Eventually, as the industry slowly evolved, we grew with it.
We worked with contractors to try and get that extra firepower into those kitchens. “We started deploying air-blast gas-fired ranges in China and across Asia in our designs.
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I was being taught how to challenge the status quo and persuade people.”ĬKP quickly gained a strong reputation for specialist kitchen designs for oriental cooking. “He could take a 5,000 meal cook-serve facility and switch them over to a cook-chill operation. “He was the best in class he had clients eating out of his hands,” says William. In the late 1980s foodservice consulting was a rare commodity in Southeast Asia, so a man of Petzold’s caliber – bolstered by William, who was gaining knowledge daily – shone in a burgeoning market. He taught me everything that operations and master planning were to foodservice consulting.” He was very patient, sitting with me every day after work, answering my questions. “He brought all this experience to the table at a time when kitchen contractors were offering design for free,” says Alburn.“Christian was my mentor. He also played a pivotal role at McDonald’s where he was integral to shortening burger production time. Possessing “immense hospitality experience”, Petzold had been a hotelier, chef, manufacturer, contractor and operator. Christian wanted me to learn all aspects of the trade – he didn’t want me to just jump in at management level.” He had two draftsmen working for him, but he needed a technical guy. Having completed 95 job applications, he was invited by a German gentleman called Christian Karl Petzold to interview for his hospitality company Christian K Petzold Consultants (rebranded CKP in 1987). “It was impossible to get a job,” he says. However, William graduated “right smack in the midst” of one of the worst financial crises in Southeast Asia. Nobody was thinking of hotel management.” My generation were the baby boomers – we were going from poverty into wealth, so needed to secure ourselves a ‘decent profession’ to be able to make it big. But at that stage, I didn’t think about a career in hospitality. “From a young age, I had refined taste buds. William’s father (“linguistic, technical, outspoken”) worked for the Malaysian railways in an administrative capacity, while his mother (“very opinionated”) was a schoolteacher. While the creativity and problem-solving characteristics came naturally to William, an interest in hospitality at that stage was only tangential. By solving each of those small boxes, you solve the entire problem.”
However, engineering in its philosophical sense, is breaking a big problem into small problems.
Instead, there was a huge creative side to me that enabled me to visualize things three dimensionally. “I was not a traditional tick-the-box type engineer. Despite losing his mojo for medicine, William’s grades were good enough to get him into engineering school where, despite initially “absolutely hating it”, he gained a Bachelorate of Engineering (Mechanical) in 1986 from the National University of Singapore, specializing in thermal engineering, air conditioning and building services. Yet, the road to success, as with many in this profession, wasn’t always a straight or smooth one. William’s international experience in food and beverage concept work, restaurant planning, foodservice and laundry facilities design and solid waste consultancy has seen him and the CKP team (currently 60+) – execute countless high-end projects, including Wynn Palace Cotai Wynn Resort Macau Sandy Lane Barbados JW Marquis Dubai City of Dreams Macau Solaire Manila Crown Towers Perth and Four Seasons Maldives, among many others – including more than 1,000 hotel projects. Some 37 years into his career the president of CKP Hospitality Consultants, which has offices in Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, Shanghai, Perth and Bengaluru, is one of the world’s – and certainly Asia’s – most highly respected and experienced design consultants. The world of medicine’s loss was – in due course – to be a significant gain for foodservice consultancy. However, by the time he reached his penultimate year at school, he had “fizzled out of energy” in that pursuit. As a young man growing up in Malaysia, Alburn William wanted to study medicine.
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