We had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Roch, a seasoned educator with a diverse background that spans over three decades. Andrew’s teaching career began in the early 1990s when he taught English and Politics in a French school located in the Alps. After this, he moved on to work for multinational IT chip manufacturer, Kingston Memory, where he developed and delivered a number of market-leading courses that are still taught today. Two of these courses were “Motivation Over Manipulation” and “Understanding Leadership Principles,” which focused on developing leadership skills and ethical business practices.
In 2009, Andrew saw a gap in the market for Purser Training, and with the support of three pursers, he spent 14 months developing the industry’s first Purser course. This course has since evolved and is now an accredited IAMI/GUEST purser course. Andrew’s expertise in this area has made him a sought-after consultant in the luxury yacht industry.
Throughout the interview, it was clear that Andrew has a genuine passion for education and training. His ability to identify gaps in the market and develop courses that address those gaps is a testament to his creativity and entrepreneurial spirit. It was fascinating to learn about his journey, from teaching in the French Alps to becoming an industry leader in Purser Training. Andrew’s story serves as an inspiration to anyone looking to pursue a career in education or start their own business.
Transcript ———————–
Farah [00:00:07] Hello and welcome to the Shipshape Podcast, a series of podcasts where we meet amazing people and talk about their experiences, personal, technical and all related to the maritime world. Come and dive in. Dive in, Dive in.
Georgia [00:00:41] This week on the Shipshape podcast, we speak to Andrew Roch, founder and managing director of the Palmero Group, founder, the Crew Academy, and dig into the thorny topics of yacht recruitment. The highs and lows of mental health support within the yachting industry, and how we should all be taking training much more seriously on board for our own sake. My name is Georgie Tyndall and I’m a freelance editor and writer within the Maritime Sphere. I’m recording this from the UK and I’m joined by Merrill Charette.
Merrill Charette [00:01:11] I’m a liveaboard on a Ta-Shing Tashiba 36, in Boston, Massachusetts. So, Andrew, where are you recording this from?
Andy [00:01:19] Hi, Georgia. I’m Andy Ross, depending on where you’re coming from. I’m coming from deepest, darkest Sussex just on the South Downs. And I’m sitting in what used to be the Maynard Keynes private office where he wrote Keynesian theory, postwar Churchill’s economy, the Second World War. He wrote that theory sitting at his desk looking at this fear onto me. Just over 80 years ago.
Georgia [00:01:47] And what’s the most philosophically fascinating thing you’ve ever written from that desk, Andy?
Andy [00:01:53] Actually, I wrote my first ever human profile of an individual who was struggling with cocaine and alcohol. 28 year old Irishman. And he came to me for some support and wanted me to build a program. And I did my first proper paying customer to help him build a daily vocal program to get him out of the addiction is currently 63 days into recovery, which is a joy.
Merrill Charette [00:02:20] So you’ve been in the yacht business for over six years, right? So where were you coming from before? How’d you end up in this side of the industry?
Andy [00:02:30] Thanks, Miles. Great question. I’m three years old. When I got my first job as a guest, an old 75 foot vessel sitting in the port camp called Navarre Latin, designed by a lovely old gentleman called, couldn’t speak and had to get his name. He was my father’s horse trainer and Freddy Tansley, and he took us on as a guest every summer. And we’d sit on the front of the boat looking at what was a boat called Tits, sitting in the Bay of Cannes or in Port Cantos. So I sort of started at a young age of three, looking at the water, looking at boats and being marveled by these wonderful white palaces. And in those days, a big boat was 16 foot. A vast boat was a boat like sitting in the harbor in a plastic, you know, nearly 200 feet. So my style was as a guest in all these incredible machines and looking at all the people running a boat. He had two wonderful people on board looking after him. Shows that. And Jose and one was his girlfriend and she did the cooking and just that was his Filipino housekeeper who would come and keep the boat clean on the weekends when guests were there. So it was a lovely entry into yachting and a beautiful river I call the next door. I on to water ski behind that when I was eight. So my sort of entry was a really young age by being Marvel by an old minesweeper converted into a yacht sitting in one of the newest ports in Cannes, built by an incredible guy called Picanto and eventually found out my grandfather had funded Picanto to build that port. Years later, when I found the certificate of ownership of one of the two parishes for the Port of which I then took it to a lawyer in Cannes who told me that I was a couple of years out of date to claim ownership of off the port. Strangely enough, it expired after 40 years. But yachting has always been in my blood from the day I was born.
Merrill Charette [00:04:41] You ever go sailing or anything like that? Only big boats. Little boats.
Andy [00:04:46] Yeah. I mean, you can see a job there that’s happy Go lucky. That was my father’s first small vessel, you know, under 30 foot sailing around the Isle of Wight, competing in the round the island sail. Throughout my childhood, I was predominantly on motorboats and I loved Sunseekers loved Reeva’s record, said I was the first to have a red sunseeker built by the founder of Sunseeker for my father, 36 foot small sentry pay. It was just a wonderful way to grow up driving around on the only red boat in the south of France surrounded by white boats. Again, very unique. As a kid, 38 knots. It was just a perfect day boat.
