From The Classroom to AI Innovation - Matthew Spriegel's Success Blueprint

0:09Matthew Spriegel:I'm really right now I'm in this place where I'm trying to explore like more integrated living like how can all these things work together you know working in the communities and still having time to help people. Welcome to Brave Bold Brilliant. I am here today with Matt Spiegel and I'm hoping I have pronounced that correctly, Matt, CEO and founder of Atium. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too, Jeanette. You pronounced it perfectly. Well, it's always good start, isn't it? I'm going to actually get someone's name correct. So, you know, this is good. And you're over in Riyadh at the moment, Matt.

0:47So very exciting kind of conference going on over there. What's happening there?

0:52Matthew Spriegel:Yeah, so there's the Tourize event over here in Riyadh. It's a really exciting event. It's great to see what's happening. And Saudi came over here with the Skiff team invited me. So I wasn't supposed to be here three days ago, but I took them up on the invitation. It's been a great opportunity to connect with some of the top leaders in hospitality and tourism globally. So really nice to be here. I'm happy to be talking to you as well. Great, exactly. And we're just saying what an amazing, fancy background you've got there as well. But I mean, you know, this is just a normal day in your kind of, you know, lounge, isn't it?

1:25Matthew Spriegel:Exactly. Yeah, I'm at the Ritz-Carlton, which is, I'm not a fancy guy. So this is quite extravagant from my background. Oh, great. But you are someone that has moved around a lot. You're someone that is curious, has spent a lot of time in China. and now really you split your time, you know, Bangkok, Singapore, Dubai, you know, so you're pretty sort of well-travelled and flexible. You know, you jump on an opportunity. You're not afraid of kind of crossing borders, so to speak. So I think we're going to have a great conversation, Matt. I'm looking forward to it. Me too. So listen, I mean, there are some themes in your career.

2:06Obviously with Atty and we're going to talk about the business and what that's all about, because clearly, you know, tech, AI, how you actually support your clients today to deliver excellent kind of customer service at the front line, but with that interface of tech. But life for you, you know, has taken a number of twists and turns, hasn't it, Matthew? You know, you started out teaching in China. You've done consultancy, pharmaceuticals, and then you jumped into tech and AI. So we've got a lot to cover, but what made you shift, do you think, from those early days of teaching in China to moving into the tech world where you are today?

2:46Matthew Spriegel:Yeah, so I think it's worth mentioning the reason I went to China in the first place. I traveled China, India, Nepal, and China stuck out for me as a place that I could live because compared to America, I found that it was so much contrast with America and I really felt I was lost there. And that made me also feel like this is a place I could learn a lot. And, you know, one trip turned into moving to China for what was supposed to be one or two years. Then it turned into 12. I really fell in love with China, went all in. And, yeah, I had a lot of different projects and businesses and kind of potential careers in China that actually turned into a business at one point.

3:29Matthew Spriegel:So I think originally I moved to China for curiosity, started a business with with Atium because it was a burning desire to to use the same kind of technology and frameworks that I used to learn Chinese to help other staff and teams, corporates, accelerate learning, development, employee experience. And so it was a pretty easy shift. I should say it wasn't an easy shift, but it was something I couldn't resist. And I've learned I mean, I've learned a tremendous amount through starting a business. I basically got an MBA through starting Atium. And, you know, we've been able to meet some incredible, incredible people along the way to where we are now.

4:08Matthew Spriegel:As even if we stop tomorrow, I'd still be really proud of what we built. But I think in many ways we're just getting started. So the best is yet to come, Matt. And we're going to we're going to talk about the future as well as kind of the journey so far. So with Atium, just for those that maybe haven't come across your business, Matt, can you just explain a little bit about what you do and who you help just so that we kind of get the context for Atium? Yeah, so Atium is a behavioral change technology that's built for frontliners. So we're building a lot of the same transformative tools that office workers take for granted, but we're building them with the front lines in mind.

