24 Hours With… Kate Parker, country head, Zomato
24 Hours With… spotlights the working day of some of the most interesting people in Mumbrella’s world. Today we speak with Kate Parker, country head for Zomato.
6:30am I reach for the iPad/passion-killer to check emails and scroll my news feeds – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Zomato.
A new version of the app was pushed out overnight for testing. I download it and spend the next 15 minutes trying to break it.
I shoot a message off to each city’s Whatsapp group reminding them to do the same and to become familiar with all the changes.
7:00am I can hear my two kids in various states of readiness for school and jump into the shower before they have a chance to ask for breakfast/lunch/find my school hat/money.
I throw a heap of fruit and veg into my Thermie (yep, I’m one of those people) to inhale on the way to work, otherwise it’s a pit-stop at Laneway Greens for their sensational Kale and Kiwi smoothie.
8:30am First thing I do is a lap of the office to say ‘good morning’ to everyone and ‘goodbye’ to the sales team, then choose my seat for the day.
We hot desk at Zomato and this morning I’m sitting with our content team who are working on our next restaurant collection update. ‘Best bars to lose your virginity’ gets thrown around as a collection idea and (luckily?) it’s quickly replaced by our photogenic food collection Snap & Eat.
I then join our sales head for our weekly call with our business head in Brisbane. Brisbane is the third city we’ve launched a sales team in (content is always the first hire in any city). However, with a restaurant market one-third the size of Sydney and Melbourne the focus of the call today is on average spend and what we can do to lift it.
10:30am Lunch conversations begin, but to be fair, it’s pretty much food talk all day.
12:00pm I make it my mission to try at least one new place a week, usually with someone who is “encouraged” to check in or download the Zomato app. Today it was Hako for the yellowfin tuna rice paper rolls, cuttlefish tempura in squid ink and green tea sea salt as well as a massive sushi and sashimi plate. It’s Japanese so there’s no calories.
1:00pm Pulse check time – web and app traffic, app downloads, revenue and sales team leaderboard. Sort through emails. Get online with HQ in India where the morning has just begun, and work on one of the (what feels like) thousands of Google sheets we love creating.
We’re partnering up with Taste Festival this weekend and I’m in the middle of too many conversations with different teams.
Internal comms is our biggest challenge, with marketing, sales and strategic all running hard, but not always in the same direction.
I schedule a video call with the team and we all make the decision to bring the focus back to Taste, and get them the right promotion for the event.
Strategic and marketing find common ground and agree on the activation for the festival. I often have to remind myself that we are less than a year old in Australia, so cohesiveness will take time as we learn to run as a team without tripping over each other.
3:00pm I look at my phone and see three messages from my 16-year-old daughter and a missed call from my 11-year-old son.
My daughter has sent me photos of the ‘Review us on Zomato’ stickers she saw in restaurant windows on her walk from school to the train station.
She still refuses to download the app though… In her eyes I’m her personal ‘Zomato’, one that doesn’t use any of her precious monthly data. I pack up my laptop and head for the train.
6:00pm Dinner is combined with a download of the day on Netflix with my husband (tonight it’s Madame Secretary) followed by ‘quality’ TV which, regardless of content, we seem to be happy to sit in front of until at least 10pm. Tonight it’s NCIS: Los Angeles.
10:00pm It’s off to bed for a last check of emails, before switching off with a read. Right now it’s China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan (so far not living up to the prequel) which has me switched off and sleep ready by 10.30pm.
10:45pm Of course, I can’t sleep without one last Zomato scroll to see what’s popular and trending; I need to come to the office armed with the perfect lunch spot after all.
Haha so what do you do in your free time 😉
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