Merrill Charette [00:05:29] And where did. The whole education get involved.
Andy [00:05:32] When I started to fail at school, struggle at university and then had two years teaching, it was part of my degree. I ended up thinking I’d be skiing in France for a year and entertaining myself or my gap year teaching. So essentially I did a four vehicles and one year to teach, and I ended up in a mining town in the Alps in a little town called Eugene. That was a coal mining town with a vast technical college in it, and no one had any job opportunity. It was either become a ski instructor or join the dole. And the majority of the town of about 20,000 people were on the dole. So this big technical college where I arrived late September, dark autumnal night with my skis on the roof, and I was like, I’m going to stay here in here and teach. But foreboding. But in fact, all the kids at the school welcomed me and I ended up having the most amazing year being essentially motivated by students to teach them to speak English, despite the fact that none of the teachers liked me because I already spoke French and they would normally expect the year the individual who every year would come from England to France to not speak great French, then they could educate us in France, the Alps, subway, our cuisine, period. Fondue. I’ve done it already. But what I ended up being inspired by with the kids, you know, 14, 15 year old kids, girls and boys who had no prospect of any real future in that town, despite the fact that the Olympics had been the year before in Albertville, the Winter Olympics and the French and the Olympics built incredibly buildings and stadiums, and yet there were still no job prospects for these poor guys in the mountains. So that was my first foray into teaching where I learned that it was not at all to do with the school or the teachers. It was all to do with the kids and the students, and they were all that mattered. Their future, giving them hope, figuring out a way to extract the best out of each one on an individual basis, and not to follow the typical French collective that way in the middle. If you’re intelligent, you’re damned. If you’re not intelligent, you’ll be dumped. You had to be this middle small percentage which made teaching in France very, very difficult for me because I enjoyed finding those individuals that were either hugely bright or really struggling and then putting them together and getting the brighter students to support and mentor those that struggled with that matter. So it was a really wonderful year and it opened my eyes to how impactful and powerful teachers and education and students can be then mixed in the right way.
Merrill Charette [00:08:25] Then you must have realized that there was a gap in the market in the superyacht industry.
Andy [00:08:31] Got it. And we’re going back early 2000 supplied goods through a company I founded and then lost, sadly. But we were a big provisioning company and lots of teachers, bosses and captains were struggling with clearance. That duty accounts lots of different technically challenging paperwork trials, and we were shipping to the Maldives, the Seychelles, the Middle East, even to Singapore and doing the bad in the Caribbean. But it was these difficult logistic bases that were really struggling. And so we sort of figured out how can we provide them with sort of some sort of course to give them the foundations in how to manage that paperwork when it came to importation and clearance duties, accounting, VAT, etcetera. And sort of the post course morphed from that. We had three wonderful chief steward pastors that we worked with Katrina and Theresa and Angie, and we put more than one and she Wilson And over about a year they created the personal us and we sort of checked it, started delivering it, and Katrina was our first trainer. And then over the last 14 years, that course has just morphed into an encyclopedic, incredible program. I think we’re close to 700 persons have been through over the last 13 years, and that then morphed into the academy, into different educational courses, all the fluffy stuff, service, housekeeping, Butler, Floristry. But we kept coming back to the foundations of what were great courses, and that was real educational learning, maritime law, accounting, leadership management, h.r. Processes, structure that enabled stewardesses, purses and anyone in the other roles to really start learning again. And our biggest surprise there as we reached out to our alumni and. Last year, 60% of our students never did any education policy. Age of 80, and around 80% of our alumni never did any education was the age of 60. And that’s the most joyful thing to think that these incredible humans are giving their time and money to come to us. And yet how brave they got to be to put themselves back in that position that they may not necessarily have had the greatest journey at school. So we have to provide a safe, caring environment that’s also motivating and supportive so that that journey is not onerous. We don’t want them to leave us and go totally failed. It was just so scary and I wanted to leave and go. I love learning to go off and learn more and podcasts are awesome. My motto is people to learn and listen and then go research the subject to a theme that’s important to them.
Merrill Charette [00:11:30] So obviously doing this, you see the opportunity and you know, you’re basically opening the doors to opportunity for a lot of these people, but that is one side of it. How did you build credibility within the industry to begin with? Because I’m assuming that everyone that comes through will get a certification and, you know, have credibility within the industry.
