Sourcetoad CEO, Greg Ross-Munro, Shares with Us How He Founded His Hospitality Technology Innovation Company and Talks about Lessons Learned from COVID-19
To start with, how are you and your household carrying out in these COVID-19 times?
Greg Ross-Munro:Well, the pet dogs are extremely excited to have the majority of the people home more, that’s for sure!
Inform us about you, your profession, how you established Sourcetoad.
Greg Ross-Munro:I started Sourcetoad in 2008, mainly as a software application development consultancy. As the company grew, we focused increasingly more on hospitality technology, partially due to the fact that I love to take a trip and partly due to the fact that it’s more fun to deploy code in Aruba than in an office building downtown. In 2013 we were given two big opportunities to work with significant cruise lines on smaller projects. From there, we’ve grown our group, our client base, and our innovation offerings.
How does Sourcetoadinnovate?
Greg Ross-Munro:Sourcetoad was set up as an innovation company, and that’s been our mission because day one; to come up with contemporary solutions to all of our client’s issues. We usually now concentrate on putting in the infrastructure to allow development. It turns out that if you develop pipes to enable the quick awareness of concepts, you become a development device. Focus on the plumbing, and the innovation comes naturally.
How the coronavirus pandemic affects your organization, and how are you coping?
Greg Ross-Munro:Although we have dealt with challenges, we feel lucky to be a service that could rapidly change to the pandemic results. We was among the very first business in the location to start working from house. It’s been a learning experience, but we have striven to keep our culture as much as possible. Having existing strong partnerships has helped us continue working with our clients throughout this time, even when there has actually been so much uncertainty. I believe it has taught us all about resilience, and I feel confident that we can face any other challenges that come our way.
Did you have to make tough choices, and what are the lessons learned?
Greg Ross-Munro:Like numerous other services, we have needed to make hard choices. We spent a long period of time attempting to determine the finest possible options that would affect the least variety of individuals. I believe we have actually done an excellent job of that, and our team seems to be adjusting well. A stating that we picked up in the office when things were truly demanding is, “Do the next ideal thing,” which has become our approach when things get hard. It might also be a line from a specific Disney film …
How do you handle tension and stress and anxiety? How do you predict yourself and Sourcetoadin the future?
Greg Ross-Munro:I constantly try to stay quite positive. If things get difficult, I remind myself that we’re all going to pass away one day, so I may as well reconcile it and not stress over the important things I can’t change.
Who are your rivals? And how do you plan to remain in the game?
Greg Ross-Munro:Our primary item offering, Cruise Director, is a fleet management suite that permits cruise ships to synchronize all their customer-facing content to an entire fleet. It tracks, integrates, and runs analytics throughout entire fleets of ships and even throughout brand names under the primary umbrella. It’s so excellent and so significantly various from what anybody else is offering in the cruise industry that I can’t compare us to anyone else straight. We intended to produce something innovative, and I believe we accomplished that. We do, naturally, have indirect competitors– home-grown systems and combinations of different vendors. We are quite close, however, to getting to a point where the ROI we provide to our clients is going to be frustrating. It’s a matter of understanding our clients’ companies and creating a culture that just builds better technology than anyone else in the area.
Your final ideas?
Greg Ross-Munro:The entire COVID-19 challenge has been an education. We’ve seen our industry take some serious hits, our team’s struggles with adapting to working remotely, and the stress and stress on everyone around us. Like any trial-by-fire, we have not come out unscathed, but we are absolutely stronger than in the past. New levels of trust have formed, both within our teams and with our customers, since we have actually had to count on each a lot more. We are not out of the woods yet, but the incredible action to adversity that I’ve seen in the people around me has actually made me understand that our survival and success are an absolute inevitability.