Maya Lopatynsky graduated Spring 2020 with a BS in Hotel and Tourism Management from the Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality. Still living in New York City, she is currently a Business Development Manager at HRS Group, a data-centric software company that covers procurement booking and payment in the corporate lodging space.
What has your journey been like after graduating from NYU?
The brief period between post-grad and my job was very tumultuous, and it was hard to navigate right after the pandemic because it seemed like the whole world shut down. But Dr. Minnaert was really a key factor in giving me ideas as to what kind of companies to look at for jobs, who's hiring, or what industry is going to come back. And to say I got a job in October, only a couple of months after graduation was pretty nice.
Can you talk about your current role at HRS?
HRS provides technology to help streamline and deliver savings and value to corporate customers within their hotel programs, and I work on the enterprise solutions team as a Business Development Manager (BDM) within the group. So I do research and prospecting for new corporate clients that I think our technology would be beneficial for. It is sales, but it’s also developing HRS and extending our network here in the US, as our headquarters are in Cologne, Germany.
What does a typical workday look like for you?
I do research on a list of corporate clients and contacts, and I reach out to them and ask for a meeting to discuss their lodging program and see how HRS solutions can help them or if it’s of value to them. So I start my morning by reading emails to see if any clients that I've reached out to have interest in jumping on a call. And then I will spend the rest of my afternoon researching and contacting customers from this list that I created in Excel. Then, I strategize and create email talk tracks, as well as voicemail templates that I can read off of when I'm leaving a voicemail so that I can hit the nail on the head every time. I'm able to tailor each and every outreach to specific initiatives or payment topics that HRS’ technology can align with.
What are you passionate about in the work that you do?
I'm passionate about the fact that I get to create my own storyline and sell HRS in my own way to these big companies. I'm really passionate about delivering the value of HRS to corporate customers, saying “Hey, I know you're using these vendors, but here's why HRS is better”. So I'm excited to be able to be creative but also articulate myself well and deliver the value proposition. I'm also passionate about just making sure that I'm hitting my own key performance indicators (KPIs) every week. I tell myself I need to set up a certain amount of calls per week. And that's the way the sales cycle works, you have KPIs and certain metrics that you need to hold yourself accountable to. So I'm competitive with myself in terms of making sure I'm not disappointing my boss but also making sure that I'm doing what I feel is sufficient.
In what ways has your NYU experience had an impact on your career and shaped who you are today?
I think NYU made me a better student and I’ve been able to keep that same structure getting things done in work and prioritizing certain aspects. So I've been able to make sure that I'm disciplined in my work environment in the same way that I was with my academic environment. The SPS curriculum helped me prepare to have a really deep understanding of the travel industry and corporate travel, key terms, etc. So I was able to assimilate into my new job a lot faster than some of my coworkers because they didn't always come from a hotel background. I'm still in the hospitality industry, so I'm able to use what I learned in all of my classes at NYU, specifically SPS, to my advantage in the corporate world. I love that almost every professor I had at SPS was an adjunct professor and the career advice and the real-world experience brought into the classroom is just so helpful.
What career advice would you give to NYU students?
Find an industry that you know is going to suit you best, not others' expectations of you. Find what you love to do and make a career out of it. Take the opportunity to figure out what you don't like doing while you're in college. I didn't know much about sales and that I could use my personality and my intellect to my advantage. I thought I had to go into a career like hotel development, where you're very much not interacting with other people, you're doing an analysis of numbers. So I would say professionally, just don't be scared of the unknown and intern, intern, intern. Interning and picking up on stuff that makes you uncomfortable, versus what comes naturally to you is a really great indicator of what kind of career path you should go down.