With over 10 years of experience in hospitality operations, management, and consulting, Benedicta Genevieve Ogar has collaborated closely with senior executives across various industries. She excels in positioning organisations for sustainable growth, demonstrating her prowess in hospitality business services, project management, pre-opening and post-opening processes, business development, brand and strategy development, hospitality recruitment, service training, and personnel management.
Her extensive portfolio includes internships with prestigious establishments such as Sequoia Lodge (Disneyland Paris), Mandalay Bay (Las Vegas), Caesar’s Palace (Las Vegas), and The Cosmopolitan (Las Vegas). Benedicta has also been instrumental in numerous projects, including Angle Villa, Circa Non Pareil, Nostalgia RestoLounge, ILE EROS, SEA Experience, Monty Suites Lekki, Jamari Residences, Metro Apartments, Hiro Hotels, Teh Harbour Hotel Owerri, The Creek Terrace Owerri, My Coffee, The Nook Hotel, ROMA, Kohinoor, Lifestyle 18, Madiba Group, Inaya Apartments, and Le Paris Hotel.
In her latest venture, Benedicta established The Service Arts and Hospitality Academy (SAHA), aimed at revolutionizing hospitality education. SAHA offers comprehensive training and education designed to equip students with practical skills and a passion for excellence.
In this interview with IFEOMA OKEKE-KORIEOCHA, she speaks on how she is preparing the next generation of hospitality professionals to make an impact in their careers and communities through innovative curriculum, hands-on experience, and personalized mentorship programs.
Briefly tell us about the Service Arts and Hospitality Academy (SAHA), which you established recently?
SAHA is an academy that we have set up to basically train hospitality staff and get them work ready. It is basically saying, come get trained and after that you do an internship and after that, you come back to correct based on the report that we get from where you have gone for your internship and then you fix that and you are market ready. We aim to train new people that are interested in the hospitality industry and also to up-skill people that are already in the industry that need training to get to the next level.
What is the ideology behind the way the academy is built?
What we have done is that we train, especially for the level of the people we have to work with sometimes. Classroom doesn’t always do it. We believe in practical learning. So it’s a ‘show me how to do what you need me to do.’ We have a room set up as a hotel room. We are basically training housekeepers in a real hotel room environment. You get to see what to do with the hotel room mattress protector. What do you do with the pillow protector? What do you do with the blanket? Which one comes first and which one comes after. Instead of teaching you on a board, you are engaging directly with the product or the material that you are going to be working with in a real work environment. We are focused on 70 percent practical and 30 percent theory.
What inspired you to do this?
This is something I have had in mind to do for a very long time but this has taken some time. So I had to work for a few years to be able to save up and put it together. I was trained in Switzerland and when I came back, I was a general manager of a hotel. I have managed some hotels here in Nigeria. When I came back, I noticed there was a gap with the skills in most of the people that we were hiring. So, what I did was that when it was time for me to work on any project, I would hire people by myself and then train them. In doing that, I realised that it was a serious issue and a challenge that we had. So, what we have set this up for is to now cater for the many different companies or hospitality businesses that need the service. We don’t want you to waste time when you hire people in trying to get them to understand or train them in what you need them to do. They come to you ready. You basically have to carry out an onboarding session. There is a need in the market for this and I saw the difference in how I was trained. Even though I was trained as an operations manager, my training included a lot of tasks. Some days I was a housekeeper, some days I was a waiter in a restaurant etc. Even though I was doing an operations management course, they didn’t think you could make people do things you do not know how to do yourself. So I found myself in the kitchen some days, I was a cleaner some days and I found myself as a front desk officer sometimes. What this did for me is that a lot of what I have learnt has really stayed with me. This is because I was shown how to do them. I had practical exams that involved leaving me in a dirty room and I had to get that room ready at international standards. You need to know the basics if you want to grow in the industry or become a leader in a hotel or even in the space.
It is not just me doing the training; we have a whole faculty here. There are people that have mostly been trained abroad. So we know what is needed and we are here to get that done.
