Startup Life: Unscripted #14 with Shelley Hughes, Senior Marketing Manager at Mr Yum

Welcome to Startup Life: Unscripted, a TNG Media newsletter as part of The Nudge Group, where we feature candid conversations with startup operators about their career journeys and experiences. If you received this email as a forward, you can read all our past interviews and subscribe right here.

From Fashion Spreadsheets to Hospitality Storytelling: Unravelling Shelley's Marketing Magic at Mr Yum

Welcome back to Startup Life: Unscripted! Today, we're super excited to spotlight Shelley Hughes, the Senior Marketing Manager at Mr Yum, a mobile ordering and payments platform revolutionising the hospitality industry.

Combining her academic prowess in finance and fashion with the energetic hustle of the hospitality tech space, Shelley is a beacon of adaptability, creativity, and strategy. At Mr Yum, her distinct blend of analytical thinking and narrative crafting is pushing boundaries, crafting brand experiences that resonate deeply with venues and patrons alike.

In our candid chat with Shelley, we journey through the dynamic landscape of hospitality marketing, unveiling her transformative shift from crunching numbers to crafting narratives.

Key interview takeaways:

👗 From fashion to hospo-tech: Shelley unpacks her shift from the world of fashion analytics to the heartbeat of experiential marketing in the hospitality sector. Witness the magic that emerges when numbers meet narratives.

🍔 Life at Mr Yum: What's it like to drive marketing at a bustling hospo-tech startup? Shelley offers an insider's view into the brand's ethos, challenges, and the exhilarating pace of startup culture.

🤝 Creating connections over campaigns: Dive into Shelley's philosophy of marketing. She emphasises the joy of forging authentic bonds with venues and the thrill of amplifying their stories beyond mere product promotions.

🌟 Pathway insights: For budding marketers eyeing the startup landscape, Shelley shares golden nuggets of advice: Embrace versatility, cultivate curiosity, and treasure every interaction. In the startup world, every coffee chat might just be your next big break!

Hi Shelley, it's wonderful to have you here with us. As a marketer who has found her niche in the hospitality industry, can you tell us a bit about your journey and what led you to specialise in this field?

If you told me that I’d be working at a growing hospo-tech startup 5 years ago I’d never believe you. I started my career as a graduate planning analyst at the Cotton On Group - I had finance and fashion degrees up my sleeve and big plans to ascend the ranks in a global fashion org.

After a year in an analyst role I could no longer bear the sight of an excel spreadsheet and looked to the consumer centric areas of the business that essentially had more.. fun. I then weaselled my way into the marketing department and never looked back.

A hop and a skip later I was ½ of the marketing team at Melbourne based venue group, The Van Haandel Group and fell in love with the story telling, experiential based marketing that comes from the hospitality industry - it was beyond selling a product, it was about creating connections.

At this point in my career I was seeking a new challenge, with Mr Yum making for the perfect next step; a fast growing startup brimming with opportunity, a brilliant mission to help hospo businesses grow and some of the most talented professionals I have ever met. It’s essentially a talent incubator that has allowed me to forge deep connections with venues that actually make a difference - the type of marketing I care about.

So, being the Senior Marketing Manager at Mr Yum, you've probably got some cool stories about building brand experiences. Got a favorite one to share?

Mr Yum works as a growth platform for the hospitality industry, empowering venues to utilise technology to provide exceptional in-venue experiences. One particular experience that I’m proud of is our partnership with the Westpac OpenAir Cinema. If you’re not familiar with the event, it’s an out of this world cinema experience set on Sydney Harbour.

This is no picnic rug set up - the event seats 1600 diners per a night with a range of experiences from a fine dining restaurant to a more casual fish and chip eatery. 2023 was the second year in a row that Mr Yum powered the ordering across the 42 night season, providing us with the opportunity to work with big brand name sponsors, while doing what we do best - working with vendors to bring about an epic ordering experience.

You team up with a bunch of venues and industry partners in your role, right? How do those collaborations shape your marketing game? Any standout moments from a partnership you'd like to highlight?

Throughout my time at Mr Yum I have had the opportunity to work with some epic industry partners, helping us unlock new ways to connect with our customers (venues) while also building brand awareness with in venue guests (punters at the pub). The reason why industry and brand partners are so important to us is because we’re looking for new ways to incentivise customers to order through Mr Yum as opposed to wasting their time in a line at the bar.

The most exciting outcomes from collaboration are the situations where the venue wins (more $$ spent) and the customer gets a stellar deal (cheaper beers anyone?). The first things that come to mind are awesome margarita deals with Mr Consistent or cheaper buckets of Corona for courtyard sessions in Summer - they’re simple solutions that drive product adoption and make our venues happy - this makes us happy.

What does a day in the life of a Senior Marketing Manager at a cool startup like Mr Yum? Got any regular (or not-so-regular) challenges that pop up, and how do you handle them?

In my most recent performance review my VP described me as a “hired gun” - reason being, I get briefed on a project, spend the next few weeks researching, project managing and executing. What this means is that my job is quite different each month, keeping me engaged and constantly thinking.

An insight into a few of the projects that I have been running over the past six months include; migrating our knowledge base and creating an online community, executing five industry panel events across ANZ, building a new merch store and conceptualising and executing a new webinar series alongside our Partner lead. The beauty of this work is that each project is widely different.

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How's life in the startup scene, especially with your role at Mr Yum? Is the experience drastically different from your previous job experiences?

One piece of advice that my first boss at Mr Yum said to me (the unstoppable Mads Hallett who is now the Chief of Staff to the COO), was to learn how to give away your legos. If you’re in a startup it’s likely that your role is going to change 10 times within the year - you need to be accepting of that change and start to appreciate the opportunity that it presents.

My previous roles were far more structured - the pace was slower, but so was the opportunity to grow. I must admit, it took some time to adjust to this cowboy country way of life, but when you do you’ll never second guess your decision to jump aboard.

The hospitality industry is known for its fast pace and dynamic nature. How do you stay ahead of the latest trends and how do these trends influence your marketing strategies?

Mr Yum is a product first company, meaning that we ensure we lead with our product and the solutions it presents to venues. The way that the hospitality industry changes thus impacts the product and the solutions we’re offering and those that lead our marketing campaigns.

For example, here are two questions we have been getting asked lately; “how can I fill my venue during quiet sittings?” or “how can I boost sales?” We take these queries and think about new ways that we can talk about our CRM platform to help get more bums on seats more frequently, or new product focused campaigns that highlight different tools you could use to boost sales. These are all valuable learnings that will infer changes to our strategy, update our messaging and focus on the key issues that affect our target market.

Plus, we have an extremely collaborative team of big brains - this ensures that we’re innovating as marketers in the same way that our product does. Water cooler chat is not underrated!

And lastly, looking back at your career, what skills or experiences do you think lit the way for this job? For those dreaming of a similar journey, what's your top tip?

There is no set formula that got me here, but I personally believe that my tertiary years within an analytical function helped instil a commercial mindset that is deeply beneficial within a marketing role. Having this skillset meant that I could keep numbers over hype, even when running brand centric campaigns that are difficult to track the ROI.

Anywaaaaaaay, I’ll stop the chit chat and suggest that anyone who wants to forge a similar career path should always look for new ways to stretch their skills, ask more questions and not be afraid to try new things (a varied job history can be a great thing!). This is how I got to my current role, by meeting new people, putting my hand up to get involved in different projects, and not letting a little rejection or setback knock me down. You never know where a random coffee meeting will get you one day…

From the Startup Life team

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