Benji Hart

The business and the constraint

As General Manager, I held full P&L responsibility for a 120-key beachfront social resort, restaurant and 24-hour bar. The resort stayed open throughout the transformation. I was responsible for running the daily operation and rebuilding the business behind it.

The property had a good location and a product guests enjoyed, but neither was translating into its full commercial potential. Demand rose and fell around the island’s party calendar. Outside peak periods, competitors fought for bookings by cutting room rates, sometimes below our own cost. I initially followed that discounting before changing direction.

Accommodation brought people to the property, but the bar was its profit centre. The commercial problem crossed the whole operation: what guests chose to book, how long they stayed, whether they spent their evening with us, what they bought, and how much of that revenue we actually retained.

Making daily work and money visible

I began by shadowing staff, asking questions and working through the existing routines. Reception already had a digital room-booking system, but payments and ancillary sales were scattered across paper folders and books. A room payment, towel rental, tour or laundry charge could require separate entries, followed by a total in the finance book.

At the end of a shift, staff could spend another 30 minutes to an hour trying to reconcile the paperwork with the cash. If the till did not balance, they recounted it and worked back through the books. The error could have happened earlier, and the records often did not make it clear where.

I built a Google Sheets system that recorded each movement once: the transaction type, guest and room, amount, time and staff member. The expected cash balance calculated automatically. Reception checked it roughly hourly, so a discrepancy could be traced through the recent transactions while the details were still fresh, rather than reconstructed at the end of a shift.

I also built a bespoke POS and financial/sales system, connecting stock, sales and F&B control to the operation. Together, the systems improved service speed and data accuracy and removed more than 20 hours of weekly administration. Department routines and SOPs changed alongside them. A new 24-hour staffing model lowered labour costs while improving service coverage.

Finding why a popular bar was underperforming

I worked on the menu, lighting, music, staff interactions and programming. Some changes improved the experience immediately, but they did not resolve the main constraint. Guests liked the bar, drinks and staff and intended to spend the evening there. On quieter nights, it still struggled to become busy enough to hold them.

The restaurant and poolside bar were close together, but separated physically by a wall and a change in level. Guests were eating, getting ready and arriving on different schedules. Some started drinking while others were still having dinner. Before the diners joined them, the first group could already have left to find somewhere busier.

The guests who remained in the dining area were comfortable, had space and seating, and were already socialising. To use the bar, they had to get up and relocate. That transition created a natural opportunity to go back to their room or try another venue, intending to return later. People already at the bar saw others sitting elsewhere and concluded that the evening had not really started.

The property was asking guests to move away from somewhere they wanted to be because that was where we had put the bar. Identifying that took months of observation and experimentation. Improving individual parts of the offer had helped, but had not fixed the physical arrangement that was interrupting participation.

Rebuilding the property around guest choice

I decided to move the bar into the dining area. Removing a beachfront pool bar looked counterintuitive: it was an obvious selling point. But the dining area already had the seating, comfort and social activity guests wanted. Putting the bar there allowed dinner and the evening’s activity to overlap without requiring people to relocate.

I personally led the physical rebuild: demolishing and relocating the poolside bar, removing two other buildings and building a new wing. We reorganised the property into three connected areas: a chill zone in the former pool-bar space, a social and party zone around the dining area and new bar, and an active zone with pool, ping pong and beer pong tables.

The purpose was to let guests choose their experience while staying part of the shared environment. They could relax beside the activity, join it, move between experiences or step back out when they wanted. The layout supported that freedom; it did not prescribe a route or timetable.

We kept construction costs down by using the onsite team and reusing materials from the property. That also meant taking staff away from other work while maintaining the live operation. Moving the bar carried a real commercial risk: if we damaged the social experience, guests could spend their evenings elsewhere, stay for fewer nights and recommend other properties.

Connecting the better product to better economics

The room-pricing decision started with the economics of selling a bed: what it cost to clean and provide it, and what we could charge while maintaining occupancy. Competitors were selling below our own cost. Following them could bring people through the door while weakening the business that had to serve them.

The cheapest bookings also brought guests who paid less for rooms, complained more and spent less at the bar. Accommodation brought people to the property, but F&B was the profit centre. I had to consider what the whole stay contributed, including whether guests wanted to spend their evenings and money with us.