4:48Matthew Spriegel:So that's like the forgotten workforce. That would be front desk workers, security guards, housekeepers, food and beverage staff. And what we do is we take large sets of content plus a business case that we identify with a client. And then we build playbooks. And a playbook might consist of daily training modules, engagement surveys, daily challenges, peer-to-peer recognition with a full layer of gamification to keep the staff coming back every day to complete activities. And the goal is to drive service standards, is to drive operational efficiency, to drive revenue, and then also to create a happier, safer, more productive workforce.

5:26Matthew Spriegel:Again, we're building for the front lines. And it's all mobile first, very AI driven these days. But AI is now table stakes. So we kind of removed that from the description of Atium. Right. Okay. So actually you're using the tech to make the front line employees happier, more effective, deliver results and streamline the kind of processes and the approach they take. But you're not using tech to remove the human roles. Would that be correct? Yeah. I mean, human connection, especially we work a lot in hospitality. Human connection is more important than ever. Our goal is to keep things really short.

6:06Matthew Spriegel:So if like, let's say cornerstone LinkedIn learning for office workers is like Netflix, we're like TikTok for the front lines. So the average use on a session is around five to six minutes. So the idea is you learn, you get updated and you apply this to your work. And that's where we talk about behavioral change or solving for performance gaps in the frontliners. Right. And we've got some common clients, common friends with our lovely teams at our core hotels as well, haven't we? So we've got to give a shout out to Duncan overall, Kerry Healy, who have both been on this podcast. So Matt, you are in good company, let me tell you.

6:48Matthew Spriegel:I just saw Duncan on my way over here. I was on the back of the golf cart and I saw Duncan and Kerry was around yesterday. So, yeah, it's always good to connect with the Accor people and always happy to meet more people in Accor and also to meet the friends of Accor. So I'm really glad that we got a chance to connect. Yeah, well, this is the power of networking, right? Because actually Kerry Healy, so for those of you who don't know, Duncan O 'Rourke is the CEO of the premium mid-scale economy brands within a core for me at APAC. And Kerry is the chief commercial officer, you know, working with Duncan across that whole region.

7:20So these guys have got massive, massive volumes going through the business, right? So Matt, in terms of scalability then of kind of what you've developed, But presumably it does, you know, it's completely scalable. There's no limit because the tech allows you to reach thousands and thousands of frontline teams in a way that is harder to do. If you were a physical, say, go back in the day to being a physical trainer, L &D, you know, people in a room, get them to kind of do sort of more traditional training. But the tech allows you to reach, you know, a huge volume of these people. Right.

8:00Matthew Spriegel:Correct. Yeah. Whether you're a general manager or you're managing at a hub level or even you're a hotel training manager, our our job is to supercharge those those roles and help them do the communicate and train their teams at scale. We're definitely not trying to replace workers. It's it's or let's say replace jobs. It's more about using AI, leveraging AI to help those leaders do more with their teams. and it's working really well. The other thing here is a lot of the AI tools that white collars use on a daily basis that we're experimenting with or integrating into our daily work, we're making some of those AI tools accessible to the frontliners in a really practical, simple way.

8:41Yeah, I love that. So with AI, I think there's quite a lot of fear about it, actually. I mean, I obviously work with global clients as well, very often around strategy, executive kind of, you know, development and things like that as well with senior leadership teams. And I think there are businesses that are really embracing it. And maybe as a startup, actually, you know, starting a business with fewer barriers to entry, actually, to allow those businesses to kind of grow pretty fast. But I think in a larger business where you've got legacy, you know, legacy systems, legacy processes, legacy structures, etc.

9:21I think there's sort of those that are saying, no, we have to do this. We've got to really embrace AI and tech. And there are those that are maybe a little bit, let me wait and see, or it's in a little bit too difficult, too frightening box because all of our legacy systems processes are so interlinked that where do you start? So how would you advise businesses that are a little bit nervous about the tech and maybe are burying their head in the sand right now and saying, oh, I'll look at it in the future. We'll see what happens. Or no, I don't think it's ever going to replace jobs. And we know it will replace some jobs.

