Kirti Shenoy (00:00)
Welcome back to Great Work. Today's guest is Alex Atwood, Executive Chairman of Gravy Work. Staffing is in Alex's DNA. His grandfather, parents, and extended family all ran staffing companies. Alex grew up in the industry, but instead of keeping it traditional, he built the Hospitality Training Institute, bringing in-person training to an industry that always relied on shift-based, seasonal, and on-demand work. That foundation eventually led to Gravy Work, his platform that pairs training with technology to cut no-shows,

onboard workers in minutes and give clients transparency into every shift. In our conversation, Alex shares what makes hospitality staffing unique by training builds loyalty and how technology can scale a people first business. Let's get into it.

Kirti Shenoy (00:57)
Alex, you've built so many companies across the hospitality space, from staffing to institutes over the past couple of decades. And now you're leading GravyWork, which is an on-demand hospitality platform. For the listeners, ⁓ may not know your full journey. Could you walk us through how your career evolved and what ultimately led you to build GravyWork?

Alex Atwood (01:15)
Absolutely. And I want to thank you very much for inviting me on the Great Work podcast. It's great to be here and it's great to talk to you, yeah, my path actually started, I'd say, ⁓ from my genes, from my lineage. My mother and my father both started a staffing company before I was born and then they separated, split up. Both of them had their own staffing agencies. And my grandfather, who had come in from the old country, which is Iran, where my family's originally from,

started a staffing company when he came in the country. So I grew up in staffing, doing things like folding time sheets. When I was old enough, I would greet people when they were coming in for interviews. I would learn how to, they wouldn't let me give interviews necessarily, but I learned like what are the key components of an interview and all of that. So when I graduated from college, naturally I didn't wanna get into staffing, because I was kind of tired of it. And I had actually looked at getting into the chicken wing business at the time.

And a good friend of mine who I grew up with, who was a technologist, we sat down and he said, look, your core competency like it or not is staffing. So you need to do I'm going to partner with you. And we're going to build something that is future forward. Now this is the year 2000. So future forward in 2000 in technology meant online meant ⁓ just like a searchable relational database where

You could potentially find certain skill sets in your candidates and those type of things. So we did that. We built that in 2000, quickly learned that the hospitality industry was very slow to adopt any sort of technology enhancements. So what happened was they were concerned, which is like a no-duh thing with the quality of the staff. Are the people that are showing up, do they have quality? Do they know what they're doing?

In hospitality, much, which was in the staffing side of it, it's much different than what they call staffing, which is more, you know, think about people potentially cleaning up job sites for construction projects. You know, people doing cleaning, sort of things where training is sort of minimal aside from some safety. What I learned quickly in hospitality was that there's about a 25 to 30 % skill level needed above baseline in order to just perform.

You have to know how to sort of the lingo and the industry is unique like that. So in 2007 We kind of took a step back on putting so much into the technology and that's when I launched the hospitality training Institute at the time in 2008 2009 the Obama administration put out the Workforce Improvement Act which allowed funds to come from the federal level down to the Unemployment centers the one stops is what they call them

So we partnered with them in the different markets that I was doing staffing in, launched a training center, turned that into somewhat of a profit center, but really what it did was it just leveled up the quality of training and the quality of candidate that we were sending out. And hospitality in general, the staffing side of it was the gig economy before the gig economy.

I mean, hospitality is cyclical, it's seasonal, it's shift-based. And so we were scrambling when we first started to try and keep up with all that huge dynamic nature of the way everything sort of goes. So that led us to, well, that led technology, the advancement of the iPhone came, people started getting jobs off of their phones, things like Uber showed up, people were relying more and more.

on their phones as more than a communication tool, but an actual device that allows them to be able to make money for themselves. So that's when around 2018, we launched Gravy Work. was actually the idea behind Gravy Work was thought of and conceived in 2000 before technology had caught up. And 2008, when technology had caught up, it just made sense. The entire industry, the entire gig economy was now a thing.

So that's how Gravy Work happened. then since then, I mean, obviously things have just gone into, ultra high speed since 2018. And so now we're seeing the advent of AI. We're looking at intelligent matching that isn't just rules-based anymore. So it's super exciting. Extremely challenging to launch a tech enabled.

staffing business that's technology forward. But now we're seven years into it and I think I'm finally starting to get a hang of this.