I raised our cheapest room rate by 153% as we rebuilt the experience. The physical layout, staff interactions, music, lighting, service and programming made the property a stronger reason to come and stay. Guests could remain part of the social environment on their own terms, and the bar could serve them where they already wanted to be. We stayed in the same market and niche, attracting higher-value guests within it.

That connected the pricing decision to the product. We gave guests more reason to choose us and spend time with us, while earning more from the accommodation they booked. Occupancy and guest F&B spend increased alongside the higher room prices.

I also rebuilt the economics inside F&B. Menu costs and selling prices needed to make sense together; service needed to turn guest participation into orders; and POS logic and cost control needed to make the money visible. The self-built systems described earlier supported that work by improving the accuracy and speed of sales and financial records. The bar needed to earn more from what it sold as well as attract more customers.

Gross F&B margin rose from 15% to 50%, while ancillary revenue on low-volume nights tripled. The stronger experience generated demand and spend; the menu, pricing and operating controls improved how much of that business we retained. These changes worked together across the property.

The result and the next operating phase

Average nightly rate increased 40% against our own prior baseline. Our cheapest room reached 3.6 times competitors’ cheapest rates, yet occupancy reached 2-4 times theirs during the price war. During off-peak periods, our bar often attracted more guests than the competitor bars combined.

Demand grew enough that I converted my office into staff accommodation, freeing more rooms for guests. The commercial results were accompanied by a different daily operation: clearer controls, faster service, less administrative work and a physical layout that supported how guests wanted to spend their time.

The team had carried a sustained period of change while continuing to run the resort. Some staff resisted the changes or left, and the next phase required consolidation: making the new routines consistent, restoring close attention to detail and giving the operation time to settle.

I handed the next GM a functioning operation: the rebuilt physical layout, digital sales and financial systems, department routines and a team trained in how they worked. The resort was performing commercially and was far better aligned with what guests wanted. A traditional General Manager was better suited to the next phase of steady operating discipline and incremental refinement. Recognising that change in what the business needed was part of the handover.

I later used this turnaround as the case in my thesis on business transformation methods in hospitality. The result had come through practical experimentation; the thesis examined how formal Project Management, Lean Six Sigma, Agile and Scrum could have made the same work faster, better and cheaper.

The business had outgrown its operating system

The Board engaged me directly for scale-up and strategy work at a travel-tech business managing 850+ vehicles across Sri Lanka and Cambodia. The company had expanded into two countries, but its reporting and operating systems had not kept pace. Leaders lacked a clear, complete view of sales, performance and responsibility across the business.

My task was to understand how the operation worked, connect the parts being managed separately, and build the systems and routines needed for the next stage of growth. I started before the new Global GM took his first GM seat, then worked alongside him, the Cambodia GM, Head of Growth and department heads.

The engagement was extended twice, taking it to nine months. That allowed me to carry the work from diagnosis and planning into implementation alongside the people who would run the business.

The first two weeks: turning the gaps into a scale-up plan

I started by tracing sales, reporting, targets, departmental responsibilities and management routines across both countries. Process mapping and customer-journey analysis helped me follow what happened to a customer, how the work passed through departments, and what information reached management.

Within my first two weeks, I delivered an 85-page scale-up playbook to the Board. It brought the decisions, measures, workflows and routines into a connected plan for the Board and incoming Global GM.

The playbook set the direction. Over the nine-month engagement, I worked with the leadership team to put it into practice, develop their capability and investigate the problems that emerged from a closer view of the operation.

Building visibility leaders could use

Working with the Global GM, Cambodia GM, Head of Growth and department leaders, I implemented shared KPI logic, sales dashboards, departmental workflows, reporting and management routines. Process mapping, staff coaching and department-head mentoring were part of making those changes work in the business.

The dashboards showed what was happening; the workflows and reporting connected it to departmental responsibility. Management routines brought those parts together, giving leaders a way to review performance, agree priorities and escalate problems. A change in a number needed to lead to an investigation and a decision about what to do next.

In sales, I examined staffing, response times, messaging, follow-up and conversion alongside the customer journey. That connected the daily sales work to bookings and made it possible to examine the commercial result across the operation, rather than judge each department by its own activity.

