Ep 81 : In Conversation - Benjamin Tan, Deputy CEO & Chief Commercial Officer, Wildlife Reserves Singapore
Summary
As we celebrate Earth Day, Executive Director David Kelly meets Benjamin Tan, Deputy CEO & CCO of Wildlife Reserves Singapore, responsible for Singapore Zoo, Jurong Bird Park, River Safari and Night Safari.
Benjamin discusses the upcoming project with Banyan Tree to create Singapore’s first Super Low Energy resort, how the resort will be made sustainable, and what you can expect. He also shares how WRS educate visitors on conservation and sustainability, how they plan to relocate over 3,500 birds across 400 species from Jurong Bird Park to Mandai and acclimatise these birds into their new habitat, as well as how they have managed the locations during COVID-19.
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"While we look forward to the scale and scope of the new attractions, this commitment to sustainability, that is what truly distinguishes us." Benjamin Tan, Deputy CEO & CCO of Wildlife Reserves Singapore [click to Tweet this quote]
Episode Resources
Connect with Benjamin Tan on LinkedIn
Find out more about Wildlife Reserves Singapore
Find out about the Mandai Project
Episode Transcript
David Kelly: Hello, and welcome to in conversation with me, David Kelly, and this series, I sit down with brilliant businesses and the people that run them. And whilst we celebrate Earth Day, this week, I'm delighted to be joined by Benjamin Tan, Deputy CEO of Mandai Park Holdings. Ben's responsibilities, cover asset development, F&B, retail, sales and marketing, as well as general commercial strategy and performance across all assets owned by wildlife reserves, Singapore and the under construction man-made park development piece as well.
He's also Managing Director for Mandai Global, a wholly owned subsidiary of Mandai Park Holdings, focused on establishing and operating new lines of business and driving expansion into adjacent industries. Spanning the experience economy, ecotourism and edutainment. Prior this role, Ben was the Senior Vice President at Qantas Airways from 2014 to 2019, primarily based representing partners, regulators, investors, tourism, organizers, and was a board member for all Qantas-associated companies in Asia as well. And before that was the Head of Global Sales for Jetstar Airways. And prior to that, held various senior positions at Microsoft and Nokia and has lived and worked in Beijing and Tokyo too. Ben a really warm welcome to you. I'm delighted to have you onboard with us today. Great to have you with us.
Benjamin Tan: Thanks, David. It's great to be here.
David Kelly: Let's get started. You're the Deputy CEO of Mandai Park Holdings and responsible for the rejuvenation of the Mandai precinct to an integrated nature and wildlife destination. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about what it is that's going on and some of the projects.
Benjamin Tan: Yeah, sure. For readers who may not be aware, Wildlife Reserves Singapore owns and operates the Singapore zoo, river safari, night safari and Jurong bird park. If you were to visit us these days, you would find that the Mandai precinct is a massive construction site.
We are in the midst of putting the finishing touches on the new bird park, following which Jurong park will close and relocate to Mandai. We are building an additional new zoo of a completely different style, not seeing anywhere else in the world. We are building two indoor attractions along the lines of, I suppose the closest equivalent in Singapore would be the art and science museum, a very large indoor playground and a resort that will be operated by Banyan Tree.
So as a part of the redevelopment, we will be creating two new public areas that will be unticketed and freely accessible to the public. With F&B retail and event space. There's a fair bit that's going on. If things go according to plan, we will go from having a visitorship of 5. 2 million people per year, pre COVID and taking that and molding and will be doubling that over the coming five years. What's extraordinary is the care that we have taken in so far as protection of the environment, we have surveyed the forests around and made a commitment to preserve over a thousand trees. Even once we built new assets and in the event that we have to remove any trees, we have made a public commitment that for every tree we've had to remove, we will plant two. A key feature of the new precinct is an equal link that connects the two sides of the nature reserve that has been separated for the past 50 years.
So while we look forward to the scale and scope of the new attractions, this commitment to sustainability, that is what truly distinguishes us.