Kirti Shenoy (05:40)
I I want to go deeper into some of those topics and start off with maybe the HTI, which is the Hospitality Training Institute that you really started. And something I want to commend you for is you started this training institute before all the corporate consultants,

got a hold of the word upscaling. You really started this kind of concept for a large user base. So can you walk me through what really inspired you to create HTI? What gaps did you maybe see in the hospitality space when you were building a staffing company in that space?

Alex Atwood (06:13)
Yeah, thank you. That's a good question. So at the hospitality training, as I said, the inception of that came out of a need. And I was staffing exclusively the hospitality industry and found that the industry, in terms of from a staffing perspective, first of all, it was a service that the industry didn't necessarily recognize.

⁓ number one, number two, the staffing companies that would service the hospitality industry, you would find companies like manpower, ⁓ other industrial companies, the, the, the labor staffing companies of the world that really had no idea the nuance, and the skillsets involved in actually executing hospitality. So if you think about it, their bread and butter again is, you know, construction site cleanup, ⁓ you know, just hands basically to be able to get things done on an as needed basis. And so when you're taking folks.

that are those sort of candidates not giving them any sort of training and then putting them through in a hospitality environment where they're in front of others, their presentation skills are important, how they look a lot at the time, how they're dressed, their uniform presentation is very important depending upon the brand that you're working with. So the complaint that we got that was especially from other staffing agencies that were working with them was that they just don't know what they're doing. And so we would rather...

When we've used another staffing company, we'd rather cross train people in our hotel or in our catering company to be able to do these services. so at that point we said, well, if you cross train, why not allow us to do the cross training of some of your staff? And then we took it a step back and said, wait, no, no, no, no, no, no. We can put a training center together. Now that's a lot easier said than done, but we realized that, know, to your question,

⁓ What are we actually training on? Well, we realized that basic front of the house service being, when you think of it as a banquet, there's some key skills involved with that. It's not neurosurgery, it's not rocket science. It's basically learning how to do things like fold a napkin, set, do a place setting, be able to box a table, skirt a table. What does the North and the South of the room look like? Carry a tray. All of that we learned could be done.

in about four hours. You can teach them the skills, it takes about two and a half to three hours, and then an hour to practice, sometimes a little bit more, and they'd get the fundamentals. So we had a basic banquet skills training course. We did things like we had a tray that we actually put potatoes on so that it wouldn't be easy. almost immediately, we saw an incredible amount of

interest in what we were doing. Our ⁓ staffing was so much higher quality than any of our competitors that we just became sort of the largest staffing company that did this in the DC area at the time. so that was very compelling and it clearly validated what we knew was that you could just, like if you call it upskilling or leveling up or whatever that is, the hospitality industry is...

is an industry that is ripe for it and staffing in that industry is ripe for it. So yeah, that's how it started and then we continued that. We ended up getting a Chev license, which is a school license so that we could expand on that. And it was very successful. Around the time that we founded Gravy Work, was a lot.

to run the training school. So what we did was we folded it in and we took all of, we extracted all of the key training and all the key learning and all the tests and all the modules. And we, we started to synthesize that into the gravy work business model. So with gravy work today, while the hospital training Institute isn't its own standalone entity, it does sort of, it's the underpinning. It's the scaffolding behind what we do and our training is in person. So ⁓ we've seen our competitors and we've seen

sort of micro video training out there. Truth of the matter is you can't teach someone how to carry a tray over video. You can't really teach someone how to do some of these skills because it's all done in person and you have to actually be physically in a room to do it. And there's actually real hardware, real things that you're touching. And so that's what we do now. And it's And it's a big differentiator because we do take it seriously.

Kirti Shenoy (10:16)
⁓

I think it's super fascinating. You know, I talk to staffing companies all the time and there are tons of companies that are in light industrials trying to move into hospitality. There's tons of companies in hospitality trying to move into light industrials. And I think it's a really interesting perspective to hear,

one could say someone that operates machinery is of a certain level of let's say like intellect or skill set just the small nuances of what might be involved in hospitality could make or break Whether that worker has a good experience and whether the client has a good experience with the worker So I really like your suggestion on you know in-person training and I think that that is a really good tip for staffing companies if you're launching in a net new category for the first time Try to maybe keep parts of that staffing experience a little bit

like the traditional staffing companies. If you do onboarding and a lot of training online and you're launching into a new particular space, try doing some of those on-site training so you could see firsthand what these staff members really need to learn in order to be successful in the role.