I stayed involved as leaders began running the business with these systems and routines, helping them use the information to work through decisions while the company continued to grow.

Mentoring the leaders carrying the change

The new Global GM was an experienced and talented operator taking his first GM seat. I became a mentor and sounding board: answering questions, working through decisions and bringing the wider operating picture into the discussion. When I covered a gap, I also helped him build the capability to take it on.

I worked with the Cambodia GM and department heads in the same practical way. KPI and funnel reviews and a clearer view of the customer journey gave them more context for their decisions. We used that information to work through priorities and establish clearer routes for escalating problems.

The systems and leadership development grew together. Better information gave the team more to work with; mentoring and practical support helped them turn it into judgment and action.

Following the evidence from sales to paid marketing

One investigation shows where that closer view of the operation led. Digital marketing spend had increased severalfold without a corresponding increase in bookings, while slower growth was being treated as a sales-and-marketing problem.

I began inside the sales operation, testing staffing levels, response times, messaging, follow-up and conversion. Those tests did not explain the booking pattern, so I worked back to website traffic. The additional visits were not showing a reliable relationship to additional bookings either.

Traffic had risen with the marketing spend, but that alone did not establish that the spend was generating bookings. Visits were an intermediate step in the customer journey. The commercial question was whether the money spent bringing people to the website was turning into business.

Testing the diagnosis before the capital decision

I tested the raw data through five analytical models and approaches, including AI-driven analysis. I also checked whether the effect appeared later: traffic might lead to bookings after a delay, rather than immediately. That still did not explain the missing relationship.

I had already suspected that the marketing approach was wrong, so I needed to challenge my own diagnosis before taking it to the Board. I put the finding to the Global GM, Head of Growth and marketing team and asked them to find a flaw, missing variable or alternative explanation. Their knowledge of the business could reveal something the analysis had missed.

After that challenge, I presented the evidence to the Board and recommended removing the spend that was not producing bookings. The Board accepted the diagnosis and removed 90% of paid marketing spend. Bookings held.

That tested the finding in the live business: most of the spend could disappear without the expected loss of bookings. An investigation that began with sales performance had led to a materially different decision about where the company should spend its money.

A role decision that changed performance

A different problem required looking beyond someone’s performance in their current role. One manager was materially blocking my own work, and dismissal papers were being prepared. They were effectively new to management, while the company had grown so quickly around them that the role would have stretched an experienced senior manager.

I had no line authority over them. I recommended moving them into a role that better matched their strengths and what the business needed. The difficulty they were having in the existing role was a poor basis for concluding that they had no value to the company.

Within a month of the move, they received an award from the Global GM as one of the highest performers in a business of over 100 people. Looking at the role fit changed the outcome, despite the obstruction they had caused my own work.

What was working by the end of the engagement

By the end of the nine months, the Global GM and department leaders were running the business with shared KPIs, sales dashboards, workflows, reporting and management routines in use. The initial playbook had become part of how the company operated.

The marketing investigation and manager redeployment show two different uses of that understanding. In one, I followed the evidence beyond the sales team to question what marketing spend was actually buying. In the other, I looked beyond a manager’s current performance to examine what the company was asking them to do.

I left the leadership team with a clearer view of performance and responsibility, routines for using that information, and the practical support and development to make better decisions. The work had progressed from identifying the gaps to implementing the systems with the people responsible for running them.

A struggling bar inside a five-star hotel

I took over as Bar Manager of a multilevel bar with an outdoor dining area inside a five-star city hotel. It had underperformed for years under several managers. Hotel leadership had considered closing it, but doing so would have put the property’s five-star status at risk. My responsibility was to recover the venue’s service and revenue.

Guests were complaining, revenue was poor and the team had lost confidence. Repeated punitive management had made staff fearful of guests: an interaction could lead to a complaint, and a complaint could get them into trouble. The attention and initiative needed for good hospitality had become difficult for them to offer.

Giving the team confidence to serve

I started by changing what happened when something went wrong. I made the team’s mistakes my responsibility and stopped punitive responses. We worked through the cause of a problem and what needed to change, giving staff room to ask for help, learn and try again.