David Kelly: Amazing. You mentioned some of the work in collaboration with Banyan Tree. I believe you were creating Singapore's first, super low energy result within Mandai Park and this sounds really exciting. Can you just share a little bit more about what we can expect and how the result will develop and how it will be sustainable?
Benjamin Tan: There's much to look forward to that resort actually. It will be Banyan Tree's first property in Singapore, they have been quite successful and gained a very good reputation outside of Singapore.
So the founders and management of Banyan Tree are really looking forward to setting up something as a part of the homecoming, so to speak. We have a very deep abiding commitment to sustainability. So as a part of the construction, we are looking at minimizing use of common areas. That one typically associates with being an indoor spaces and hotels, and we will be providing incentive for guests to minimize the use of electricity while staying in the room.
And every single thing that we do from carbon footprinting for the menu of F&B items. Tracking of energy usage, all of that has been taken into consideration. So there's much to look forward to, there's a limit to how much I can talk about it because it's under embargo, we do want to save an element of surprise and delight when we launch.
But yes, indeed, we are targeting it to be quite an extraordinary building. When's it going to be operational? When's the development looking at being completed? Let me just say this. COVID has obviously introduced an element of uncertainty, but we will be looking at completion of the whole precinct within the next four to five years.
David Kelly: Goodness. The Wildlife Reserve Singapore have conservation as a top priority and are currently supporting over 50 projects in the region, including Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam. Can you tell our listeners more about the work you're doing here in Singapore, perhaps around the penguins or the bamboo sharks and how you choose such projects to support. And it'd be also great to hear and what you're doing in other parts of the region as well.
Benjamin Tan: Yeah, sure. We participate in NC 2 conservation, which is protection of animals in their natural habitat, as well as XC2, which is outside of their natural habitat. We participate in the curation protection study and breeding of animals, both within our parks, as well as supporting projects that are outside of Singapore.
Just to give a data point and example over the course of 2020, we have had close to 400 live births between our parks at Mandai spanning over a hundred species. Of which 29 species, if I recall, are actually endangered animals. The births of particular significance is a pair of Malayan tiger cubs of which there are only about 150 left in the wild.
So every addition counts very much. We work with other organizations for Institute conservation in country, and we really select the projects that we believe is of significance and where we have expertise or resources to add. We try not to spread ourselves too thin because there is a finite amount of resources that any organization has.
But we believe that running a zoo as an attraction is merely a shopfront. It allows us and enables us to fulfill our remit of public education and engagement. But the real work and what defines us as an organization is the protection of animals, international habitat. In addition to conservation we also work with local communities to support business clearing forest land for cash crops.
To give an example. One of the reasons that forests are cleared in this part of the world is for coffee plantation and a search in Indonesia, in particular, we work with one of the communities to buy coffee. That's grown in the shade called well coffee, so we buy up all of the coffee crops and we serve them within our parks.
And we believe that it is involvement in projects like these that give us permission to keep animals, to keep and display animals. So we want to balance. Know the work that we do with animals into building this as well as fulfilling the our remit of public education and engagement within the parks, in terms of public engagement and education, it is awfully difficult to convince the child that he should grow up to care about giraffes when he has never seen one. So that's how we look at our mission in totality.
David Kelly: I'm going to ask a bit of a silly question then. So I guess with the zoo, obviously it's probably a bit easier to tag and log all the different animals that you have within that asset. But how do you monitor all of the species across your other assets, where they are freer and it's more of a natural environment for them. How do you pull all that together?
Benjamin Tan: We work with researchers who are in view, we have a conservation on that is a part of our partnership that we have with Temasek under their other domestic trust that supports the work of field conservationists in country. So we do keep in very close connection with the people that we support, both from an expertise and funding perspective.
David Kelly: Can you share with us a little on the research that? The Wildlife Reserve Singapore and the Republic Technic have embarked on since 2019 around the use of black soldier flies as part of a commercial waste management system. It sounds really amazing that you would connect to the opportunity with the assets, to the academic sector as well, to look at the future of waste management here in Singapore, it sounds like a really exciting project.