And then can take that, bring it back into the tech or maybe just decide, hey, this is one of those categories where we really feel comfortable having in-person training and we're going to just continue doing these recurring training models because it's not worth a worker going in for a client not being trained, not knowing how to do the place setting, not knowing how to follow directions with the hospitality lingo. So I really like that insight and I think that's super special. I think in general also, you know, the best staffing companies do spend

quite a bit of time training their workers on the style of work that they're going to be doing and I think first off that kind of brings you that loyalty with the worker where they're really learning on the job and they feel like hey this is the staffing org that actually taught me how to do these particular types of things I feel like if I stay at this company I'll learn more

and they're invested in my growth. So that's a really good feeling all in all for a worker. But it also just in general helps the industry because the more staffing companies that have this training, the better masses of hospitality trained workers will have to do all sorts of jobs. So really, really like that. And congrats on building that institute. That sounds so awesome. ⁓

Alex Atwood (12:24)
That's right.

Yeah, you touch on community and that was an unexpected result of doing that is that once you train people, you build rapport with them. They know your trainers, they know your team and they just have more loyalty. But it really is how you execute the training. You can put ⁓ stale training in place and it won't build any of that. So really having the energy about the quality of the training that you're putting forth is really important.

Kirti Shenoy (12:52)
And now, know, wanna talk about the hospitality staffing space in a whole, could you walk me through, you know, what's out there today? What does gravy work do that's different than other niches? What are other like niches that maybe you think work well, but you're just not touching yet because you have your niche. We'd love to just kind of understand, you know, how you see the hospitality space and, you know, what different characters are doing in this space so far.

Alex Atwood (13:18)
Well, you have, well you sort of have a, I don't know, maybe a Venn diagram. You have different traditional staffing companies that have been doing hospitality for a period of time. And they're solely focused on the industry. Then you have companies that are, know, sort of, their toes are dipped in, so they'll do a little bit of hospitality, a little bit of industrial, a little bit of clerical, a little bit of IT, a little bit of everything, right? They're kind of everything to everyone.

And then you have your tech enabled, tech forward, almost purely technology driven solutions to staffing, are probably, they've become really prevalent in the last like maybe five or six years. So the differences are this, the traditional staffing companies that try and tackle shift based work like hospitality and skilled shift based work like this, most of them it looks like.

You know, lots of group texts, lots of like last minute things that you're trying to pull together. It's kind of slow. It's kind of messy. You're only as good as your last thing that you've staffed. and you're just constantly pulling things together to make it happen. And it is a massive burnout, ⁓ on your team members. and ultimately.

You're you're you don't have the visibility or the transparency to be able to really execute well But if you put the amount of energy into it and you have the the right team members you can get it done Because it is after all a people business no matter what staffing you're in And so if you really like people you really care about it and you have hard-working people that love what they're doing It can be successful But what we do different is I call it's like a co-creative culture that we have so we have us we have a small team

And everybody owns the system in the sense that we improve by making sure we give everyone a voice. We have a very structured type of process that we put in place, but we make sure everyone knows that, you're co-creating what we're doing here. And we use, you know, we use all kinds of techniques like yes and, and all sorts of stuff like that in our meetings. But at the end of the day, what it all turns into is ownership. The team has ownership in what we're doing. Every placement that goes out, somebody owns that. Every shift that's filled.

Someone owns that. And that's important. And when you layer in the technology, it's really for two things. It's worker-centric. It's worker first. And it's transparent. So we want to give all the expectations upfront. How much do you expect to make? What are the details around that job? All of that so that workers feel like they have an environment that they're comfortable in. Very, very important.

And again, having the gravy training, the gravy train system that we have in place allows for us to be able to unlock shifts, unlock different pay scales, give our customers an idea of the level of skill that our people actually have. And that being done without technology is extremely difficult.

So having the technology, being able to badge up our employees and being able to really understand through data, different performance metrics is key. And then having those clear rules in place. So really the difference is we're a people business. And I don't say this is a slogan, because I hear that a lot, people first and this and that. No, no, Our whole business is people. We're sending people that are received by people, and there's people behind the scenes that are making sure everything goes well.

we are starting to implement some AI, but I don't ever see a people business going away from people being the center of it. And so if you're a staffing company, that always has to come first, unless you're robotics, right? So that's key. then you have, like the rules are in place. So when you have the technology, then you can have skills and rating systems and you know how far a particular person is from a job site.

You know no shows and drops and histories and all of that. And you know it immediately. Just in one quick dashboard shot, in one quick profile, you can tell everything about what that candidate's done work-wise under your platform. you get data as guardrails and you are able to and you're able to cut your operational expenses pretty significantly. But most importantly, you can like,

Kirti Shenoy (17:12)
No.