10:04Right. What's the approach that you take and what are your thoughts on AI in terms of the threats and the opportunities?

10:12Matthew Spriegel:Yeah, the way I see AI right now is it's actually an opportunity for people to do more of what they love because you can take an idea or your purpose in your life and you can build tech, you can build solutions, you can build frameworks, you can do a lot of things on your own that you would have needed a whole team to do before. in terms of like large companies let's say the the too big too big to fail category i think that i'll use our company's example we're not we're definitely not that size we're still in a growth stage startup phase but we have hired a lot of people that are kind of at the at the head of the curve in terms of ai capability what tools are out there and we try to bring bring them into the team in terms of doing trainings, workshops to really help the team incorporate what these guys and gals do best.

11:07Matthew Spriegel:For large organizations that have bigger resources, I spoke to a consulting company this morning called Agents in South Africa. And they bring in a lot of the AI tools to corporations to help them leverage the latest and greatest. And I think the main thing is it doesn't need to be done on your own. And just like when you're developing a new product or a new service, looking for like a minimal viable product, just trying to, it's like a new language. So you just need to start doing it and you learn a lot by doing it. And it actually can be quite a fun process to try to apply the AI tools to ideas or things you have that come up on a daily basis.

11:50Matthew Spriegel:But in terms of threats, I think, I still don't think a lot of us know it's going to happen tomorrow. But again, AI's table stakes, it's something that even those kind of old dinosaur companies need to consider. And I would look at it as more of an opportunity for whether it's a laundromat or a truck cleaning service or a limousine service, these companies, if they can bring in those AI tools, they've already have distribution, they already have long lasting trusting partnerships. It can actually supercharge their business if they just change the narrative and what's possible with AI and their company.

12:25Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting one, isn't it? Because it's partly around mindset here that we're talking about. Do you have a growth mindset where you see opportunity and even in sort of challenging scenarios, or do you see it as a threat and as a negative? And I think as an entrepreneur as well, which clearly you are, you have more of a natural probably ability to be able to see the opportunity in things like tech that are happening. And you've built your business on this. It's how you help your clients. But as an entrepreneur, Matt, I want to ask you, how do you avoid the shiny penny syndrome?

13:03And by that, I mean all the new fancy, shiny stuff that we kind of go, oh, that's great. We could do that. We could do that. And I know you've just started another business. So this is probably quite an apt opportunity for us to talk about that as well. But it is it's a double edged sword, isn't it? Because on the one hand, to have that openness and that mindset around growth and opportunity and, you know, getting involved in lots of different things, there's opportunities everywhere. How do you balance that with also staying in your lane and staying focused? Or don't you?

13:37Matthew Spriegel:um that's a great question and for me um my solution to that because i i am a kind of a yes man i do uh chase uh the shiny object sometimes especially when it comes to new um new ideas in the business or um new partners etc i have a i have great partners in the business co-founders ollie and devin um and they they keep me on the ground they help me um assess feasibility is this is a great idea. Maybe it's not for now, maybe it's for next year, or maybe it's not possible. So like having complimentary partners in the business is really important because you kind of need someone to go out and look for the moonshots, but you also need someone that can integrate and make these, make these things a reality and make them part of your business.

14:23Matthew Spriegel:But no, I've also learned to, as much of a yes man as I am, I've also learned to say no to a lot of things to protect the time and everything's an opportunity cost. So you can't chase everything. I mean, actually, when we first started Attyom, we worked with Chanel, Porsche, Mindshare, NBA Arena, Mercedes-Benz Arena, and lots of different restaurants. And I remember one of our advisors, Andrew Collins, actually said, dude, you need to own a vertical. And I was like, what do you mean? Like, everybody can use our technology. Who doesn't want to improve their workforce? He's like, trust me, you need to own a vertical.