How many students are you training at a time and what’s the criteria for selection?
For now, because the property we have is not very big, we will be able to take 15 students per class. We have a class for front office operations, a class for housekeeping operations. We have a class for Food and Beverage service. We have 15 people across each of these. When we are doing the intermediary level, which is for people who are already employed in the industry and they want to go to the next level; all we need is upskilling and some training to put them at a level where they are able to lead the people behind them and manage properly.
What’s the duration for the training?
In total, eight weeks. In eight weeks, you have your classroom work, practical and side visits, the internships etc. Then we have one week of class before graduation.
What is the cost?
From the last calculation we did, the least would be around N200 thousand.
You said you train people and make them ready for the market place. Do you partner with hospitality firms or hotels to provide jobs for people you train?
We have been able to partner with a good number of the properties around. So, first we are able to get our people in there to do a job shadow and another week of an internship and then we get a report from the property. We already have a staffing business which is a hospitality staffing business. So, we provide staff to a lot of the properties on the island. There is an opportunity already. There are so many clients looking to hire people but we don’t have a lot of employable people. That’s where we come in. So, we are now trying to train people so we can send them to our different clients. So, we have these partnerships in place.
As one who trained in Switzerland, what lessons do you think Nigeria can learn from Switzerland on growing the hospitality sector in Nigeria?
From schooling in Switzerland, I’ll say it is not the same. What we should do at this point is to understand what Nigeria’s hospitality sector looks like and not necessarily copy the Western way of providing hospitality services. Now, when you go to some properties they are adopting the American style, when you go to another property, it is the European style and in another property, it is a different style of service. There are so many different types of service out there. When are we going to sit down and say this is how we are going to address hospitality service as Nigerians? We need to start infusing our culture and tradition into the services that we provide. If the European man says I have to shake the hand of a guest. In Nigeria, we can decide that we bow or kneel to greet our guests. We need to just develop something for ourselves. So, Nigerian hospitality for Nigerians and for people visiting Nigeria; here is a need to experience true Nigerian hospitality.
How much capital flight are you saving by setting up a hospitality academy in Nigeria?
If you come in here for training, you’ll be saving a lot. What you are paying is about 150 to 200 dollar. If you were to take a one month course abroad, I can guarantee you that you are spending nothing less than 3,000 to 5,000 dollars, apart from transportation, your flight, accommodation, feeding and upkeep. You will also need to start to get used to a whole new environment.
We have a lot of people on the waitlist for the training and we are looking to take the first group, which will be the pilot in November.
In recent times, there has been an increase in new hotels and restaurants in Nigeria, especially at a time when there is an economic downturn. What do you think is the reason behind this?
This is still going to be around globalisation. There is a lot of travel and a lot of people are getting very much interested in Nigeria, even though those of us here are not really seeing the benefits of the value or what is in this country. This should tell us something. If we are saying the country is not good and there is nothing and we are all leaving, as we are leaving, foreigners are coming into Nigeria. They are making Nigeria their homes and they are staying here. This should tell us something. We need to start looking inwards. We have the numbers and we also have to position our country and ourselves in a way that sells us properly. Tourism is a huge thing. See where Dubai and UAE are today. They built something around tourism. So, if as a county we are able to look inwards and know what we have; because we have so much, then we will build something for ourselves.
I follow some influencers and they are showing you different places in Nigeria. So, I think we need to work on what we have.
Did growing up influence you to focus on hospitality or was there something else that inspired you?
My mum is a hospitality professional. I remember visiting her in 2005 at the Obudu Cattle Ranch where she worked at the time. My mum also went to a hotel school in Calabar. After school, she went on to work at the Obudu Cattle Ranch. I spent about six weeks in the ranch and I just knew that this is what I wanted to do. At one point, I said I wanted to be a lawyer and at another I said I wanted to be a newscaster. So, just that one visit in 2005 to Obudu Cattle Ranch changed everything for me. It was beautiful. Hospitality is just a way of life and naturally in Cross River where I am from, we have it in us. So, having gone to school to study, it just naturally stuck with me.
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