The Choice
Every venue is running one of two playbooks, and both compound. Neither stands still, which means you are building one or feeding the other, every shift.
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Writing on business, ownership, and the art of enjoying both, from the Initiative's co-founders.
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That's Just How It Is
The venue still trades, still fills on Friday, and the reviews are not terrible. Normalisation is the stage where decline stops feeling like decline and starts feeling like reality.
When the Room Goes Sideways
The pass is stacking, the floor is guessing, and nobody is running the room. Hospitality crisis is not one catastrophic event, it is a cascade watched live by everyone sitting in it.
Hire the Spark, Teach the Skill: The Selection Problem Hiding in the Labour Problem
You can teach a person with the spark to run a PMS. You cannot teach a PMS operator to develop the spark. Most operators have built funnels that select hard for the wrong one, then declare a labour shortage.
The questions you will be asked, in the order they will be asked
The order is the method. The cheap questions come first because they are the ones you cannot rehearse.
The Gap Between Promise and Delivery
Nothing is catastrophic. Everything is slightly off, and it compounds across a service until the guest leaves unconvinced. Destabilisation is not the absence of effort, it is the absence of architecture.
Hotel or Accommodation: Most Operators Have Already Chosen and Won't Admit It
The positioning is hotel. The rate is hotel. The deck the operators show their investors is hotel. The actual service layer is accommodation with extra furniture.
They Are Not Buying the Venue. They Are Pricing Your Absence.
A buyer is not paying for last year's covers. They are pricing whether your hospitality business survives without you. What actually sets the number.
What the person across the table is actually looking at
They're not buying your revenue. They're pricing the risk that it walks out of the door with you.
Why your business is worth less than you think, and exactly where the discount sits
The gap between your number and their number has four parts, and each one is priced separately.
You Can Feel It When You Walk In
You know within thirty seconds. The host is present but not attentive, the greeting is functional, and the room is flat. Demoralisation is the first thing a guest experiences and the last thing most operators address.
Speed Up to Slow Down: The Time-Buyback Decision Most Operators Are Failing
A property spent two million dollars and eighteen months on a deployment whose entire business case was the time it would save. Then it threw the time away.
Browse by topic
Hospitality
The Choice
Every venue is running one of two playbooks, and both compound. Neither stands still, which means you are building one or feeding the other, every shift.
That's Just How It Is
The venue still trades, still fills on Friday, and the reviews are not terrible. Normalisation is the stage where decline stops feeling like decline and starts feeling like reality.
When the Room Goes Sideways
The pass is stacking, the floor is guessing, and nobody is running the room. Hospitality crisis is not one catastrophic event, it is a cascade watched live by everyone sitting in it.
Leadership
The Signal Audit: Five Questions to Ask Before You Put a Leader on Camera
A single clip can undo weeks of good marketing. Five questions to run against leadership content before it goes out, starting with whether the action proves what the words claimed.
Your Signal Is the Message. McDonald's CEO Just Proved It.
It was not the message that failed. It was the signal. The internet did not debate the food, it debated belief.
The $600K Leadership Mistake I Made While Building My Third Business
Eight years in, able to command a room, and somewhere between the second business and the third I had started asking for permission again. Not fatigue. Dissociation.
Capital and Exits
The questions you will be asked, in the order they will be asked
The order is the method. The cheap questions come first because they are the ones you cannot rehearse.
They Are Not Buying the Venue. They Are Pricing Your Absence.
A buyer is not paying for last year's covers. They are pricing whether your hospitality business survives without you. What actually sets the number.
What the person across the table is actually looking at
They're not buying your revenue. They're pricing the risk that it walks out of the door with you.
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