, ET Bureau|
Dec 03, 2017, 12.01 AM IST
SIMA PATEL reached Oakland, California, as a fresh-off-the-boat bride in 1979. The girl from Surat spoke very little English. Husband Pravin’s family, like so many Patel families in the US, ran a motel. She started helping out, pitching in at the front office, doing the books and sharing housekeeping duties. She kept going, growing the family business, getting to the corner office and breaking many stereotypes and glass ceilings on the way.
Today, she chairs the California Travel and Tourism commission Patel, who is also the CEO of Ridgemont Hospitality, has achieved a first for a Gujarati woman — becoming a leader in the hospitality sector in the US. “Typically within the Gujarati community, women were not taken seriously back in those days and even today many don’t recognise my achievements,” Patel, 54, told ET Magazine, when she was in India as part of a delegation from Visit California, the official tourism agency of the state.
In Delhi and Mumbai, Patel spoke about promoting California as an affluent, chic and luxury destination among wellheeled Indian travellers. Annually three lakh Indians visit California and spend over $700 million — a figure that Patel and other members of the delegation hope will cross $1 billion by 2020.
Patel speaks with a hint of a Gujarati accent. And she shows no hesitation in speaking about her heritage and her early days and how she has moved to her current position within the family business. “I am part of all important decisions, including new project development, financing and choosing construction companies. I am the driver and visionary,” says Patel. She feels having a woman at the helm gives Ridgemont an edge over other Gujarati-owned hospitality businesses in the US. The company has just broken ground for its biggest project so far — a greenfield, 121-room Hampton Inn in downtown Oakland, near San Francisco — a project personally helmed by Patel.
Change in Attitude
Mike Patel, a prominent Indian-American hotelier and entrepreneur from Atlanta, Georgia, admits there is a glass ceiling. “Our culture still keeps women behind the scenes and is gender selective in offering major responsibilities. It is restricting them from realising their business potential as owners or leaders of any of our big hospitality companies.”
But attitudes are changing. The Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA) which has over 16,000 members, last year elected Jagruti Panwala as its treasurer for 2017-18. Panwala, also from Surat, moved to the US in 1991 and earned undergraduate degrees in finance and economics. She and her husband now own and operate multiple hotels, and she also heads an asset management and succession planning firm Wealth Protection Strategies.
AAHOA had launched a women’s leadership conference over a decade ago. It now has elected women members on its board, rather than just two women nominated directors. In a couple of years, members hope, AAHOA will have its first woman chairperson. Sima Patel herself had made history in 2004 when she became the first American woman from a minority community to chair a major lodging association — the California Lodging Industry Association (CLIA).
In 2006, she was elected to serve on the California Travel and Tourism Commission. “My peers in industry urged me to represent them. However, it was the encouragement and support that I got from Pravin and his family that helped me make up my mind,” she says. In 2016, she became the first industry-elected chair of the Visit California board of directors. “After two terms the governor of California, Edmund G Brown, reappointed me on the board. I’m proud to be the longest serving board member.”
Mukesh J Mowji, hospitality investor and CEO of Silicon Valley-based startup Pracrea Inc, feels it’s better that women are now getting elected to leadership positions in hospitality, instead of being nominated. He says: “The old-school thinking that women should stay at home is changing in our community.
Today’s young women are welltrained professionals who are striking out independently as entrepreneurs in sectors such as food services and real estate.” The change in attitudewithin the community has led many professional Gujarati women to come back to family businesses, adds Patel. “They have college degrees and bring with them professional skills and I feel proud of them,” she says.
Patel says second- and third-generation Gujarati hospitality entrepreneurs are diversifying into new areas and growing the family businesses more professionally. She identifies this as crucial as the industry faces challenges from the likes of Airbnb, which is a competition, but can also turn a collaborator in times of high demand. “My son, Dhruv, too is a millennial and thinks differently from us. As director of operations, he has helped raise the revenues of the company by half a million dollars through innovative thinking,” Patel says. She sees the same trend in many families in the community.
No comments:
Post a Comment