14:57Matthew Spriegel:This is why, et cetera, et cetera. And it took me two years to walk that path of being an agnostic solution for all industries to go, actually, we work best in hospitality. We should go after this vertical first. And once we made that conscious decision, the business took off. Now we're in 70 countries, but that kind of goes back to picking which opportunities you want to go after and making sure you stay focused because entrepreneurs by design like to start new things. They like new ventures. It's quite easy to do that in the entrepreneur world because you're meeting so many great people all the time that want to start things as well.

15:33I think that's a great way of looking at it, a great piece of advice, actually, because it doesn't mean to say that you're discounting those other sectors maybe in the future, but you're niching down, you're getting absolutely famous and well-known within that. And that's a large pool. Hospitality is a big sector. It's not a small sector at all. So there's plenty to go for there, isn't there? I mean, He would take if you could get 10 percent of the market share of hospitality globally. That's a huge number, right?

16:03Matthew Spriegel:That's what we want. Yeah, we are, you see. So you've got the vision, but you become famous. And then I think what tends to happen after that is that you might, you know, you might still take on some other things, but you've got your core. You do that exceptionally well. And a great mentor of mine, actually, a gentleman called Rob Moore, who helps us when we were actually setting up our real estate business and our property business. He's great on social media, personal brand, and all this kind of stuff. So he's a good sounding board. But one of the tools that he introduced me to was a 70-20-10, where you go, okay, 70 % of my time, effort, resources, investment is going to be focused on my core, my core business.

16:4520 % I might have some other things that are sort of, you know, bubbling along that are coming through and then 10 i'm just going to kind of test and learn a couple of interesting things but i apply my resources in in that proportion and then your 70 percent might then become a business that you exit or you sell or you bring someone in to run that and your 20 percent might then jump to become the 70 you know so it's quite a good way of looking at things i found it really helpful um totally through my time and uh yeah what's that what's the saying about focus follow one course until success yeah i think it's about doing something

17:22Matthew Spriegel:one thing really really well and you get all the best practices you get the frameworks you know how to build that thing in that space and then there's so many um things that are unassumingly applicable to other areas in the world other problems you can solve um which is kind of what we've done with this with this new uh project as well um yeah it's it's a it's it's not an easy one and again I think you got to be surrounded by great people to keep, to keep, to keep some of the crazy stuff on the ground. So. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, with your background, obviously, where did you grow up in the States then, Matt?

17:58Matthew Spriegel:I grew up about 10 miles outside of Philadelphia in a place called Havertown. Not a, not a, not a very fancy suburb of Philadelphia. And then I moved to Massachusetts when I was 13. And that's, I was a little bit of a naughty kid. And then I I remember my stepdad, who's also one of my mentors, he said, you know, you can we're going to move to Massachusetts and you can change everything right now. And I remember I got glasses. I showed up to school on time. I was paying attention. I still wasn't the best student, but that was a big kind of turning point for me that helped me get into a better college and set me on a much better course.

18:35Matthew Spriegel:He was one of the many people that kind of saved me or put me on a better on a better path from when I was a kid. So I grew up with a single mom, three sisters. She was working night shifts in downtown Philadelphia. It was not a very easy. My mom kept the peace, but it wasn't an easy upbringing until we met my stepdad and moved to Massachusetts. Wow. Yeah. And isn't that interesting? It was almost a crossroads for you. You either carry on being a little bit naughty and maybe not paying attention to kind of school and what have you. But you had a crossroads and you had a choice and it was that catalyst that kind of then put you on a different path, right?

19:16Matthew Spriegel:Yeah, actually at 13, moving to Massachusetts. At that time, I remember I thought my life was over. I was leaving all my friends, starting in a brand new school, didn't know anybody. But like many things in your life, the worst things at a specific moment in time can turn out to be the best if you just give it space and you give it time. um sometimes sometimes it can be reframed in one year sometimes it's five years but i remember moving to um to go to to go to college and back in pennsylvania uh that was really easy for me because of that move when i was 13 it was really easy to talk to people to make new friends i met all the people in my dorm like on the first day whereas i think if i hadn't had to do that move at 13 it probably would have been um there would have been more friction points to like building up a community and university.