Benjamin Tan: Yeah, we are quite excited and energized by a prospect as well. So perhaps to describe the project in a little bit of detail we are looking at whether there is a closed loop ecosystem that can be used for processing animal waste. So as you can imagine, we have 15,000 animals in our living collection. Which generates a good amount of waste that otherwise has to be incinerated.
So the way that we look at the use of blacksoldier flies is that the lava is actually getting all the organic materials within the excrement. So when they're done with the excrement, what's left is actually, highly nutritious and very good use, quite appropriate for fertilizer.
And when the lavae mature into adult black soldier flies, the adult black soldier flies do not have digestive system. So in the event that they escape, they do not become pests because they are not attracted to food. They have only one mission, which is to lay eggs, that hatch into lavae and that we can continue to use to process animal waste.
And as a matter of fact, where we have excess lavae they are actually highly nutritious and delicious meals for the primates. So really this is about leveraging what is naturally occurring within a controlled basis to serve a very practical purpose. In a way that is beneficial to the environment in terms of requiring less energy for the process of waste.
David Kelly: Great to see that as an opportunity and some of that's coming out of all of your activities as well, but of course, within Mandai Park, sits as you've mentioned the award-winning Jurong Bird Park, the night safari, river safari, and the Singapore zoo, which I personally absolutely adore going to the zoo.
It's absolutely brilliant, but they really are iconic destinations here in Singapore, not just for tourists that are coming in, but also for those that live here too. What's it like running such massive assets and things that so prevalent for us here and also the pressure of business community and the wider communities here go down and visit. It must be a real privilege.
Benjamin Tan: It is a privilege and quite an honor, and quite frankly, it's a pretty happy job when we arrive at work in the morning, pre COVID, you would be surrounded by excitable kids in school uniforms on excursions, waiting to get into the parks. And at the end of the day, you generally see visitors leaving our precinct exhausted, but happy. There's a place of really positive energy. You feel that you're involved in something that has meaning, that contributes not only to issues on conservation and sustainability, which is really important to us, but also to the overall community at large, as a property and as a business, we are quite well loved by Singaporeans and Singapore residents. And we do believe that we have a role to play. Especially in this difficult period that we all going through.
David Kelly: Clearly the pandemic had a big impact on lots and lots of businesses, especially those in the tourism sector, like yourselves. A couple of questions as you're in a position of leadership. How did you navigate the last year? Because you've got lots going on. You've got lots of developments happening with relocating the bird park for example, how have you kept everybody motivated and keep yourself motivated?
Benjamin Tan: I think for us what's unique about us. So first of all, to agree on your point, this has indeed been a really difficult year for any business which is dependent on visitorship. So we are not unique and we are not alone in that respect. Around the world we hear of really distressing news, such as some zoos potentially seeking to euthanize to help with loss to feed the kind of loss we have heard of our museums, considering the unthinkable, which is starting to sell the art collection.
The distancing procedures that the government has had to implement as a matter of necessity has actually made it a pretty difficult period for us to get through. The fortunate thing about Wildlife Reserves Singapore is that we have benefited from the Job Support Scheme that really took a good chunk of the burden that we would otherwise have to shoulder.
And the other thing as well is that we are reminded every day as we come to the parks that we do have a whole new precinct under development. So there is much to look forward to and then that's been what's been keeping us going.
From a positioning perspective and how we tied ourselves through this period, we go back to first principles, right? Which is, why do we exist? We exist because of the work that we do in conservation. We also exist because we have a community remit because this is a place of respect that this is place of rest. It has actually pushed us to rethink how do we deliver our value proposition in different ways and in the format that is consumable by our customers.
