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.
Writing.
Essays, frameworks, and field notes from nearly four decades of building, backing, and selling businesses.
More writing
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.
Hire Anyone. Import Nothing.
The four kinds of business owner, why three of them were manufactured at national scale, and the four-minute test that tells you which one you actually are.
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.
Indispensable Is Not a Compliment
Being across everything feels like leadership and prices like risk. Why owner dependency is a standards failure before it is ever a valuation problem.
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.
