The occasion was the launch of the first Sage Hotel in Western Perth but actually it was more significant than that for Singapore-based SilverNeedle Hospitality – it also marked the comeback of Anand Nadathur to the business he founded.
Anand Nadathur: “It’s not failure that’s the problem, it’s the lack of testing.”
Anand, the younger son and director of the Nadathur Group, the private investment arm of NS Raghavan, co-founder of Infosys Technologies, founded SilverNeedle Hospitality in 2009 based on his vision of combining scale with customisation in hotels.
His background in tech – he’s done a few tech startups and invested in several – and his family pedigree made him a natural for scale and to help him on the customisation side, he brought in veteran hotelier Bill Black (Four Seasons, Fullerton track record) to be his right hand man.
To create the foundation for SilverNeedle, he acquired Ativa Hospitality, a Bangkok-based boutique hotel management company, and Constellation Hotels, an Australian hospitality platform with over 4,000 rooms, which today forms the base on which the group is now building upon.
He then left the business for three years and returned as CEO and chairman last December, and brought back Bill Black as president – Black was Anand’s right hand man in the early years and also left SilverNeedle after Anand stepped down. Obviously he had felt things weren’t going the way he had envisioned but he wasn’t saying that to me. What he said was, “If you have a vision, sometimes you have to execute it yourself.”
He also believes it is the right time for him to make a comeback because of the disruption happening in the industry – new generation of travellers, blurring of spaces, the boom in private accommodation, a middle class in Asia Pacific ready to travel, among the forces at work.
Anand, who is responsible for the wealth management and strategic direction of group assets of Nadathur Group, chose hospitality, investing $100 million out of the group’s $1 billion fund into it, “because I felt a lot of the hotel experiences were not for someone like me”.
“In the context of the current generation of travellers, it is important hospitality transforms,” he said.
He believes hospitality is grounded in the traditional real estate business, it is room and product-centric, yet in the age of the connected traveller, the global citizen, values have changed and SilverNeedle aims to align itself with those values and needs.
Anand and Black, Tech and People, Yin and Yang
It’s an interesting combination – Anand and Bill Black. One talks new tech, one talks people – yet the two are so fundamentally infused, like yin and yang, and if they can figure a way to bring their two worlds together, it could be the perfect recipe for a hospitality company rooted in service and tech for a new generation.
Bill Black, playing the hospitality statesman role: “When I first met Anand, you can imagine the kind of conversation we had.”
Said Black, “I’ve been a hotelier for 32 years, mostly in the APAC region. When I first met Anand, you can imagine the kind of conversation we had. He would question my business – and it forced me to rethink our business.
“I learnt to accept the questions and not give an answer right away – I said, I’ll come back to you. There is no doubt our industry is changing, customers are changing, and the industry has to change. There is a revolution going on, and hotels have become commodities. The passion and personal are being replaced by hard facts and commerce – we don’t want that to happen. We want to look at it with fresh eyes.”
As such, with the Sage brand, three core values underpin it – celebrating local (picture above shows breakfast served at Julio’s, an Italian restaurant that has been an institution in West Perth, and which remains at Sage), connectivity and people.
“I know it’s age-old, people,” said Black, “but our employees are changing too and we have to change with them, Our local employees are ambassadors to their city, this is an important distinction.”
Lines are blurring, “why should we in hospitality create boundaries?”
But beyond Sage, Anand as CEO has a bigger goal. Yes, he needs to grow the company, which has 55 hotels in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Laos and Sri Lanka, under the brands of NEXT, SAGE, Chifley and Country Comfort, but he also wants to disrupt hospitality.
Sage West Perth: Blend of old and new, just as in the company that’s managing it.
“We have to keep testing, keep coming up with ideas. It’s not failure that’s the problem, it’s the lack of testing,” said Anand. “Let’s try 10 different ideas and see what works.”
His new team blends techies and hoteliers and it’ll be interesting to see what the mixture produces.
Anand said the lines were blurring between live, work and play and if people no longer see boundaries, “why should we in hospitality create them?”
Referring to co-working models like Wework which is now getting into hotels, and new spaces like spring space coming up in New York that bring rooms and workspaces together, Anand said all industries were being disrupted by technology and forcing companies to rethink or else they’d disappear.
“I believe individual customer behavior and the ability to understand and predict that will change the way we look at the customer. Things like customer segmentation and channel mix will change – there will be nuances which technology can help us pinpoint.”
Anand, who’s lived in Singapore for the last nine years, remembers his first failure. It was in 1995 in 3D simulation.
“It didn’t work, we were too early, no market, no customers. Technology hadn’t caught up in India at a level that we could afford. That was my biggest lesson.”
He had no intention of working in the family group, saying his parents left their two sons to “be our own person” but when his father, after retiring from Infosys Technologies, told him about the fund and his vision, and asked if he’d like a position, he said yes. “My father said, it doesn’t matter what you do but do you know what you want?”
He said his father, whom he clearly idolises, taught him many things but the key thing was values. “It’s not about saying the right thing, it’s about doing the right thing. My father through Infosys created the biggest number of millionaires in India. He created it as a team and shared it with everyone and this was in the 1980s. He taught me, it’s never about one person, it’s about the team.
“The other thing he taught me was, you will fail, the question is how wisely and quickly you fail.”