Alex Atwood (17:24)
decrease your no-show rate and have your ⁓ customers really give you high, high marks when it comes to competing with others in the marketplace that just don't either specialize in hospitality or just don't see the value in the people side of things. And that's sort of where the technology companies I find sort of miss their way is that they're, let's face it, staffing isn't technology for tech. It's not a technology play, it's a people play. And it's a service business. And so,

If that service is high quality, your customers are gonna continue to work with you and you're gonna get more customers. If your service is not high quality, no matter how great your technology is, those customers aren't paying for your technology. They really couldn't care less how good your dashboard is if the people showing up look like Return of the Dead or like the zombie apocalypse or something. They're just not gonna wanna work with you anymore. So

Kirti Shenoy (18:13)
to dive into the technology side, obviously there are so many hospitality staffing companies and brands out there that don't really have tech as a forefront of their product. Is No-Show the main...

value prop or main outcome that you think the technology really brings? Or is there something else? Like what in particular do you think the technology gives you a leg up on compared to other staffing companies? Because we know it's a people business. Then at the day it's who's showing up and doing the work and does that work satisfy the client? But what would you say is the niche or the leg up that the technology really gives you compared to those traditional companies that maybe don't have the tech that GravyWork has?

Alex Atwood (18:53)
Yeah, so you have less leaks like no shows. can pull different levers. You can make sure that geographically jobs are assigned or closer to the workers that they're there. You can reward and incentivize different actions like people being on time. You can put together pricing that matches peak availability versus peak high season or low season.

you can track sort of per job so you can look at a job and say, okay, you know, what's the time to fill on this job? What's the on time percentage over the last month? What's the filler rate? And it's all real data. So it's coming from, you know, real actions that are being taken on the platform. So it's, it's really a game changer. And that doesn't even say, I mean, there's just so much I can go through about this, but I mean, if you think about, just, just activating new or, ⁓ onboarding net new workers, I mean, you can take, ⁓ what used to be, you know, maybe a

you know, a couple of hours to literally like seven minutes or eight minutes to go from zero to, uh, to an in an onboarding status or into a, into, into your platform. Um, so that's, know, that's all game changers. And I think the key is, I think it goes back to, transparency. think that's like the main thing there. Right. So you're being super transparent with the people picking up the shifts. You're being very transparent with your customers. They're able to pull reports, you know, uh, in real time.

They're able to see and communicate with workers in real time. They're able to really kind of get an average of what a particular worker was, know, getting an average of what their past performance looks like so that they know what they're expecting. So all that transparency was not available before I'd say like 2016, 2015. I would hear from my clients in the old company and they would say,

You know, it's kind of a black curtain who's going to show up and who they are, what they're about, unless we've seen them before and they're part of our favorite, you know, team members, it's, it's, we just, we just have no idea. And so this totally solves that. they, so they know things right away. And I think that's a huge benefit for both sides of, ⁓ of the business.

Kirti Shenoy (20:57)
That's awesome to hear and I agree. think, you know, we...

have come so far in hospitality and staffing in the first place. People really used to just say, hey, I want 20 people to show up at this event. And they would have no idea who's showing up, what they look like, what they're trained on, what past type of shifts they've done. So we've come really far just in terms of even giving clients context into who's actually performing the work for them. Because it is a vulnerable thing to have someone, a temp worker coming in to work a really big

event that's not a part of your normal crew. So I think even just that context in and of itself, we've come so far with technology. And Alex, another question I'd love to ask you is, who are

your best customers? Who are the best customers that work with you at Gravy Work? And I mean like the category of customers. know, obviously you built the tech, you're tech forward as a business, you've built in hospitality for a while, but what are the types of customers that are your best customers? And how did you come to the realization as a business owner and as a founder that, hey, these are really the best type of customers that work really well with my product. If I could have 10,000 of them, Who are they? And how did you come to, you know, the fact that you're like, yes, this is

ideal customer.

Alex Atwood (22:11)
Yeah, that's an easy one. So early on, I realized that there were customers out there that would tell you how like to jump how and you'd ask how high, right? And again, they would really just whatever the last thing that you did was defined who you are as a business. And those are very difficult. And a lot of the times they'll do things like isolate your temp workers, your temp staff from their internal people, kind of treat them.

differently, maybe talk down to them. There's all sorts of different times when we've actually had to fire clients because of the way that they either treated temp workers or they treated our team members or really just the clients that don't look at it as a partnership. Because look, at the end of the day, you said something a second ago that is so true. When they have temp workers come in,

the guests, the people, whoever their constituents are, whoever it is their customers are, they have no idea if that's a temp or if that person works for that company. So at the end of the day, the nature of it is a very intimate partnership. your services are reflecting to their customers, right? So I don't really understand why a customer wouldn't want to partner with a company that's actually bringing in the people that are serving their guests.