It has actually turned out if I'm, if I were to be perfectly honest here to be a period of great creativity. To give two specific examples. We were among the first zoos in the world to come up with a virtual product. So this happened about six weeks into circuit breaker, where we started making available zoom sessions, such as the one similar to the ones that you and I are having, where we enable our customers at home to come face to face with an animal and to answer questions and to field questions, and to have a discussion with the people who are providing the care and day to day management of that particular animal. So in particular, our penguins are quite popular . And we have a capybara called Mo who's quite a crowd pleaser. So what this has enabled us to do is to actually reach out and continue to have a role in the community. For kids who are stuck in school and not able to socialize , not have a proper birthday party, for adults and for companies who will quite frankly bring in a good break for meetings that take place. So that product has enabled us to enter living rooms, boardrooms. It's been broadcast also the Singapore as well to to our hotel partners who have guests serving quarantines. And that's something that we are quite proud of. The thing that we have done new creative use of the space during a period of social distancing to create new product categories, to appeal to a completely different group of customers.
So for example, over the past March holidays, we have come up with a glamping product right in front of the huge melody tank that we have in a river Safari. And that's something that we test marketed it over the March school holidays, and we weren't sure how well it would sell. There was a limit to how many camps we can put in because of distancing procedures.
So we could do no more than four camps with a maximum occupancy of 20 people over the week. Every single one sold out within five minutes, which has been a huge confidence booster. And we are currently in the process of figuring out what's the best way to scale it out. Every week, we aim to have something that's a new, exciting differentiator, whether it's in the form of glamping and whether it's in the form of a dining events. So that's something that we believe that our customers really can look at.
David Kelly: Great to see you that you have pivoted your organization that way and provide experiences in different ways, I think is really, it's really impressive. Another silly question if I may, was there ever a concern that the virus was going to spread across the animals in the zoo? Was that something that was in your annual risk register in terms of what happens if this does impact our wildlife?
Benjamin Tan: That concern to be quite honest, this has always been on our mind to the the primates in particular are susceptible to diseases that affect humans and as such with, or without COVID, we actually have pretty strict separation protocols between our human visitors and our animals. So that has always been there. If you were to drive a vehicle into the back of house areas where we've closer access to our animal to our living collection because we'd have to pass through all the hoops. So the concerns about zoonotic diseases that spread between humans and animals have always been a part of our separation protocol and a well ingrained, deeply embedded portion of how we manage the animal human interactions. In fact, if I could add a little bit in general, we are more worried about our animals catching stuff from humans. Flu virus can pass between a human being and an orangutan, and that's not a good thing. So we do take great care on these matters.
David Kelly: Â It's not something I would ever have to deal with in my day job. So I find it amazing that you have to consider it new as, I guess the social distancing helped him in that respect. Moving away from Covid I think we're all sick of it. And I think we're just waiting for the world to get back to normal so we can start enjoying the wildlife again. You've got some really brilliant things coming up haven't you the new bird park and the relocation of the bird park, that must be a huge undertaking. Super exciting. How do you even go about a project like that, how far along are you with it, and what have some of the challenges been?
Benjamin Tan: The bit that we need to work through very carefully when we are looking to relocate an asset, the size of Jurong bird park, it is among the very largest parks in the world. So when we are looking at moving the bird collection to the new bird park, it does require quite a bit of careful choreography. So to, to assure listeners who are as concerned as we are about animal welfare, we do not have staff running around with a net trying to catch birds. What we do instead is to condition them, to move themselves within containers that are then sealed and move to the new property. And then there will be a period of a climatization because they need to get used to the new surroundings in order to reduce the overall levels of stress in the system.
And during the period of the time, we will be very careful not to open because we don't want the influx of visitors and folks having cameras introducing further variation and further stress. There are also other considerations, including the fact that the new bird park is going to be significantly larger.
In many ways we will have one of Asia's largest penguin tanks at the new bird park if we were to take the existing penguin colony in Jurong park and put it in the new bird park nobody will be able to see them because the new enclosure is that much larger. Now that means that we need to work with other zoos to be able to induct penguins, to fill out a new park.
So you can't exactly go into Amazon or on Lazada or Shoppee to buy penguins. It doesn't really work that way. We are quite careful and quite selective in which partners we work with. Some of these birds are actually hatched for us and then comes to period of making sure that they're transported to Singapore.