Andy [00:11:51] Oh, yeah. I mean, Maria, let’s be clear. I’m I’m like Marmite. But if you have more buy in that, I think as an American alternative, you know, I’ve been a drug addict for 21 years and an alcoholic. And the last five years in recovery, I’ve had to repair and rebuild relationships, reputations and really try and make people understand that every person’s journey is unique and that if you show humility, vulnerability and kindness and you constantly put others first, then you have a real chance of rebuilding yourself. So if we turn that round to trying to build credibility around products, this causes our products associated business. We are delivering an educational product to build credibility takes time, and you can’t be in a hurry and you take little steps every day forward and a few back and you test things. And it’s a constant journey to empower other human beings to come and learn and also to persuade them that learning can be smarter. So credibility, the purse, of course, 13 years ago was not credible. It became credible because of the numbers started coming through and then the word of mouth. And then we watched over 13 years, stewardesses h heads and purses growing and growing into those roles. And, you know, I fought 13 years ago to get past an eight grams salary. It was nowhere near. It was five. And in some cases, no captains really were interested in a person certificate. You know, it was visibly seen as a waste of money. And we had an older person saying, Don’t do this. I become a person in 15 years of slogging. And yet we now see 23 year olds come through our program getting the highest grades. Specifically wanting to become a person in this industry. Is that career and not interested in doing five years going on the train. They have the desire, the push, the brain, the knowledge that you know, and they want to do it. And, you know, we’ve seen 23, 24, 25 year olds graduate with unbelievable results and then getting the jobs that they want, stepping into chiefs view and to HIIT into your management and into the personal of which there are now six Meryl George that there are senior persons, rotational persons deck persons guest versus crew assist. You know there’s now yacht administrators, there’s personal assistants, personal secretaries, captains, secretaries. I mean these are just roles that in the past would be fulfilled by the chief steward who would be overloaded with work, underpaid, undervalued and non certified. But we now have policies on 8000. They’re all certified for.
Merrill Charette [00:14:44] The people who don’t know what a purser is. Could you describe what that is?
Andy [00:14:48] Oh, essentially the poster is the Switzerland of the yacht. He or she she or a the de facto administrator, the Mother Teresa, the mother hen, you know, they are the person who provides the crew with structure, with a guiding word as to where to go to look. How do I do this? Where do I go for that? They do the accounts, they do destination management, guest planning. They help with flag state visits. They help when customs come on board. They are essentially the captains or the teepees or in fact any crew members, right hand person. And they are the most incredible individuals. Because their brains think differently. They have a structured sort of process driven algorithmic brain, and they want to help and they want to provide solutions and not put up an argument. So if you give a person a job to do, they’ll go out and research and figure it out. To present a solution. That’s right. Now a unique sample debate.
Georgia [00:15:51] Because when we did our interview about purses before and I had absolutely no idea really what line was. I thought it was more just kind of about financial management. I remember when we talked about it before, the role is just so much bigger than that. It’s just encompasses such a wide range of things on board.
Andy [00:16:08] Yeah. And the posters nowadays are becoming the safeguarding officers. They are becoming the mental health state champions that directing people where to go for support, how to process visas, how to apply for X, Y or Z, even down to offering them fiscal advice to where to go to invest their wages or how to pay in APRA, you know, short term bonus at the end of the trip. They’re incredible human beings, but I see them very much as each person and each vessel is a character. You know, we forget that a boat is a character and the character is the make up the chase, the layouts, the working structure, the flows of service, everything to the boat. And then we put the human beings into it, not the vessel owners, get them. It’s about the team that work within that structure. And how does that working structure live together, work together, socialize together, function in a positive way. So yachting is so complicated from a human perspective, and yet we see them being treated just as one entity. I see job adverts every day. Shift You wanted for me to vote or in life? Grant 60 days, but it bears no relation to anything in the world. From the recruiter perspective, nothing. You never see a job. CEO 180 grand, 30 days holiday has to travel. I mean, it’s just bullshit to be fired. Absolute bullshit. Profiling, detailing what’s the character of the boat, you know, what does the deck department consist of? Who are they? What are they? What are their nationalities? What are their ages? What do they like doing? You know, what turns them on? What turns them off? What type of characters are they? What are their histories? You know, what are their histories? Before yachting, we all forget that everyone had a life before yachting and in many cases had incredible careers before yachting. And yet we never want to see what they did before yachts. And when we start to look at these individuals from a human perspective, we understand that these incredible teams are just made up of such diverse, incredible human beings. And we very rarely celebrate the crew or the individuals for the next Chris.
Farah [00:18:29] This show was sponsored by Shipshape school.
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Farah [00:19:27] Welcome back to the Shipshape podcast.
Georgia [00:19:33] How often do you find that people have a real issue transitioning the other way? So say they’ve worked on yacht and then they go land based? I mean, I know it can be a bit of a shock for some people making that transition between the two things. You’re talking a lot about the human side of people and the industry. How often does it come up?
