Meet the founders behind the new LinkedIn for hospo
The Shaker Collective launches, social photos from the Boothby Best Bars awards, and more.
In this Monday’s letter: the duo creating a LinkedIn of sorts for the global hospitality industry, all the photos from the Boothby Best Bars NSW awards last week, and in case you missed it, details on the next bar to open in Enmore. New here? You can get the email direct to your inbox here.
Marissa Johnston and Evonne Eadie have launched the Shaker Collective, which is billed as a platform for the hospo community to get together and connect online — without all the crap that comes from social media. The duo says that the central idea behind it is to move all those hospo group chats and Facebook bartender exchanges you have into one central place — and one that is separate to your personal life.
It’s a place where bartenders — initially in the UK, Australia, and India, but everyone everywhere is welcome — can look for jobs, organise guest shifts, and look for collaborations opportunities. You’ll be able to see what brand events are in store in your city, and brand reps will be able to get in touch directly with the bartenders in their areas.
Crucially, access for hospitality workers is free; brand folks and others can access The Collab Collective for $49.99 a month.
The co-founders have spent their careers in the hospitality space, bringing with them plenty of insight: Marissa previously led Diageo’s World Class and advocacy programs, and Evonne was the head of advocacy for Diageo in India before founding trade publication Perfect Serve India.
Below, edited and condensed for clarity, I spoke to Marissa and Evonne to learn a bit more about the program. And you can find us on there already — come and say hey.
Boothby: So is this a bit more LinkedIn than Instagram or Facebook?
Marissa Johnston: I think it’s the LinkedIn equivalent for hospitality. But also, our goal through our events is initially we’ll be doing virtual events, trying to break down some of the barriers to access to information that communities don’t get. You know, BCB is a couple of thousand people maybe in London, but even within the UK, there’s thousands of people that work in hospitality that don’t have the means to get to something like that. As we grow, we want to be growing our team so that we’ve got community managers in each region that can help us grow these communities, bring people together and manage a bit of that online/offline experience as well.
And so it’s free for bartenders to use?
MJ: Yep.
How are you guys going to solve the problem of completely irrelevant posts on there, as we see often in the Facebook groups? You’ll be making editorial judgments, I guess.
MJ: We’ve set out our initial community guidelines, which are a starting point. You’re never going to be able to control exactly what everyone posts. But I think it’s one of those things that we will learn as we go and adapt as the platform grows. It does have built-in moderation. So people do have the ability to report content. So if something’s inappropriate or political or anything like that, they can report it then comes to us as the host to review. We’re going to take a zero tolerance policy on anything like that.
And if people are spamming it as well, then we just need to train the community of what type of content we will accept and what we won’t.
And there will be a space for job ads, and those looking to find work?
MJ: The way we’re looking to tackle the endless thread of people looking for jobs is by separating out the job section.
How did you guys come to settle on this sort of this platform and this idea?
MJ: I actually drew out mainframes of something like this years ago, spoke to developers around guest shifts. That’s kind of where the idea came from initially of how to help venues and brands collaborate more on guest shifts. Because it was like the same circle of people just working with each other. And then started talking to another developer at the end of last year around reskinning something, and then finally found a solution that required less development.
The idea really stemmed from World Class in the end and managing brand ambassadors in 50 countries around the world — how you can bring together communities in one space? So it’s been a fun six months getting the research and obviously building it to our best knowledge of what we think is going to work. But as Evonne said, it’s something that’s going to evolve with the feedback from the community on what they want as well. We can we can tweak, we can add new features pretty easily, which is great.
Are the users able to go and create their own groups with inside this? Like in a WhatsApp kind of way or no?
MJ: No. So it is first and foremost a networking tool. We want people to be networking in the broader communities.
Where do want to see this go? What’s the big stretch goal for you?
MJ: For me, I would like it to be the largest community for hospitality and the go-to resource for networking and collaboration. And I think if I could do one thing for the community, it would be to break down barriers and access to resources, but also to shine a light on communities that don’t get the spotlight that they necessarily deserve.
Evonne Eadie: I’m largely aligned with that; I’d like it to pave the path of what a career in hospitality can be. I think you have a big collection at the bottom that might not actually see in 10, 15, 20 years what actually is there. So they may leave the industry and you lose these incredible minds purely because they don’t know how amazing a long-term career in hospitality can be.
What would you say to some bartenders who probably think that the idea of networking per se is like a dirty word?
MJ: If someone says to me, you’ve to go to a networking event, I’m like, my god, kill me now. I network in my local bar by just having a drink and chatting to people. So I think what we want to do is show people what different networking looks like, and what that can unlock. And for us, that would be about shining a light on people’s stories, career stories, and how they’ve got there. And it’s not by going to a networking event or spruiking [or] spamming this. It’s making introductions, celebrating other people, and just being recognised and seen.
Yeah, it’s about building relationships.
EE: Yeah, exactly. And that’s going to flow through our content. How did you get to where you are? What’s the biggest unlock you’ve had in your career? What’s a piece of information that you wish you knew 10 years ago? So we do want to start shining a light on those who sit in these very well-known roles. What happened? There’s 10 years behind that. What is this journey that you’ve been on? Because someone might want to replicate that, or learn from your mistakes.
Last week the best bartenders and operators in NSW got down to The Trocadero Room in Enmore to celebrate the third annual Boothby Best Bars NSW awards — get a look at all the social shots and all the action at the links below.
Sam Bygrave
Sam Bygrave
On the Boothby Best Bars NSW Top 50 this year, bars in Newtown and Enmore made up a fifth of the list, comprising the second largest concentration of quality bars outside of the Sydney CBD.
And a new bar is set to join their ranks by the end of July: Deadwax.
You can read about it at the link below.
Sam Bygrave