And you would imagine that in this period that we were going through transportation and logistics is not to be taken for granted. And then there's this new period of a climatized issue. So it's quite finely tuned choreography that needs to happen. That includes multiple stakeholders ranging from patrol operations to the avian team in the zoology department to effect what would be a move. As a matter of fact, moving the staff, this is actually having the staff get used to the new park is probably the easiest thing. Getting the birds to be acclimatized in the new park, that takes time.
David Kelly: How do you stop the birds from flying away?
Benjamin Tan: During the transportation, we actually move them in containers. So we use very large containers. We give them an incentive to get into the containers. And, during such time, when they get comfortable with the containers, we close it up and we move them. So there's no risk of them escaping. And then we transport them directly to inside the aviaries inside the walking aviary, of the new bird park before opening.
David Kelly: Great stuff. You're doing an amazing job. How can we help to inspire to get more people involved in the parks? Such as conservation ambassadors or corporate engagements, it would be great to see if we can amplify the key messages that are coming out of your activities and all of your team that are doing an amazing job. How can we do a bit more to inspire our sort of community to get involved?
Benjamin Tan: Thanks very much for asking. We do have quite a vibrant volunteer program or a docent program for young people who do volunteer with the parks we have aspiring vets who have been volunteering with us for a number of years . As a matter of fact, we have employees that used to be volunteers during the student days. Any wonderful parks, every dollar of expenditure, there will be a portion of it that gets diverted to supporting the conservation work, whether it's in the field or within the parks. The value exchange is really simple. To our listeners, if you have a good time at any of the parks just visit us more. And, every visit counts in terms of enabling us to keep contributing towards supporting animals in the wild as well as in the parks.
David Kelly: I remember Anuka your polar bear who was wonderful. And I remember seeing all of the kids' pictures on the walls that were saying goodbye for Anuka which was really sweet. And you're in a position where actually there's some social pressures in terms of the animals that you can can't have in the zoo, or shouldn't have in the zoo because it's not their natural habitat. How do you balance that? Because it must be really difficult. There could be an exciting opportunity to move an animal in Singapore, but actually socially it's not the right thing to do.
Benjamin Tan: That's something that we think quite hard about, ethics really matter to us, the way that we think about our animal collection, we are incredibly selective about the animals we induct, the source of the animals we induct and the process of the induction. To give an example, so for a polar bear, it's a very large animal requires a lot of living space. Not a native from a climate perspective and clearly it does not belong in the tropics. Would we do it again? Today we wouldn't and it's got nothing to do with cost. It just feels like it's the wrong thing to do. Yet Anuka turned out to be a wonderful asset and a great ambassador. Absolutely. Yes. That's a positive externality out of a bad situation. If I could give a couple of other considerations most top zoos around the world today, absolutely do not pay a butcher to capture an animal from the wild and bring it to the zoo. That absolutely does not happen. And as a matter of fact, we are very careful about where we source our animals in terms of our partner institutions because we want to make sure that we are not unknowingly supporting poaching activities. So that's something that we are dead against. Is there benefits to having animals in captivity ? Actually, yes, you can study them. There was a lot of research that suggests that about 80% of what we know about wild animals are actually research done in the zoo, in zoos around the world. And let me just give you an example.
A number of years ago, there was a there was a documentary called Blackfish with quite frankly, a lot of bad press. For good reasons. So it was quite appalling how the killer whales were treated. But on the other hand, because he will have been successful in breeding killer whales in captivity, they have contributed a tremendous amount of knowledge to the care and feeding nutritional needs, and even the gestation period of killer whales
Before killer whales were in captivity, no one knew how long the gestation period was. No one knew what a killer whale that was pregnant would look like. Is there value to that knowledge in terms of enabling us to conserve that species? Absolutely. Yes. Does it mean that we support going out to catch a killer whale and to keep it within a confined space? Absolutely not.