Andy [00:19:52] Well, I mean, we turn this back to what I was just saying. How often does recruitment and a focus on prebiotic never. You know, it’s a run up where you were born, what you grew up with, your schooling, any work experience, you know, all of that and the charitable stuff, whatever puts on that. They went to Africa and built a bridge for two years. You know, a recruiter would look at it and go, get rid of that as irrelevant. It’s totally not relevant. It’s totally relevant to this human being sitting in front of you. Look, the yachting likes to yachting is very cool overall, too. It’s humans that work within it and I mean that from the following and that it leaves in its wake so many borrowed from human beings and that broken from exhaustion, stress, burnout, fatigue, bullying, abuse. I mean it’s just close and stories. And yet I always believe that yachting is 95% good, 95% of yachties are incredible human beings. It’s just this 5% like in the world test just is 5% of predominately men controlling countries and ruining 95% of our lives. And yachting is to say it’s full of awesome people. But the one thing yachting lacks is time. This constant thing. I don’t have time. Don’t enough time to call my call home. I don’t have time to focus on my mental health or still exercise. I don’t have time to create a good diet for the crew because I’m so busy cooking to the guests, but enough time to go learn. It’s just that time management, if you want me to be frank, if they were told how to manage their time better, how to prioritize and how to empower others to support and pass delegate to people how to work, and your team would be in a much better position. But let’s get back to the question. So many yacht crew leave yachting and create businesses. It’s amazing. Every day I see a new business and let’s not talk about how many recruitment companies get set up by Yachties. That’s a different subject. But you see mental health companies being set up, you see practitioners, suppliers, you see your crew going into management, going to run their family businesses, setting up their own businesses. You get them going off and doing charitable work, you know, But at the end of the day, a lot of your crew, by the time they leave, hopefully they put enough money in the bank to be able to take a breath and just leave and start afresh. And the world is full of yachts outside of the yachting hubs of Antigua, you know, palm multi, the boat is full of yachts who’ve got successful lives, families, and they’ve been privileged enough to hopefully stockpile enough money to buy a house or two and to pay for schooling and to go and have a good life outside of yachting.
Georgia [00:22:42] I’ve never been crew myself. I have spoken to some crew members who have been quite candid about the fact that when they first got their crew salaries, they got very excited and spent all their money on, you know, expensive things and then quickly realized, hang on, I should probably put some of this time because I think it can be quite exciting for especially young people entering the industry. It can be quite a good wage compared to, you know, working down the local pub, for example, and in a wetherspoons in the UK it’s quite good money, but I think yeah, it’s about long term financial planning, isn’t it?
Andy [00:23:14] Absolutely. And it’s really interesting when you talk to Yachties, especially Yachties, who come from underprivileged backgrounds and who not necessarily grew up in Falmouth or on the Cape, etc., you know, we break them into different demographics. You know, I chatted to a young Welshman the other day. He goes home every holiday. He’s incredibly wealthy compared to anyone in his village, and yet he holds himself with such pride, which is very different from arrogance, you know, he wants to do to support his community. And he loves going home because he’s so grounded. And so ellipses, yacht, life, social media. And yet when he’s at home, it’s the polar opposite. And it’s about family, sisters, structure, his friends. And in fact, he’s empowered a lot of people in this region to look at not in a really positive way to look at engineering degrees and to go to college and to look at getting an extra ticket or to an extra A-level or even just to complete his GCSE or their GCSE, and then to figure out, is there a point? Halfway into yachting. But you’re right. Money corrupts all children, and the lucky ones are the ones that remain grounded and realize that they are not the guests.
Merrill Charette [00:24:37] When we started talking about your courses, I can imagine that you probably started off doing administrative and service training and looking at your courses. Now there’s a lot of soft skills and human based courses. So was there a specific story that you have where you’re like, Oh, we totally need to focus on that?
