The Berlitz team at Compass Offices' China Building business centre.
Can you describe your professional expertise/responsibilities?
Interviewee: Pete Kang, Language Center Director
“I have spent some 46 years in Hong Kong. I'm Korean and I have mostly been in the financial investment field. I was part of a large private equity fund in Korea and one of the largest investments we made was in private education companies in Korea, including Time Education. As part of Time Education's expansion into Asia, Time Education acquired Berlitz in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. Berlitz is a very well-known and well-established language school and language service brand, headquartered in the US”.
Can you describe the significance of your business?
“Berlitz has been around Hong Kong for a long time. During the 80s - 90s, it saw significant growth and expansion here and established itself as the pre-eminent languages learning centre in Hong Kong. Most of our customers are business professionals looking to learn English, Mandarin and Cantonese at the business level. There has also been a lot of overseas companies, including Japanese and Korean conglomerates stationed in Hong Kong wanting to learn business English.
Since then, there have been a lot of structural changes within the city. For instance, business professionals covering China out of Hong Kong has made Mandarin very popular and essential to our business. We position ourselves as a premium language service provider, and we strive to cater to business professionals who want to get better in a spoken language. Whether it's English, Mandarin or Cantonese, we want to ensure that people get professionally fluent. We want to attract people who are very dedicated to improving their language skills and we do that by making sure that people commit to a time - at least 2 units a week (if not more), to ensure progress is unavoidable. We also have a very strong curriculum and progress tracking materials so that ultimately, students are able to speak with confidence at the end of their experience”.
What is a contributing factor to becoming a client at Compass Offices?
“We wanted a more flexible office option in contrast to the traditional fixed terms on a real estate commitment. Rent expense was one of the biggest reasons and when we came into the shared office spaces, and we realised there's a lot of common area and a lot of other spaces that we can use, so that was a plus.
We realised that a lot of the tenants in shared office spaces were able to take advantage of the high quality service we provide, as they were also able to save on rental expenses. This was a win for us, and also a win for our fellow tenants.
We also host various classes over the weekends and a lot of shared office spaces don’t allow easy access during the weekends. Compass Offices as a differentiating feature enable easy access to its premises, where our students can come early or stay afterwards, and can enjoy extra study and preparation time, in a professionally decorated and comfortable setting. This is unique to Compass where other more restrictive shared offices do not offer. At the end of the day, our customers are typically corporate professionals and executives, and when they realise the Compass locations and space is highly differentiated and well managed, we hope this will also help Compass gain additional tenants through added traffic”.
Where would you expect your business landscape to evolve in the next decade?
“Years ago, the principal source of information was through teachers and textbooks, but the Internet changed all that. Most people in my generation relied on Wikipedia and Google, but for younger generations now it's Instagram, TikTok and other forms of social media where people gather a lot of information. As education and access to information is changing, language learning is also changing as well. However, we think the need to learn languages will continue to remain, and Berlitz is taking advantage of this need in a changing environment to upgrade and diversify our offering. For example, all customers now have the choice of having one-on-one classes in person, online, or through a hybrid combination of both. We are also diversifying the content and monitoring of our classes with new offerings, such as Berlitz Flex, and Berlitz On Demand. We continue to evolve to keep up with the changing needs of our customers.
We want to be very flexible in terms of our course materials and the way we present our online services. What we are very different from just a collection of training videos since language learning requires a specific type of interaction that can only be optimised through 1 on 1 interaction. We continue to find this very important”.
Would Compass Offices' model suit your business as it continues to evolve?
“Yes, by being in a shared office space, it frees up a lot of budget to provide better services and care for our customers. As we expand our footprint and scope of services to include not just language learning, we want to roll out other services such as professional translation services or if a business professional wants to have a native speaker help with interpretation requests in a conference call, we want to be able to help. A shared office space allows us the flexibility to flex up or down or to gain access to a conference room with seamless coordination and ease”.
Name a feature of Compass Offices that you enjoy the most.
“The interior and corporate fit out is an upgrade to most other shared office spaces. I really like the interior here. I also like the fact that Compass Offices seems to treat a lot of their customers as responsible individuals and not be too restrictive. This level of trust and respect is difficult to find in other places where you need your key card to access bathrooms and fridges. I find Compass to be professional, respective, and very understanding to their customers' needs, just like Berlitz”.