SINGAPORE: Surya Jhunjhnuwala, managing director of Hind Group, on stamping his own mark in the hospitality industry with Naumi-branded boutique hotels.
Luxury boutique hotel Naumi on Seah Street is the result of all the things Surya Jhunjhnuwala, managing director of Hind Group, did not like during his stay at large hotel chains.
In addition to providing personalised service, Jhunjhnuwala also makes sure that guests have access to a free minibar in their rooms.
“Why do hotels bother running around checking the minibar after a guest leaves? That’s time-consuming and it’s really not worth arguing with a guest over a can of Coke. You have to be real,” he says.
“I travel a lot for business and stay in many hotels. The big chains were great but they really lacked soul. Despite paying hundreds of dollars a night for a room, I would be subjected to standing in queues for check-in or waiting to be attended to at the restaurant. This didn’t feel right or make any sense.”
In fact, when Jhunjhnuwala first launched Naumi in 2007, luxury boutique hotels were unheard of among travellers who were looking for intimate and unconventional travel experiences.
“People often confused boutique hotels with budget hotels back then,” he laments.
Today, Jhunjhnuwala has no such problems. He runs two hotels under the Naumi brand in Singapore and has recently acquired two properties in Auckland and Sydney to be converted into Naumi hotels.
In Singapore since 1977
Hong Kong-born Jhunjhnuwala is not new to Singapore. Hind Group is a consortium of companies involved in the property development, investment and management business.
In 1977, his father and uncles ventured into the city state’s hospitality industry after becoming owners of the 600-room Imperial Hotel off River Valley Road.
When his father suffered from poor health in 1996, Jhunjhnuwala moved to Singapore to take care of the hotel business. In 1999, Imperial Hotel was sold to DBS Land (now CapitaLand) for $100 million.
Shortly after, Jhunjhnuwala bought a freehold development site along River Valley for $25.9 million and developed it into a 46-unit boutique apartment project called Residences at 338A. He also saw an opportunity in Australia to develop a 27-unit, high-end boutique apartment project in Brisbane’s city centre called The Domain on Gregory.
While the properties were fully sold, Jhunjhnuwala says he never felt that property development was his niche. “I wasn’t very passionate about it. I would build it, sell it and lose it. It’s like losing your babies. I wanted to build something I could own and develop in the right manner, and hotels seemed to be the right fit,” he explains.
In 2003, both he and his younger brother Girish, who runs Hind Group’s Hong Kong corporate office, ventured into the boutique hospitality business when they bought an office building in Hong Kong and converted it into a serviced apartment block named Ovolo (which means spherical in Italian). Today, Ovolo has six properties in Hong Kong, two in Sydney and one in Melbourne.
Learning from the bad
After amassing enough practical experience running a hotel, Jhunjhnuwala decided to launch Naumi as a luxury boutique hotel. “I didn’t want to go into the old hotel business that my uncles and dad did, which had 500 to 600 rooms. I would rather focus on about 100 rooms,” he says.
He bought Metropole Hotel on Seah Street in April 2006 for $18 million and spent another $10 million to transform it into the upscale Naumi Hotel. In 2007, the 40-room hotel opened with room rates starting at $400 a night.
The hotel has a staff-to-guest ratio of 1:1 to ensure personalised service. The name Naumi was chosen by his wife, Ritu. “It means the ninth day in Sanskrit and it is a very auspicious day on the Hindu calendar,” he recounts.
From the start, Jhunjhnuwala focused on getting the hotel’s fundamentals right. He was convinced that in order for Naumi to take off, the hotel had to employ good staff. To this end, Naumi hires staff from different industries instead of just the hospitality industry.
“I don’t want to hire staff that are stuck in standard operating procedures. If you’ve been working in a big hotel for a long time, chances are you will be adhering to and looking at SOPs when you work,” he observes.
On the other hand, he is on the lookout for people who are spontaneous and are looking for a challenge. “I want to challenge my staff and they should also be challenging me. We want our staff to feel empowered to provide our guests with the best experience at our hotel. You don’t have to follow SOPs,” Jhunjhnuwala says.
Meanwhile, Naumi has a mentor programme to introduce new staff to the hotel and the service standard expected of them. He adds, “We also have a weekly programme for senior staff, but this is all just a rough guide. We didn’t set out an SOP, so staff have the flexibility to be different.”
Shortly after the hotel opened, however, the global financial crisis hit. “At the time, I panicked and questioned what I was thinking launching Naumi because the economy was collapsing, and I was asking myself whether we should have started this at all,” he recalls. “But for a period like that, you just have to persevere and wait it out. Everyone is suffering with you. You are not unique.”
Jhunjhnuwala saw the crisis as the ultimate test to whether his Naumi concept would succeed. “It’s one of those things where we didn’t want to be the same hotel coming out from a cookie cutter. We were different and it worked out for us,” he says.
According to him, “business was as per normal” during the crisis and the hotel attracted a following of business travellers. He estimates that about 70% of the hotel’s guests are business travellers.
Big exposure for small players Positive user reviews on travel websites such as TripAdvisor, Expedia and Agoda also helped raise the hotel’s profile. “The Internet has changed the hospitality industry for the better Even small players like us can get attention online. Before, you had to be a large hotel chain in order to attract guests. Now, you can be featured on any travel site,” he says.
Naumi has consistently been ranked highly on travel sites for its excellent guest experience. It has also been ranked by Condé Nast as one of the best places to stay in the world.