Andy [00:24:57] Or Yeah, that’s the story behind that. My own collapse into mental trauma. To be honest, Meryl, you know, I touched on the fact that for 21 years I was a cocaine and drug addict, alcoholic. I went through a process. I lost a business in yachting, and I didn’t understand why I kept defaulting, why I couldn’t get better. And luckily, I was helped by some trauma therapy and understood what had happened to me as a kid, the abuse I’d suffered at the hands of three men, and my life suddenly took a different turn. I had context and I gained perspective on my behavior as to why I kept defaulting to drugs as an escape in order to not feel. So we started as a team looking at mental health and what we needed to do to help others in the industry. Why were they struggling? And so we did our first mental health course. But really the catalyst outside of my own recovery and learning going on a learning journey to understand how I could become a better human being every day, to work on myself as a human being, to put others first and self lost. We sort of had this thing that happened called Colette, and we ended up with 36 kids and pass passes nature these doing a six month long course. Of course we meet every week, twice a week, 2 hours, and in fact we were three times a week Monday, Wednesday, Fridays during the first October and halfway through. It was so lovely to see people bounce onto the calls. We had a couple of girls who just were so engaging, so positive, despite the fact that they were locked up in apartments and hadn’t left throughout the whole duration of this course. And yet every day they get themselves dressed, do their hair to the makeup, put a different outfit on and bouncing to excite the group. And it just became a habit that we were waiting to see what they were going to be wearing and how they react today. And then the storytelling started. And so I thought, right. And I got them all to do a task of writing their coping diaries and I wanted them to share. So we set aside two days and we dedicated the diary to those sessions, and the stories started coming out about what had happened on both their boats and how they’d been treated by their other crew, their captains, their owners, management at wholesale trauma and some crews not being able to leave their boats ever. There were hugely positive stories, there were hugely damaging stories, and then there was the middle ground. And the middle ground is always good because it gives you perspective. The great stories give you hope, the middle stories, keeping perspective, the bad stories and the tough stories give you enable you to sort of emphasize and feel what they were going through. So we had this incredible collection of 34 stories, and it just got me going as to how many others out there are going through any one of these three types of journey. How can we get the great stories to the mix of the bad and everyone to see that the goal can come back and we can be back to yachting as normal? Just give them hope. And that’s sort of when we started running our programing programs and we sort of decided we were very lucky. We built a platform and it started to make a bit of money and we started to sell it to other companies and we had some extra money in the bank and it was like, What do we do with it? You know, we don’t need a car. My kids are at school, they’re all healthy. We don’t need anything. We’ve had a wonderful life and we’ve been very privileged to have always been able to earn money. And it was, let’s do something with this. And my wife looked at me and a couple of my team looked at me and went, Well, you’ve changed. How do we sort of bring a bit of that to yachting? So we started delivering off those first courses and that was the Captains Mental Health program, the suicide program detection, the recovery program that I deliver. And Hannah and others within the training team are just such incredible human beings that stories alone motivate other crew. But it’s about getting a crew together, getting 25 senior leaders, captains, each of these in a room on the scene for 4 hours or 8 hours and pushing them to open up and then giving them the safety to talk. And suddenly you see all of these connections and see shared stories, stuff that happened in their childhood and abusive alcohol and all that drank sister the. Died in a friend that’s killed themselves. So you get these collective stories of voices who people are just drawn in to be open and honest. And yachting loses all its barriers, all its ranks, all the tickets, all of the things on your epaulets. They all just disappear.
Georgia [00:29:44] I can’t really imagine. It’s tricky because addiction is hard enough, but I can’t really imagine how it must be to deal with that in the confined space of a yacht and then potentially also the confined space of a yacht during a pandemic. The pressures that people must have gone through in that particular period, especially when they were battling with these issues, are beyond comprehension, I think. Really? For me.
Andy [00:30:09] Yeah, daughter. You know, thank you for that question. I mean, addiction is for me, it’s a simple subject. Some human beings can drink and drug and have fun at home. Some human beings default to drugs and alcohol and other behaviors because of trauma. If you take behind every alcoholic, every drug addict, every gambler, there’s trauma. And most of the trauma stems from childhood. Somewhere the tapping parent, your set, your shit, your shit, your shit. What do you think? After 16 days, after 32 days of 64 days, they told that your whole life told. And if that is stupid, you’re ugly shit. You’ll never account to anything. Even a counselor, a school, a job counselor. It says, Hey, Meryl, you’re never going to account to anything. This is a senior person saying is a human being. That’s what trauma is like. Sexual trauma, rape, molesting, all of the different other traumas that are just constantly surrounding this every day. Patrols. And they lead people to default. To escape the escape is not wants you to feel the feeling that they have associated to the trauma. So we drank and we drank because that they were numb. We don’t have to feel that feeling. Now, if you can understand the feeling and if you can work with it, contextualize it and put it into perspective and turn it on its head, then anger becomes joy. Hate becomes love. It’s very simple and it’s about the human brain and how you perceive things. So, yes, lockdown can find those accentuated, magnified all of us. But let’s be clear, George, there were so many incredible stories. Management companies, you know, wake up, put in place lots of programs on their boats. I can name you, you know, lots of different companies and owners who supported their crew to the hilt. And yet we hear the 5% of how bad it was on a boat sitting in Dubai in the crazy over curtains watching and not letting the crew leave the confines of the vessel for nearly 300 days and just madness. But the one thing that was hard torture was the fact that in the past you could just take your passport and leave.
Georgia [00:32:21] That.
Andy [00:32:21] If you couldn’t take your post, they say, yes, you’re right. But I always look at the positives and the amount of happy stories that came out of it. I don’t look at the amount of alcoholics who got into recovery, so I look at the alcoholics who got into recovery during COVID and not the amount of people who drank themselves into alcoholism during COVID. I’d rather look at the positive them.
Georgia [00:32:45] Yeah, I mean, there is something as well of the of a drinking culture within the yachting industry. I think that’s pretty pretty locked in, isn’t it? Yacht shows, boat shows, lots of alcohol. There’s obviously a status association between yachting and even the breaking of a champagne bottle. You know, when you’re launching a boat, there’s there’s something there. Isn’t that going on around drinking and yachting as well.