It doesn't really make any sense. And you're not going to get a quality service if you have that very transactional type of relationship with any of your vendors, but specifically vendors that are bringing you people. Because that sort of energy will trickle down, down to the people. And it doesn't work well. And what I found is it's almost a negative cycle where you have managers or you have people that

rely on temp staff, but don't treat them like their partners. And they're constantly going through different agencies. They're constantly trying to find their next agency. And ultimately it leads to chaos. They end up in situations where the staffing isn't where it needs to be or whether they're just bringing in a new vendor and whatever that looks like. So I think ultimately when you partner with your team members, because let's face it, people are people. They don't always do what they're supposed to do.

It's just natural, you know? When I was a little kid, I think I talked to my uncle about who owned a cheesecake shop. I'm like, what's the hardest thing? it like making the, you have to stay up late? And he's like, no, no, no, it's the people, it's hard. It's, know, hiring people is always a pain. And so it's the X factor in any business. And if you have a vendor that's doing that, then I would say that, building a relationship that's based on partnership and trust is key.

⁓ And you're just gonna get a better service that way. People are gonna wanna work with you. And so I'd say that's what it is, right? treating your vendors not like a transaction, but like an actual business partner is key.

Kirti Shenoy (24:47)
school.

you know, like hotel chains are typically better at this or do you think it's really just based on a client by client basis everyone has a different culture and a different way of collaborating with temp staffing companies?

Alex Atwood (25:00)
I think that it's, it's really different. Well, here's how I'll answer that question. I think when I first started in this industry, it was a lot more of a transactional, you know, we tell you how to jump, you ask how high type of thing and it's shifted. think that, and I think that's a generational shift to be honest, like even in hospitality in general, in markets that I've worked in, it was a lot more buttoned up. It was a lot more, Hey, don't talk, don't speak until you're spoken to be quiet, serve your food.

roll out, look good, have your crisp clean uniform on. It's not like that anymore. It's more, hey, bring people in that actually want to relate to the guests, want to be more service oriented. Like, you know, if someone asks, hey, can you show me where the bathroom is? You actually kind of walk with the guests and say, you it's there, don't you just point it. So you're actually interacting more. a couple of things that that brings into is just people being able to communicate well.

Right? So people being able to understand, listen, and be able to properly answer what a guest's question might be. Right? But more importantly, I'm finding that managers right now are more empathetic. A lot of this after the pandemic, I think a lot of the people that would treat people not so well aren't really in the industry anymore because, you know, the people that work the industry are the industry. And if you don't treat them well, you're not going to retain people and you're not going to be able to operate your business.

So I think upper management found those middle managers that have been sort of like the nightmare to work with. We won't go into who they are, but there have been them out there and I just don't see them anymore. I think those people sort of just went away because the industry just can't have that. And you'll see that also, like if you think about chefs and culinary people and that, the idea was, they kind of fly off the handle, they're very demanding, you know, they don't...

It's not like that anymore. It really isn't. there's like the chefs are calmer because frankly they were, I I can go into mortality of chefs. I mean, I seriously, I had a podcast with the Burnt Chef Project that they just talked about what the mortality and the drug abuse around chefs is, but it's just not healthy. It's not healthy physically, it's not healthy for your business, it's not healthy. So why do something that's not healthy? I think when you get to a certain, know, when you get through business, you realize that healthy businesses

It's more than revenue and healthy businesses enjoy more success.

Kirti Shenoy (27:10)
From a macro side, Alex, what do you think the industry is really craving in terms of hospitality? Like if you think of hospitality, companies that are in need of hospitality, temp staffing workers, or in need of sort of this flexible style worker, you know, what industries are hurting the most and what industries really, really need like just like mass amounts of these types of workers. Do you have an inkling on that? You know, whether that's a trend, you know, in particular states or across the US?