To give another example in the eighties and nineties for members who have been resident in Singapore for a while, we had a really powerful and really effective animal ambassador called Ah Ming orangutan. She's incredibly tame wonderful companion. You could bring her out and sit her beside the guests and have been instances where our Chairman at a time, we're just putting Ah Ming beside him in the buggy and go for a ride around the park. Ah Ming was tame enough to be brought to Orchard Road. And then she played an immense role in the education of kids, getting them to care about wildlife. Ah Ming was so good at what she did. So is that the ethical thing to do? Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, I saw an interview in the documentary quite some time ago that they interviewed a poacher- to capture a baby Orangutan, a poacher on average has to shoot about 15 nursing mothers, to end up with one who is not either dead from the fall or crushed by the mother as she falls from the tree. So there you have this terrible conflict, you have really effective animal ambassador, that came because of actions that were incredibly inethical and absolutely not something that we want. Did we buy Ah Ming from a poacher? No, she was a rescue animal that just happened to pass through Singapore. And we were the only place that she could have gone, because if you return her to the jungle, she would not survive. It can be highly conflicting.
When you consider the issue, was Anuka a really effective animal ambassador? Yes, first-class right. Anuka was charismatic. She was large. She was a favorite. She was a crowd pleaser and she was considered quite frankly a breakthrough back in the days. Oh, a polar bear, born in the tropics, how cool is that? And now let's see how she goes. Would we ever think of doing that again? No, because no, it doesn't mean that we haven't benefited from having her around and that doesn't mean that we haven't had the generation of visitors and guests who have been inspired by having Anuka around. But is this something that we want to do today? Absolutely not.
David Kelly: Anuka's parents were brought here, but Anuka was born in Singapore. She was a Singaporean polar bear
Benjamin Tan: She was probably smaller than ideal, but that's a matter of not having sufficient levels of exercise. If you were to think back, the team, we are quite proud of providing absolutely the best possible care that we could to Anuka, but really this is an animal that's optimized towards swimming very long distances and with a very large hunting area that just would not be right being kept in a small enclosure.
So again, if you rewind the clock using the BritCham time machine and you visited zoos around the world, in the eighties, you would find chimpanzees in zoos in Britain, but dressed in clothes and having tea parties. So that's wrong. So no zoo would ever think about doing something like that ever again, including zoos that used to do stuff like that in the past. So we think that as institutions, zoos actually had quite an ignoble start right? So animal collection started because you have powerful and wealthy traders, who sailed the seas. And then when they return home, a giraffe would step off the ship and the crowd would go, wow, what an incredible magnificent beast and what an influential and powerful person this guy must be. So that's really how it all started. Animals in captivity evolve over time. There was the gradual accumulation of knowledge over time.
Quite frankly, in the past 20 years, there was this realization that we've had all these animals, living collection and they're starting to become quite endangered. So with that comes a level of responsibility, I think, and also the realization and the reality that as custodians and guardians of animals in a living collection are really in the best place to study on the natural behaviors. You cannot ultrasound a giraffe in the wild. You can do that in a zoo. So again, that's a part of the our contribution to the body of knowledge of the world around us.
David Kelly: We talk about a lot about mental health don't we, certainly over COVID we will be working from home. A number of us have been separated from our families for so long. And, I think we're all really conscious about just the way we're all feeling and behaving. And I think that's probably been a good thing, I think because of COVID, we're actually, I think a bit more reciprocal to how everybody else feels and everything's relative.
Do you monitor that with the animals as well? Do you monitor their mental health and their personalities and how they change and do you store that?
Benjamin Tan: Yes, totally. We do. We keep very close tabs on the wellbeing of animals, which includes mental wellbeing with or without COVID. So a part of the job of the zookeepers is actually to think up. And to create enrichment activities for animals. So this would include sometimes you would have obstacle course , I think we've posted a couple of these on social media, which are really our favorites and the keepers also construct in a sense puzzles for the primates and for the elephants.