Andy [00:33:08] I mean, drinking and coaching and yachting, it’s all about behavior. You absolutely. Georgia, most of these people don’t have trauma, so.
Georgia [00:33:17] They can do it. And it’s fine.
Andy [00:33:18] Absolutely fine. And that’s wonderful. And yachting celebrates, you know, in its own way. And it’s wonderful. So, yeah, you look at the boat shows, what you should do is at three in the morning, go to any of the clubs in Monaco during the show and look at the guys and gals who are going in and out of the bathrooms. And then they don’t make the shift at 6 a.m., you know, you disappear and then you do it repetitively. And then you notice that people have got serious challenges and problems and they need help. But, you know, your average yachting manager, right. Having fun on the show, Wonderful. It’s when it becomes destructive to you and those around you is when you need to look a bit deeper as to the reasons why. But I know plenty of people who drink quite a lot every evening until the day they die. And they have a wonderfully happy, sad part of being permanently in recovery is being able to be around and enjoy and celebrate all of those events. But just not to drink. But that’s just my journey. Georgia I can’t effectively tell anyone that to do yachting is an incredible space and will continue to grow, I think in. To a better place. You look at the new contracts coming out, you look at the recruitment programs being run that are crew focused, profiling, character focused. I read. I hope they can be a little bit naughty. And I read a post by an individual who has a manuscript recruitment recruitment company, and the individual stated how many hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of jobs that place this year and how wonderful it was and all these thoughts. And I just looked at it and it’s like, how many people if you showed three boats just to cut an invoice? How long did all of those people stay in their jobs? How many of those jobs were toxic? How many of those jobs had a mentor to welcome them on the boat in the buddy system, to empower them to learn the job? And this brings us round to shitty, crappy recruitment and the churn we have. I’ve got nine different names. Four different recruiters know their names. Terms? You know, a lot of them are on a different podcast constantly. Both candidates and captains and crew making decisions should think about it in a different way, and they should think about it for firstly the individual that they’re going to hire. What type of person do they want to join the team? Everyone’s got tickets. Everyone’s got experience. Everyone’s got CVS with lists of boats traded, all in the bid for the photograph and the bid through the age and the bid through the nationality, because legally you’re not allowed to look at either of those three. So don’t be a dick. You know, look at the human being. Do a face to face interview and learn to ask the right questions, but also learn to listen to the response. Don’t hear what you want to hear and put your unconscious biases in the bin and don’t allow people to recruit for their opposite position because you will recruit someone who is like you, but you’ll do a bad job of it. Yeah. So think about recruitment a different way. I mean, tonight at 5:00, we’re running our, I think our fifth recruitment session. It’s four nights long, 3 hours each, and we teach your crew how to look at each other. Recruitment and retention a different way. And this is a such a model of give create the right contracts, protect them so you can’t fight them on the spot because that works against you as a captain, because your only concern up value on the spot. But if you’ve got a rock solid contract, then you’ve got psychological safety in your job means you never worry about someone walking out of the festival and you’re meeting the opposite captain’s number is you’ll find the site doesn’t happen in the well. Look at your recruitment. Put in place professional policies, train your team to recruit, give them set blocks of questions, train them to profile and look at human being and see they put in place safeguarding officer who helps the crew train them all in mental health. Do some leadership training and understand what leadership really is. And then suddenly you’ve got the choice of building incredible teams that will stay on your boat forever and they’re going to take it back to Octopus Vulcan and Paul Allen, the founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates and what he built within the Vulcan fleet, I always talk about it involved octopus captains and crew, the good old days, the reporting on Friday nights that they had to do When they had to do it, they hated it. And now they don’t have to do it because he sadly passed the boats insult. They missed the process. The administration, the structure, the fact that they were all accountable for what they did. And yachting is brilliant at making people accountable for their shitty behavior. I hadn’t thought about personal rotation. Imagine flying home halfway through being with your family or your loved ones and you get an email and it says Termination of contract. How shitty must that be? It’s just dreadful behavior by all sorts that won’t find anyone on holiday. On rotation. You sit in front of a human being, you give them a chance to become better, to understand why they need to change or grow within the opportunity to do that. And then if they don’t, you let them go kindly. But yachting is cruel.
Merrill Charette [00:38:43] We did an interview with Ed from Superyacht recruiter and he was saying that just kind of within the Superyacht industry, there’s this mindset of we can kind of do whatever we want to because if you’re coming on superyacht, that must mean that you like boats. So I’m wondering what your general thoughts are in terms of the superyacht industry and education. How where are we at now and where do you kind of see us headed towards?
