What Alcohol Actually Does to Your Leadership

This isn't a recovery story. There's no rock bottom. No dramatic turning point where everything became clear.

This is about the version that doesn't look like a problem.

For a significant period of building Ojo Rojo I was using alcohol, and other forms of self medication, to manage the pressure of running a hospitality business. Not in a way that destroyed anything visibly. Not in a way that matched the stories I'd heard about people losing control. The relationships held. The business kept running. The team thought I was just having a tough time with the industry.

If I'm being honest about it, I was pretty good at getting by.

And that's exactly the problem.

The Version Nobody Talks About

Getting by and leading well are not the same thing. For a long time I confused the fact that things weren't visibly falling apart with evidence that everything was fine.

What was actually happening was something quieter. When you know there are problems you don't know how to face, when the weight of the business and the identity and the responsibility has become more than you have the tools to carry cleanly, reaching for something becomes its own kind of purpose. The evening arrives. The day has been heavy. And suddenly there's a clear trajectory. A direction that feels like forward motion.

While you're inside that, the other things get moved. The problems sitting at the front of your mind find their way to the back. The pressure lifts temporarily. And that temporary lifting is real. It works. That's the honest thing about it. In the short term it does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Purpose, even the wrong kind, is still purpose. And a mind that's been carrying the weight of running a hospitality business all day will take whatever it can get.

Why the Industry Makes It Invisible

This is an industry whose commercial success is partly built on the idea that another drink is always a good idea. Spend per head is a metric. Every additional drink is revenue. We are professionally invested in the culture of drinking. We build environments designed to make it feel natural. We are extraordinarily good at it.

And then we go home and reach for the same thing.

Because the industry treats it as entirely normal, because the majority of our staff are young and can absorb it without visible consequence, because the culture of the trade socialises around it, it doesn't register as a choice. It registers as just what this life looks like.

The margins in this industry are thin enough that everything feels like it's working against you. The financial pressure, the staffing challenges, the way every bad week lands personally because your identity is fused with the business. That combination creates a particular kind of sustained pressure that needs somewhere to go at the end of the day.

And the industry hands you the answer before you've even asked the question.

What It Was Actually Doing

The mornings were where it was most visible, even when I wasn't naming it as such.

Going to bed late. Sleeping in later. Telling myself seven hours is seven hours regardless of when they fall. Which is technically true and practically nonsense. The quality of sleep after a heavy evening is not the same as sleep that arrives naturally. And the difference shows up the moment you open your eyes.

The first hour of the day, when it should have been setting the tone for everything that followed, was instead a period of recovery. Moving through mud. A person going through the motions of starting the day rather than actually starting it.

And for a founder, that matters enormously. The morning is where the thinking happens. The planning. The high value decision making that only you can do. When the mornings are written off, that work gets pushed to later. And later the business is making noise and the team needs things and it doesn't happen at all.

Beyond the mornings, apathy settled around the business. The problems that were specifically my responsibility started being avoided rather than confronted. Not calling staff up on things that needed addressing. Turning up and doing the minimum. Treating the business like a job rather than something I'd built and believed in.

The anger and frustration that I've described in other videos, aimed outward, directed at the wrong things. When I eventually looked at that period honestly I had to acknowledge that what I was reaching for at the end of the day was a significant contributing factor to the version of myself I'd grown to dislike.

The Accidental Six Months

Here's how it changed. And the honest version is more useful than a dramatic one.

I got ill over Christmas and New Year. Dry January to clear the system. No grand declaration. Then a half marathon at the end of March to train for properly. Then the house renovation, months of brutal work, effectively homeless, running the business alongside it, my mum very ill, the consultancy launching.

By the time everything settled I was six months in without it ever having been a decision. And the realisation that arrived wasn't emotional. It was practical. I couldn't have done any of that if I'd been in the old patterns. The six months proved something I couldn't have argued myself into believing. That the version of me without the habit was meaningfully more capable than the version with it.

Not because I was a different person. Because the same person had access to more of himself.

The mornings changed first. Sleep that actually restored. Waking up present. The first hour of the day belonging to me. The thinking clearing. The apathy lifting. The capacity to confront things rather than avoid them returning. The exercise and the breathwork and the time with Siobhan becoming real rather than performed. The 3D printing coming back. Everything that should have been restoring me becoming actually accessible because the platform it needed was finally there.

The Leadership Question

I'm not telling you to get sober. I still have the occasional drink. What I've found is that I can stop there now in a way I couldn't before. Which tells me something about what the habit was doing that the moderate version wasn't.

What I'm offering is one practical question.

Are the things that should be yours being swallowed by what you're reaching for at the end of the day?

Are your mornings written off instead of belonging to you? Are the hobbies and the restoration taking a back seat so the numbing can happen? Are the ungoverned hours producing the version of yourself that can lead, or the version that can just about get by?

If you're going through the worst of what this industry has to offer, if you're experiencing the mood swings, the bad sleep, the anxiety, the things that appear across this channel again and again, consider seriously how much of that is being amplified by what you're reaching for when the shift ends. Whether the thing you're using to decompress is actually decompressing you or compounding the very thing you're trying to escape.

It's not a moral question. It's not about willpower or character. It's about whether what you're doing with your evenings is setting up your mornings.

Take a few months and see what changes. Not a pledge. Not a programme. Just enough time to find out whether the version of you without the habit is different in ways that matter.

I think you'll find it is. And that the difference isn't small.