So these are intelligent animals that you can't keep within an enclosure without thinking about their mental health and wellbeing. The benefits of doing that is that look, they're healthier. They're much more cooperative. They're much less likely to become aggressive and are being a good animal ambassadors. Again, through enrichment activities, you also start to realize that between different species of primates they have quite different personalities as well. So in general an enrichment activity looks like a puzzle you have to solve before you get some tasty food, so generally is in the form of snack all with nutritional balance .So the orangutans would tend to sit back, look at it and they will stare at it for maybe 15, 20 minutes. And then they will go there, just take it apart. So highly intelligent, very observant. And then you have some other species, like the chimpanzees that would just attack it and rip it and then try to pull it apart. Different approaches to the same problem. It's actually fascinating to watch.
David Kelly: I'm really jealous of your job, Ben. Absolutely amazing to get that close to nature is it's quite rare isn't it? It's absolutely brilliant.
Benjamin Tan: Then I think that you will really like some of new parks that we are building in particular. We have the code, we are calling it in advance of the actual name being announced that it's actually structured like the canopies of a rainforest, in terms of enabling guest to go to different layers, and look at animals in a close approximation of the natural habitats in the new and unique fashion. It's actually quite difficult to spot animals, right? So there would be an avenue or serendipity that's required because of the lush foliage . So quite a lot of the African safaris, a big five animals, highly charismatic very visible. The new rain forest park is built in recognition that rainforests are indigenous to this part of the world and in showcasing animals and species that live within the rainforest, not in a highly visible way that we have traditionally done in most zoos being as naturalistic as possible. So that's something to look forward to.
David Kelly: That's excellent. If I could bring the conversation to you a little bit, you've had a brilliant corporate career and certainly more recently working with two large airlines and then switching to your current role now. What were the main sort of challenges that you had not only jumping sector, but also I guess, the focus of your role, how did you make that step? And so what was your motivation and how did ease into your, into the role that you're doing now?
Benjamin Tan: I always focus on areas of commonality, whether our skillsets and experiences that you can harness that are transportable. So what is in common between a leading airline and the zoo is the abiding focus on customer service and guest experience. So that's something that we have in common. We also think very hard about segmentation. Selling different products that are priced differently to different audiences and communicating them differently. So to an airline, someone who takes a low cost carrier or sits in economy has very different levels of expectations to a customer who would drop five figures on first class airfare so probably think about the proposition to the customer. Holding ourselves accountable to delivering what's expected and just meeting the needs and requirements of our customers in terms of where they come from.
What is helpful is that I've always been quite lucky to have employers who are looking to do something a little bit differently. So I suppose, between an airline and a zoo, my background would be just different enough, but at the same time, having enough in common that that I would not be too risky to hire. So far it's worked out okay. It has been a wonderful journey for the past two years.
David Kelly: Then there's a question we ask all of our guests, which is printed off for you, with the British Chamber of Commerce time machine and with all of the knowledge and the experience that you've got now , to this point today, if we could transport you to a point in your life where you could offer yourself some advice, at what parts of your life would you go back to and what would that advice be?
Benjamin Tan: If I were to think about my personal journey, I spent the early days of my career- you talked a little bit about the journey I've taken. I spent about 10 years working for Microsoft, where I was always angsting a little bit about not the really knowing what I wanted from a work perspective, muddling along, I wasn't doing too poorly, appraisals were okay. But it always haunted me a little bit that I didn't really know what I wanted. And if I could offer some advice to my younger self, it would be that that's actually pretty cool. Nothing to be overly stressed about. Even for my counterparts who knew exactly what they wanted when they graduated, it tends to evolve anyway.
So our frames of reference, what we find important and what we find meaningful and impactful tends to evolve really significantly as we get on with life and living. So again, I suppose long-winded, we are seeing that would tell myself to be just to be a little bit more chill, and that it's perfectly fine to figure things out along the way.
David Kelly: Really good advice. Ben a huge thank you for joining us today. It's been wonderful to hear some of the challenges that you've had over the last year as a leader, but also some of the really exciting things that are coming up and your commitment to the environment and sustainability I think has shown through in this conversation.
So thank you so much for joining us.
Benjamin Tan: Thanks very much, David. That was good fun. Thanks for having me.