Andy [00:39:14] No, the big problem is money, money, money, money, money. People are attracted to yachting for money. So recruiters, no matter what they tell you, it’s about the churn, about shape the number of placements and getting your money before that person. And how many times can you churn that individual and the amount of recruiters who recruit from their own clients You place on those boats and then steal the candidates a year later to place someone? It’s just I just look at this and I laugh and go, Holy crap, this doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world that our land based recruitment company. And let’s be clear, the Hunter is a stand business. It has limited targets. It’s their rewarded or longevity. They get paid the longer the individual stays. And that’s how we measure our business. If we take it through to the land based business. See, we don’t get candidates who leave or want to jump up the cycle. They want great jobs and then they start in private properties, stay for decades because they become trusted, valued members of the family. They work, they’re given a chance to grow and progress. And actually, there’s none of this bullshit of protecting a client lambaste you work for the boss directly. Unless you work for the palaces, you have to go through the structures and the intermediaries. Base recruitment. You see the boss, her or him, the kids every day or every time they’re home. So you get to have a relationship with them. In yachting, there are so many protective barriers to hide Who’s taking the most money out of that vessel so that I always have hope and look to the future. The youngsters coming up are so awake we call them woke. It’s wrong. They’re awake. They woken up to the bullshit. They want to be treated well. They want to have decent holidays and time off. No matter what your owners or brokers or managers or captains think. Your crew work unbelievably long, arduous hours in a cigar long container, occasionally or often with mad people around them as guests or as owners, or in some cases crew who go mad because of the stress of working in the environment. It’s one of those things. So the work, the youngsters are awesome. They’re looking to learn. They want to be mentored. They won’t tolerate bad language, they won’t tolerate being treated differently, that they want to be treated individually. That’s very different. An individual is different to everyone else in the boat. So you can’t just say, Oh, the interior team is shit. Well, how many people in the interior too, with a dictatorship, you know, look at each individual and go actually to seven unbelievably hardworking human beings and there’s one toxic individual. Great deal with it. Go. But yachting is a unique place. But I will always look at the positives now and celebrate the unique human beings who constantly strive to be better, to do better. And at the end of the day, yachting is a service industry. We go back 100 years to really hard work to use and often people take offense. But we are servants and we forget that we are servants. And even I sit here with businesses showing servitude to my clients, to my candidates, I work for them. I have to do the best job possible for the candidate, for the student, for the client, for the principal, for the manager, for anyone. So I am serving them. And at the end of the day, we’re only as good as the last person we served.
Merrill Charette [00:42:54] So what is your take on kind of where we’re at right now in terms of education overall education within the Superyacht industry? You know, would you say that a quarter of the superyachts are kind of aware of what they’re doing or.
Andy [00:43:09] Everyone is aware? Because if you want to go through bridge from deck to bridge, you’ve got to go do tickets, you’ve got to go know if you want to go from the interior up to Percy, you’ve got to go LA, you’ve got to have an incredible mentor, Chief Steward Bowser, First Officer, Chief Officer, a buddy who helps and mentors you and teaches you or you’ve got to go and learn. That’s the only way I and just become head, chest and, you know, they go through different kitchens, through different galleys, under different chefs. They learn and they learn a lot. So, yes, your team is massively open to learning. And I think getting the right stuff through, not necessarily because often they don’t have time to sit back and think and break down their skill sets and look really what they need to do. Jumping to command is a massive step and you can’t do it reading books, It takes time and you must have experience. You must have experiences that are good and bad so that you grow. So this is stress versus stress. How do we stretch as an individual not to break heat, to stretch every day and put you back in stretch every day and expand your mind, Fit it for the information, keep it down just like a big rubber band. And the rubber band will grow and grow and grow and you’ll become better as human beings. So yachting is huge here. And education, in fact, I can’t announce it today, but we will. They will be announcing a massive program for big association, which will be groundbreaking and it will be the first fully accredited ticket outside a bridge that will enable crew and others to go on a new learning journey that’s accredited and supported by some of the biggest industries in the state. So as always, to that, but I’ll throw that back on your head. Every single person on your team can teach everyone else something. If you spend the time talking to a deputy, you may find out that he or she has been an incredible mixologist and won a world class competition. You may find that they are an accredited physiotherapist or have done some sort of additional education accreditation certification and we all are in such a rush to never ask the right questions, ask them about their life, their journey, who they’ve met, what they’ve learned, who taught. And then we go back to that old question of Meryl Naomi, your favorite teacher.
Merrill Charette [00:45:29] The favorite teacher, the girlfriend.
Andy [00:45:34] Oh, Meryl, you just throw my new theory out of the window, George, that you must have the name of a favorite teacher.
Georgia [00:45:41] I don’t want to cause any offense, but I like my biology teacher at school, Rob Gardner. He was nice.
Andy [00:45:46] She also said there’s always someone that you can name was healthy who taught you something or guided you. And yachting is full of awesome individuals. So many captains and chiefs choose those as a mentor crew and I inspired them to go on that journey. So I’m always going to take the positive. Merrill Lynch, which I always look at the positive and the human being.