Alex Atwood (27:36)
I think this industry, I'm talking about staffing in particular, like hospitality and sort of shift based staffing isn't going anywhere. I mean, when the economy starts to dip, companies still need people to be able to deliver services. So they end up going outsourcing and they end up finding an augmented service that they can bring in people so that they can actually perform. it gives them,

flexibility in that they don't have to have high capital costs and they can control their operational expenses by outsourcing. So I think restaurants, think fast food, I mean, I think any of super high turnover industries would do well with some sort of staffing model where they allow for.

the shifts that they have to go out to a marketplace so that they can make sure it's kind of like democratized how shifts are filled and all of that. And it's starting to take hold. There's companies now that are doing business with some of the larger fast food chains. But I think the adoption isn't fully there yet, but I think that's what I would say. Companies that really have this high turnover and they're a victim of that.

they could kind of think a little bit more broadly on how staffing or outsourcing could potentially solve some of their headaches.

Kirti Shenoy (28:50)
And Alex, you mentioned these high turnover industries like fast food service companies. How are you convincing them as a hospitality staffing leader to take the chance on a staffing company, especially when this industry operates on really, really razor thin margins? So how do you convince them on the sales side to take the chance on a staffing company, but also how do you explain to them the pros and cons of sacrificing a little bit of their unit economics with a staffing company

to solve that high turnover problem.

Alex Atwood (29:21)
⁓ Yeah, yeah, it's a good question. You you've got to really look at it, you know, if you break out, like you said, the unit economics and you look at like the per shift math, if you think about it, a bill rate consists of the worker pay, the taxes, the insurance, the operational costs, all of that. It's all blended in and you have your final rate. You don't have to worry about insurance. You don't have to worry about people filing unemployment. You don't have to worry about, you know, employees injured on the job.

And you don't have to worry about all of the HR dynamics that go around that, right? So, you know, a lot of the times the customers will see a bill rate that may look significantly higher what their pay rate is. So you do have to educate them. You do have to give them an idea of what exactly goes into that. And if they do the actual economics around it, they'll find that they actually save money when they wisely use staffing.

if you really use staffing as a tool in your tool belt, when it comes to sort of your overall operational ecosystem, and staffing is one of those, staffing companies, should say, staffing in general, but companies that outsource, you're gonna be able to just have more levers to pull. You're gonna just have more flexibility. I mean, you're just gonna have another option, right?

which is key when you're a dynamic business owner that wants to work in like a difficult market or where market conditions aren't ideal or whatever that looks like. I can't imagine why you'd want less flexibility in that sort of space.

Kirti Shenoy (30:43)
Awesome. you're still operating Gravy Work. It's been many, many years that you guys have been doing such great things in the hospitality space. What are you most excited for, you know, for this upcoming year or upcoming phase of the company? what is energizing you these days?

Alex Atwood (30:57)
What's energizing me these days? You know, what energizes me is just seeing all of the incredible advancements in technology and how that can enable people to be able to do all sorts of incredible things that they couldn't do before, including what we do, which is allow people to pick up shifts at corporate hospitality companies that

you know, they may not have even thought was available to them. And now, I mean, obviously AI, chat, GPT in the last, I don't know, 18 months has become like almost, it's almost like implanted into everyone's brain. So everyone's capacity has just grown. So I'm just super excited about what the future looks like in technology and in staffing. And I like the direction we're going in. ⁓

Although political climate can be a little weird, I think that people in general and the Gen Z and future generations have more empathy. I think that they have ⁓ a lot more self-awareness sometimes. Not all the time, but there's definitely some different shift in self-awareness. And I think that's a good thing for society in general.

And so I think we're evolving and I think way, whether it's technology, whether it's human beings, just sort of like finding empathy in the way that they communicate or whether it's just sort of the marketplace in general for staffing specifically, which seems to be growing year after year. And so those are all positive signs that really get me energized.

Kirti Shenoy (32:21)
And lastly, Alex, we like to ask all our guests this question. What does great work mean to you? You know, we call our podcast great work because we love the work and we love where work is headed. But what does great work really mean to you?

Alex Atwood (32:32)
Great work means you enjoy what you do. I think that's the key. If you enjoy what you do, like pure enjoyment, not enjoy getting a paycheck, not enjoy some future dream that may be a result of what you're doing, but just day to day, you really enjoy what you're doing. There's some fulfillment that it gives you is great work. Fulfilling work is great work. Enjoying what you do for a living is great.

Kirti Shenoy (32:56)
Thank you so much, Alex, for all of your insights on hospitality building, a tech-enabled hospitality staffing company, and your general reflections on where the future of work, especially in hospitality, is headed. We so enjoyed having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for your time.

Alex Atwood (33:12)
Thank you, See you guys.

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