brands especially still recognise the need for the imported knowledge that expats bring, in particular to F&B, GM and Resident Manager positions,’ Winnie says. ‘However, it’s true that the growing trend is for companies to hire locally.

‘Asian expats and local talent are in high demand. I would say the split is forty percent local hires and sixty percent expats, by which I mean a combination of Asian and Western expats. Organisations that can capture and develop them, as well as the next generation of talent, will be the successful ones. And I would still say that education is a very important piece of the jigsaw.’

A good fit

Winnie will be the first to admit that she herself has learned so much from having honed her recruitment instincts with Profile over the last five years.

‘As a hotel executive, I tended to look at human resources from the inside-out. What mattered was what was under our own roof. But five years in this role have made me look at things from the outside in and luckily, I have always been a people person.’

For Winnie, recruitment is about listening to clients, whether they’re companies or candidates, and finding out what is best for them. ‘I always ask myself, what will help this person to grow his or her career?’ she says. ‘I’m constantly searching for the best match and fortunately, I seem always to have found it. It’s also important that there are certain rules of ethics in recruitment, like integrity and confidentiality, which mean a lot to me both personally and professionally. It has been a good fit.’

Those in the know will not be surprised. For Profile and Winnie, the journey to a New World has long since begun.

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To find out more about Profile’s China and Southeast Asia Regional Office, visit our website on www.pmsr.com. You can contact Winnie on winnie.chiu@pmsr.com