Merrill Charette [00:46:09] Well, that’s the way to do it, right? We heard from this guy that we had interviewed. He’s like, the key to everything is to look behind you. You know, once you’ve moved up a rung, you look behind you and you bring them with you.
Andy [00:46:21] Was that Brendan?
Merrill Charette [00:46:22] No, that was fly.
Andy [00:46:24] NAVARRO okay. Awesome. Human beings don’t spend enough time looking at that. We’re so focused on. They’re the future. What’s going to happen? It’s going to happen anyway. But to be centered, to take a breath and to look at where you’ve come from and remember the people, places things to create you as human beings. You are just a collective of your experiences since you were born, and you don’t take enough time to go back and remember the things that are important that make you what you are today. We’re so focused on achieving some sort of fiscal go ahead. So I really 100% endorse what your previous guest has said. Look behind the ship and occasionally set down the rungs, go all the way back to the bottom, start again. Deeply cathartic to be humble, to go back and to get back to remember where you’ve come from. Never forget where you’ve come from.
Merrill Charette [00:47:17] So as we wrap this up, what type of tips and advice would you give someone that’s looking to come into the industry slash someone that’s kind of in the position of power within the industry?
Andy [00:47:27] Oh, go looking for the right person to work for us, asking the right questions. Why should I work for you, Meryl?
Merrill Charette [00:47:34] Oh, because I’m just such a nice guy. I’m merciful, you know, I pay on time.
Georgia [00:47:39] First of all, Meryl.
Andy [00:47:41] I know. Yeah, almost. Why you should work for that individual. Let go. Look, go looking for a mentor. Ask for someone to mentor you. You know we going to jobs. Blind recruiters don’t tell us who are going to go to work for until we’ve signed a contract that it’s like, holy shit, that that it’s awful. I actually see that on the basis that I really hate my backside or something awful. Don’t want to go that heavy, pull out the last minute because of lack of information to your research. Don’t you want to work or understand the boat? Look at the crew, research the crew. Are they the type of people you want to spend your time with? Because look, at the end of the day, Jorginho, you only have a certain amount of time, you’re bored, that’s guaranteed and you’re going to die. And you got this little bit in between and you’ve got to decide how you’re going to spend it. Now, do you want to spend it with assholes? Do you want to spend it with toxic people who don’t care about you? Do you want to spend it with awesome human beings who just want to go on a similar journey with you and hold your hand when you’re having a great day on the back, when you’re having a bad day or vice versa. So choose where you want to go and learn to say no and walk if you see something that you don’t agree with, but raise it in writing first to the management, to the DP, to the owner, call out toxicity, call out people. Abusers hate being called out, bullies being called out. The guarantee is you are the only person who is suffering under that individual. Yep. Once you call them out, it creates a voice and everyone else calls them out. So today I’m going to call out your recruiter companies, which I only want. I’m going to call them out. Toxic peddlers of dreams and not always living up to the dreams they’re selling. Figure out what you’re selling. Sell it the right way and ensure the people you’re putting forward for jobs. Go to the right environments to suit them as a human being and that they’re safe and that they will be nurtured and that their careers will thrive under the leadership on that bus that you’re sending them to. That’s what I’m going to do.
Merrill Charette [00:49:52] Well, this was an absolutely fascinating interview, so it was a great time. And we appreciate you for coming on and discussing all about this. And I really feel like it brought to light a lot of stuff that we’ve been meaning to talk about on this podcast.
Andy [00:50:07] Awesome.
Georgia [00:50:07] Yes. Thank you, Andrew. Some of these topics can be a little bit tricky to dive into, especially when you get into, you know, addiction and all these kind of dark things. But I’m really glad that we had the opportunity to speak to you about it and and hear your take and personal experience as well.
Andy [00:50:22] That showed you you’re always braver than most people in raising these topics. You know, as an outsider with inside knowledge and insightful, you’ve always been a great voice and always follow you. So and it was a pleasure to meet you and see you on your beautiful boat and to do my first ever Non self delivered podcast. So it was a joy. I will finish with the fact that I’ve never listened to my voice ever, or any podcast I’ve never given or done. So I’m terrified. I don’t know. But I’ll ask my kids and my wife to listen to and give me that feedback over dinner one night. I’ve enjoyed it a lot there.
Georgia [00:51:03] They’re always the best critics. On the.
Andy [00:51:06] Brutal.
Georgia [00:51:08] Final thing, Andrew If people find you and find out about your company and the work that you guys do, where should they be looking?
Andy [00:51:15] Oh, yeah. I mean, just look at the crew hunter or the Crew Academy. If you’ve got anyone who is struggling. Good new recovery site going live next week and that is w w w the soul dot com. So that’s a s dot com and that’s your recovery program.
Merrill Charette [00:51:36] Awesome.
Georgia [00:51:37] Thank you.
Farah [00:51:48] Check back every Tuesday for our latest episode and be sure to like to share and subscribe to ship shaped up for.
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