We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alexandria Tomayko. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alexandria below.

Alright, Alexandria thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the toughest parts of scaling a business is maintaining quality as you grow. How have you managed to maintain quality? Any stories or advice?

This is my zone of genius I love this topic.

Especially because the answer is something I do for my clients quite often and it doesn’t matter if they have been in business for 22 years or are deciding they want to build one.

Operation manuals are the best way to achieve quality , maintain it and scale.

So what is an operations manual and if it is such a obvious answer why are people not using it more?

That is a great question the why is that most people that set up an entrepreneurial venture are first timers or have gotten seasoned but do not have a business background, in fact only 44% from a stat I found has pursued a bachelors education.

I am not saying this is wrong at all there are so many successful entrepreneurs that do not have a bachelors education because well isn’t that the beauty of being an entrepreneur?

So the why is lack of knowledge of the manuals existence , need and benefits.

The what is a book that basically becomes the ventures bible (yes I said it). I describe it this way because it is very similar to that holy book, it has the commandments what the values and the rules of the company are, what the mission is.

Then it has everything the business needs to operate effective and efficiently. Systems, Charts, Maps, Training Manuals all of the details to train , onboard and run the ship.

Through these processes and training is how you achieve quality and then through the checklists and reports that are also in the manual is how you control the quality. So your business can go from 20 -> 200 over night yet if you implement the training manuals and provide access and require your staff to know and study the manual less is likely to fall through the cracks.

Alexandria, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Nice to meet you!

So me this is the part where I tell all the good and not the bad I guess. Putting my best foot forward ;).

My name is Alexandria Tomayko and I am now a semi retired Experience Planner/ Consultant (I know retired at my age?).

I have been in the hospitality industry for the better part of 18 years now (don’t let the baby face fool you) and now post covid I have pivoted back into Hospitality Consulting full time (I do business consulting for Restaurants, Hotels & Bars), I specialize in Operations & Systems it has always been an easy transition in between planning, logistics and operations to consulting on operations because they are almost one in the same.

I love what I do I love planning still yes and so I set up a site to help others plan by providing resources to them (you can check it out it is The Pantless Planner).

Yet consulting is just as fab, I see my work as a puzzle and I am called in when there is a problem and I get paid to analyze poke and and then fix it. Sound easy huh…

Each client and company is so unique and I see them as living things, so if it bringing a company back to life or helping it with growing pains I set in and over a hand.

I think the thing that sets me apart is not only my time in the industry but how I got there and the road I took to become a consultant.
Being in Events from the beginning with high stakes , the first two events I was part of was a Familiarization trip which is where you take the industry leaders from Booking,com, Kayak and such and plan a multiple day event from them to become familiar with an area and have an experience that then they would in turn sell one of the other ones was an incentive trip with over 300 people over the course of 2 months and I acted as the right hand of the CEO during that time.

My point with that is that the level and attention of detail that I had to develop further (I have always been good at detail and breaking things down) and master. Not be intimidated at 17 years old when we are talking budgets in the millions.

All of this lead to me being a great observer , investigator and keeping a cool head which are needed in consulting, I have to observe to identify where actually the problem is because it is common that people are only noticing the symptom. I need to dissect and see how all of the parts fit together and investigate how the problem came to be so it does not repeat itself and then create and implement a solution. (see it’s puzzle).

I think if there is one recommendation I can give and that you should know is in your business always get help.
So many times I am called in as a Hail Mary to see if I can bring a business back from the brink and I can see that if only they would of asked for some help along the way they would not be in the situation they are in. It is better to pay for it now than later. If you are out of your depth , confused or unsure about where to go next, how to start or what will work hire a consultant, it can be even a 1 hr phone consultation, the value, clarity and direction you get can save you time, frustration, heart break and a boat load of money in the future.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I think its relevant and spoken about a lot lately which is the Masculine & Feminine polarities and energies within us.

I guess being a woman I am expected to have Feminine energy yet being in a high level and B2B field those two don’t really mesh.
For most of my career I have been in my masculine so to speak, the driving force to get things done for my business and for others. Structure, systems and rules are my forte and enforcing them is also part of the job description.

This means that the idea of a soft, nurturing person and the a$$ that I had to become in order to command respect from my clients and peers where constantly at war.

I believed I would never be able to have my soft side come out and be part of my work, my work is all about control , logical thinking and data driven decisions.

I had to go through years of unlearning that the polarities are not inherently one good and one bad and learn to provide space to them at all times. I can never stop being the logical person that I am it is just a quality and one that has served me greatly in business. But now I have learned that with identifying and expressing feeling actually works just as well. That said I am never going to recommend a marketing strategy based on how I feel. Yet I work with humans we all do in one way or another and being balanced in these qualities or polarity makes me more human, makes me a better consultant and a better person.

Empathy and connection are things that will never steer you wrong and COIVD was a great reminder of that . So if you are reading this and you are told you are too masculine there is hope and if you are told you are too feminine there is an answer as well.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

COVID. I know this article is giving it a lot of publicity.

Many don’t understand what covid was like in the hospitality industry, you maybe have seen the number which represents the losses in the trillions of dollars but there where a lot of personal losses.

I will never forget the feeling of waking up one day and not being able to do what I had done for 15-16 years of my life (at that point exactly half of it). I always had a type of job security even as an entrepreneur that I could go anywhere and work anywhere because hospitality alongside another hospitable field has been around for ages and is one of the oldest fields.

So wake up one day and the one thing that you always knew you could do no matter where you are is gone. Your livelihood , your peers everything. Where I was at the time it was actually illegal to host events, if I did I ran the risk of being deported. The closest comparison I had was prohibition. I was prohibited to practice and create what I was set on this earth to do.

Yet it is not all a sob story you see this woman can not sit still and gets mentally bored quite easily, so I fiddled and played around with some things here and there and ended up creating a tech app for the hospitality industry. Don’t ask me to explain it just kinda happened and no I do not have an ops manual for it.

I was looking for something to keep me busy and that if it worked that would be more sustainable than the way the majority of my industry lives which is yes giant paycheck but at the end of the day paycheck to paycheck (that was one of the biggest reasons why a lot of companies went out of business).

So the pivot was into tech because I could not do what I have always done. I look back on it and am proud because first off tech and I do not get along but also because I was still able to stay with in my industry and hopefully create something useful.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://thepantlessplanner.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepantlessplanner/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Nomadicplanning
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandria-tomayko/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@ThePantlessPlanner
• Other: *for business consulting use Linked In to reach out, for the event resources use all others.