What Nobody Was Talking About at the Biggest Hospitality Event I've Been To

Last week I sat in a room full of some of the sharpest hospitality operators in the country.

Hundreds of them. Big brands. Multi site operators. Speakers from businesses running six, ten, fifteen, some approaching two hundred sites. Investors. Growth stories. Airport openings. Confidence in the room from open to close.

And in a full day of conversation, almost nobody named the fact that businesses across this industry are closing every day.

That's not a criticism of the event. It's an observation. And it's the observation I want to share here, honestly.

The Room I Sat In

I was up in London for the Propel Operational Excellence Conference. Partly as a guest, partly because I've been invited to speak at their next event in October.

The calibre of the day was high. The speakers were serious. The stories on stage were largely growth stories. New site openings. Investment rounds. Airport locations. Businesses scaling from six sites to eight to twelve. What it takes to move a hospitality brand from one region to national scale. All of that is useful.

But what I noticed, especially as someone who has just closed the doors on his own venue, was who was largely missing from the conversation. The independents. The founders running one or two sites. The ones for whom scaling to six sites is a fantasy while keeping the doors open at all is the actual battle they're fighting this month.

What Nobody Was Saying

What surprised me most wasn't that the growth stories dominated. It was how little space was given to what everyone in the industry knows is happening on the ground right now.

Businesses closing every day and every week across the country. Margins the thinnest they have ever been. A public whose behaviour has shifted so significantly since covid that the predictable rhythms hospitality used to rely on no longer hold. Founders operating in a state of quiet, sustained crisis that almost never makes the trade press because it's happening one venue at a time.

The speakers were being honest about their own experience. Their honesty just happened to be about the level of the industry where the pressures are different. Growth challenges. Operational scaling. Not the same set of pressures the founder of a single independent venue is carrying right now while trying to make payroll and cover their shortfall from personal savings.

That gap has consequences. Because the founders who most need to hear that they're not alone in what they're carrying are the ones who almost never see themselves represented at these events. When they don't see themselves, they assume the problem is them. It isn't them. It's an industry in structural difficulty that hasn't yet found the language or the platform to talk about it honestly at scale.

What Was Actually Being Said

I want to give the event proper credit. Because there was a lot that was useful.

The most interesting thing I took away was where the successful operators actually focus their attention. Less on the money. More on values and purpose. On getting the culture right. On making sure the business had something to stand for rather than just numbers to hit.

That resonated deeply. It's exactly what I focused on at Ojo Rojo, and the love that came back to us in the final weeks before the closure was the direct result of years of focusing on those intangibles. My staff turnover was almost non existent. The customers who came back for anniversaries year after year. All of that came from getting the intangibles right.

Hearing that same principle repeated by operators running six, eight, twelve sites was validating. The operators at the top of the industry who are actually succeeding right now are the ones who understand that the culture and the values are the foundation the numbers are built on.

Boredom Dictates Value

Two ideas from the day landed hardest for me.

The first came from Jamie Haziel, co founder of Little Door and Co, up to around six sites now. He said something on stage that stopped me cold. Boredom dictates value.

His point was that you should be focusing on what excites you as a founder. If you're bored doing something, that's almost certainly a signal that it isn't the thing you should be doing. It's the thing that should be handed off to someone whose value is created by doing it well. And by holding onto it because you feel you should, you're actively lowering the value of the business as well as your own engagement with it.

He said something else that also stuck with me. Be who you really are and act on your positive mindset. Don't fake it and end up resenting it. Which is essentially a version of everything I've been saying for a long time, said in one line by someone running six sites.

Chris Stagg and Peach

The other speaker who made a genuine impact on me was Chris Stagg. Former Managing Director of Peach, before they closed.

What he shared, particularly about Peach being a passion project of his and how difficult the closure had been, resonated deeply given the timing of my own closure at Ojo Rojo. He was honest about it in a way that isn't always common at events like that. Not the strategic version. The human version.

I've since met up with him. He lives in Bournemouth. He's the kind of voice the industry needs more of. Someone with real credibility at the top of the game who is willing to talk about what closing something you built feels like from the inside.

What Comes Next

I've been invited to speak at the next Propel conference in October, on culture, talent and training. My talk is going to be about how hospitality founders can lead with clarity, steadiness and control, without sacrificing their health, their relationships, or their sense of who they are.

Founder first thinking. The argument that fixing the founder is the necessary starting point for anything else the business needs to do.

Which feels like the right conversation to bring into that room.

If you're not familiar with Propel, it's a membership organisation for the hospitality industry that runs conferences, publishes industry commentary, and connects people across the trade. Worth looking into if you're operating in this space and don't already know about them.

Closing Thought

What I took away from the day wasn't quite what I expected. I got the operational excellence conference I was expecting. What I didn't expect was to leave with a sharper sense of the gap between where the industry conversation lives and where the reality lives on the ground. And a clearer sense of what my own contribution to that conversation needs to be.

Because that gap is the space this channel exists to speak into.