A Career Journey Amidst Crises
Episode 1- Series - Conversations with hospitality entrepreneurs & leaders
In this webinar Joshua Gan, regional director of Asia Pacific for the EHL Group, is joined by Hans Galland, CEO and Founder of Haulistix. In this webinar, they discuss Hans' career from his routes in EHL to starting his own business in this exciting and diverse industry, and the challenges that he has faced.
A global mindset
Hans Galland was born in Germany, with a German father and Swiss mother, they moved to Lausanne in Switzerland where he was raised and attended EHL. After graduation Hans moved to China for 10 years and then the U.S. to attend a business school and has remained in the U.S ever since, working there and subsequently founding his own company there which he runs with its co-founder today. Hans feels like personally and culturally his values are aligned with Europeans, however his professional development happened in China, he said: "China really shaped the way I do business. In a very funny way. It pushed me to think big. I think it also taught me the value of understanding what it means to be part of something big. That moves very fast. When I was in China, 2003 to 2012 was arguably the period where you saw the biggest change and the fastest development, and it was extremely exciting. So that's really the value of understanding what it means to be part of something big was really there in China."
An exciting career path
One of the very critical moments for me before moving full time to China was my internship during my EHL time, when I spent six months in Xiao. It was there where I became conversational Chinese, and it was there where I got a basic understanding of what's happening. It became very clear to me, I still remember very clearly at that time that the general manager of the Hyatt in which I did my internship at that time, kept telling me to come back and said, here's the list of 10 hotels we're going to open. And then I went back to Switzerland, at that time GDP was growing at 0.2%. Chinese GDP was somewhere between 5% or 10% so I thought this country is going to move. So I flew to Beijing to start my job search over there. Watch the full webinar to see how Hans' career developed from here.