Jhunjhnuwala takes guest reviews seriously and has his team look through all the reviews the hotel gets daily. “It’s very important to read all the reviews you get and address any shortcomings so you never make the same mistake again,” he says.
To keep it fresh for visitors, the hotel underwent a year-long revamp in 2012 and reopened in October 2013 with 73 rooms. This time round, Jhunjhnuwala introduced four suites inspired by US artist Andy Warhol and fashion icon Coco Chanel.
Every room in the hotel is soundproofed and features bathrooms equipped with “magic” glass walls that, at the flick of a switch, turn from transparent to opaque. Guests will also find a door-sized minibar secreted in their rooms.
The hotel has also amped up its service with “Naumi Angels”, who, during turndown service, go to every room to offer complimentary drinks to guests, answer any questions and offer advice on the city and its surroundings.
In 2012, Jhunjhnuwala opened his second Naumi-branded hotel. Located on Keong Saik Road, the 79-room Naumi Liora (which means light in Hebrew) is housed in conservation shophouses built in 1925 as residences.
It used to be The Royal Peacock Hotel and later The Saff, before the Hind Group bought it in 2011. “The beauty of luxury boutique hotels is that you can have many of them, but the difference is that every hotel would be unique on its own. You don’t have to make replicas,” he quips.
Naumi Liora is designed by Gaurang Khemka, founder of Singapore- based award-wining design firm URBNarc. To remain true to the property’s Peranakan heritage, the original timber flooring, French-styled windows and “five-foot way” have all been traditionally preserved.
The hotel offers three different room categories, with the biggest being the 645 sq ft Liora Porch room, which has a garden porch that overlooks the small park, Duxton Plains. The hotel also provides guests with personal butler service.
Jhunjhnuwala is currently in the midst of converting two more hotels in Auckland and Sydney into Naumi-branded hotels. He has also set his sights on opening Naumi-branded hotels in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, but has not identified any suitable properties yet.
“There is this idea that you need to be a large hotel chain in order to be successful. For boutique hotels, the absolute room numbers may be lower, but profitability is not necessarily lower,” he says.
While he is keen to open another Naumi hotel in Singapore, he notes that the manpower crunch here makes it difficult for him to find suitable staff. Most recently, the hotels’ staff-to-guest ratio dropped to 0.8:1. At the same time, there are “no ideal properties up for sale”.
For him, the ideal property would be located in the inner city. “Everyone knows that the mantra for opening hotels is location. If you are well-located, regardless of good or bad times, you will be able to manage it. Some hotels are really far from the city. Those are challenging no matter how much you lower your room rates,” he says.
Entrepreneurial spirit
Jhunjhnuwala believes he has his father, Shyam Sundar Jhunjhnu wala, to thank for guiding him along his entrepreneurial journey. “My father was very entrepreneurial, and watching him do business made my brother and I very excited,” he says.
Hind Group was started in 1918 as a business in Rangoon (now known as Yangon in Myanmar) that created textiles and garments to be exported to different markets. Following the military coup in the early 1960s, the family relocated to Hong Kong and started a watch manufacturing business named Hind Corp. Within a decade, its watches division grew to be one of the largest in Hong Kong and was one of the first to have its own factory in Dongguan, China. In 1977, the group entered the hospitality industry with Imperial Hotel. In 1989, the group purchased a majority stake in Shalimar Paints, a paint manufacturing company in India. Today, the group also runs two F&B businesses, Café O in Hong Kong and Rang Mahal in Singapore.
After graduating from high school in 1981, Jhunjhnuwala’s father roped him in to work at the family’s wristwatch factory. “I was thrown into the business. My dad was very clear from the start that I had to work my way through the ranks, so I started as a messenger in the watch factory and learned along the way,” he reveals. “I would sit and talk to my dad whenever I had any questions about the business, and these sessions informed my own decision-making process.”
His father also gave him free rein to pursue his own business interests. Jhunjhnuwala remembers identifying a brewery up for sale in Darwin, Australia, as a good business opportunity in 1991. “I consulted my dad about it and he said, ‘If it looks good, go for it.’ He didn’t hold me back. Being able to invest like that gave me the courage to make future business decisions. I invested in the brewery and eventually sold it to Foster’s Group for a nice price. It was a good learning curve,” he says.
To honour his father’s legacy, Jhunjhnuwala is launching The Intrepid Entrepreneur — Shyam Sundar Jhunjhnuwala, a book on his father’s life, in late September. His father passed away in 1997.
Now, Jhunjhnuwala relies on the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO), a peer network of chief executives and business leaders, to bounce off business ideas. “People say it’s quite lonely at the top and it’s really true. When your staff have issues, they tend to turn to the most senior guys in the company and the buck stops there,” he notes.
Since he joined YPO in 1999, Jhunjhnuwala has been participating in YPO Forum, where eight to 10 members meet behind closed doors to share their business experiences. He says, “This is shared in a confidential manner, so you feel comfortable talking about your own fears and experiences running your own businesses and the problems you may encounter. It made me a clearer thinker.”
Meanwhile, he asserts that entrepreneurship can be taught and recommends that aspiring entrepreneurs trust their “gut feel”. “What your gut tells you about an opportunity is more important than what the facts and figures tell you. If you fail, it is the biggest prize you can get, because then, you won’t make the same mistake again. If your mind tells you to do something, you can get it done,” he advises.
This article appeared in the Enterprise of Issue 694 (Sep 14) of The Edge Singapore.