Feature
Issue No. 7 - October/November 2002
Quality with a Capital 'Q'
Virtually all major hospitality operators in the State know of the Quality Training Company and its dynamic prime mover, Jim Finlayson.
Jim, audibly scottish, is both a passionate hotelier and a surprisingly de Bon oesque lateral thinker. He moves easily from crystal rooms to barrooms, and isn’t afraid to back his own commercial tenets with investment.
When Jim came to South Australia it wasn’t with a lot of fanfare. Battered by the 1987 stock market downturn, he migrated from South Africa with virtually no assets. Formerly a member of the board of the Southern Sun group of hotels, operators of the famous Sun City resort among others, Jim’s first job here was as a farm labourer on the Yorke Peninsula.
“I was no good whatsoever at it!” he says, but that career didn’t last long, as he was called in to manage the new Terrace Hotel which opened in 1989 on the old Gateway Hotel site in North Terrace, Adelaide.
“Having been on the main board of companies, managing a hotel didn’t satisfy me—I wanted my own company,” Jim said. Recognising deficiencies in the training of Australian hospitality staff, he believed a business opportunity lay there.
He left the Terrace to found what was to be a one-man training firm; by 1991 the Quality Training Company was beginning to expand out of pure hospitality service training into other areas, such as management. Jim also had ambitions to take the training work a step further, and practice what he preached.
“I had reached the stage in life where I wanted to spoil myself,” Jim says. “I wanted to make the perfect motel to play with.”
He seized an opportunity to buy the Aviators Lodge establishment on Tapleys Hill Road and went about creating a working model of his curriculum.
“I have two deep rooted beliefs about hospitality,” he says. “People pay for accommodation, for their food, for t...