20:05Yeah, I know. It's a good point. And then the decision to move to China, I mean, that was a big move. And like you say, you went not intending to be there 12 years, but hey, you know, it's funny how things can change. And culturally, polar opposite to the U.S., to growing up and living in the U.S. I mean, I spent a lot of time in China as well when I was the managing director of the emerging markets for TUI. So I spend a lot of time in Beijing and Shanghai and Hong Kong and what have you. I love I love China, but it isn't an easy environment, I would say, to survive and thrive. Lots of obviously you've got lots of cultural nuances, you've got language, you've got I would say it was like almost like an iceberg, you know, as a kind of Western European.

20:52You're only ever really going to see the bit above the water. and then it kind of, you know, under the water is where all of the intertwined relationships and government things going on. But for you, when you were in China, what did you love about it? And what tested you the most, given that you were from the US and it's a polar opposite in terms of culture?

21:20Matthew Spriegel:I think the biggest thing was the language barrier because my original plan, we had a family friend that worked for Lockheed Martin in NASA and he said if Matt likes China, loves China, he should move back there and learn Mandarin. This is the time. And so the original plan was to go there for two years, learn Mandarin, then go back to the States and look for kind of a global role in a corporate at a junior level. And one thing led to another, but the first year in China, I actually moved to Guangdong province where they speak. In my town, they didn't speak Mandarin. They didn't even speak Cantonese.

21:53Matthew Spriegel:They spoke Shun De Hua, which is like a local dialect. So it's the worst place to learn Mandarin, but it turned out to be a really important place for China. Guangdong was the first province to be opened by Deng Xiaoping. And so it has a really rich history and really important for China as a whole. And I mean, what I loved about China, even in the Shanghai days where it's quite westernized, I learned something new every single day in China, whether it's from a person, from experience, from a hardship, from a success. It's like you're constantly learning when you're living in a place with that kind of contrast.

22:29Matthew Spriegel:And then over time, I remember my first trip back to America. People would say, oh, what's it like over in China? And I'm like, oh, it's crazy. It's really crazy. Like, what do you mean crazy? I just got to come there to see it. And then the next time I went back a couple of years later to America, my friends asked me again, how's China? I said, it's interesting. And they're like, oh, how is it interesting? I'm like, well, you know, there's these cultural nuances and the language is kind of like this. It's very different from English. You kind of have to forget everything you know about language to learn it.

22:59Matthew Spriegel:So I can start to feel there's like tangible progress. And then fast forward 10 years, China felt like home. And when I go back to America, that, you know, America felt crazy. There was such, you know, reverse culture shock is a real thing. And so for me, that was like tangible progress in something. What that was, I'm not sure. But it kept the curiosity alive to stick it out in China and then also to continue exploring Asia. You know, now I'm in Thailand, in the Middle East for similar reasons, but with a lot more understanding about how I, you know, how I can learn languages faster or to pick up some of the cultural nuances a little bit quicker.

23:39Matthew Spriegel:But the first the first few years in China were definitely overwhelming, but in a good way. There's a lot going on there. So yeah, I learned how to do charades as well. The first, I remember when I had to go to the bathroom or I had to eat, you know, I couldn't say I couldn't say a single word except like, you know, how are you or sorry. And so I had to go to the bathroom. I had to act that out. And it was quite, quite funny. Maybe maybe a little awkward, too. But again, it's all part of the it's all part of the learning process. Well, it's that openness, isn't it? And, you know, so just kind of embrace it, go with it, I guess, and absorb yourself, throw yourself into something that's totally out of your comfort zone.

24:16And actually, you know, as you say, you can see the progress there. But I love international. I've loved, you know, the international teams that I've had, whether it was in Brazil, whether it was, you know, in Russia, in Ukraine, when I set Tui up over there. Obviously, really hard seeing what's happening now, you know, when you see what goes on in the world. But I love that international element. And how do you think you've changed as a person because of the cultural immersion that you've had from being outside of the U.S. all these years? How have you changed as an individual, do you think, as a human?