I wanted every guest to leave happier than when they arrived. To make that a useful guide for the team, I worked beside them during service, showing the attention I expected and coaching them as situations unfolded. I drew on European and North American service practices, teaching through live demonstration and mentoring.

They could see how I handled guests and how I responded when a mistake happened. Taking initiative became something I supported. As their confidence returned, staff became more willing to approach guests and take responsibility for the experience.

Making it easier for guests to order

Alongside the work with the team, I changed how service ran. The venue extended over several levels and into an outdoor dining area, so staffing had to match the space we were serving. I increased staffing and introduced proactive table service, bringing service to guests where they were sitting and making it easier to place an order.

The extra staff made that approach practical. The team had the time to give guests more attention and serve them more often. Guests had more opportunities to order during a visit, and both order frequency and average check size increased.

Adding staff to an underperforming bar meant spending more on its operation. In this case, that supported the service needed to increase sales. The team’s growing confidence and the additional staffing worked together: people were willing to engage guests, and there were enough of them to do it properly. Better hospitality became part of how the venue earned more.

Turning a sold-out evening into a new offering

One evening, the hotel’s main restaurant was sold out. There was demand for dinner, but the restaurant could not accommodate it. With four hours’ notice, I turned the foyer into a fine-dining pop-up so we could serve those guests in another part of the hotel.

The pop-up succeeded and became a recurring offering. What began as a response to that evening’s demand gave the hotel an additional revenue stream.

The recovery and what followed

Bar revenue increased 50% in 30 days, customer complaints fell 95% and staff tips doubled. The team that had been afraid of guest interactions was delivering better service, and the improvement was showing up in the venue’s revenue and their own earnings.

The recovery depended too heavily on me. I had become both the driving force behind the change and the person staff relied on to feel secure. The F&B director could tell whether I was onsite simply from how comfortable the team seemed and whether they had slipped back into old patterns.

Performance later regressed after I left. The experience taught me that taking on everything myself could produce a quick turnaround while leaving the operation dependent on me. I needed to build the support and structure into the business, so staff could feel secure and perform consistently without relying on my presence.

In later transformations, I put more effort into developing other leaders, sharing responsibility and building systems and routines that could hold without me onsite. Stakeholder alignment and time for those routines to settle mattered too. The business needed the confidence and capability to carry the change after I had gone.

A stalled question and a four-day diversion

I was working on scale-up and strategy with an 850+ vehicle travel-tech business operating in Sri Lanka and Cambodia when the company began considering a Philippines launch. Its business model sat in a legal grey area, and attempts to get an answer remotely had stalled. The company needed to understand the legal position before deciding how to proceed.

The Head of Growth asked me to divert from a holiday in Europe to Manila. I had no contacts there and was travelling with a holiday carry-on for what was meant to be a four-day stop. It became three weeks of government visits, customer research and work on the proposed entry plan.

Finding the person who could give the legal answer

I arrived without government contacts or pre-arranged meetings and began visiting offices, trying to work out who could answer the question. Several visits led nowhere. I had to find the right office and persuade the people there to let me make the case in person.

At the legal Undersecretary’s office, I made that case first to security and then to an assistant, until I secured a meeting on the spot. The Undersecretary gave me the official legal clarification the company needed. A question that had remained unresolved through remote attempts now had a first-hand answer from the relevant official.

Working out where the product could succeed

With the legal position clarified, I turned to how the proposed product would work on the ground. I spoke with tourists, locals and potential partners about travel patterns, customer needs, product requirements and local operating conditions. I wanted to understand who would use it, what they would need from it and how that varied between locations.

I compared legally workable locations against tourist movement, likely concentrations of demand, access to potential partners and the practical conditions for operating. Those questions belonged together: a location needed to make sense for the customer, the product and the operation that would support it.

After the government meeting, I used a phone number I had to arrange a meeting with a potential local partner in Bohol. What I had heard in Manila suggested that Bohol would be a much better launch location, so I travelled there to meet them in person and investigate it on the ground. That visit confirmed what I had heard in Manila and gave the company a potential local operating partner to assess.

The company’s preferred launch location did not stand up to that comparison. I recommended a different location and brought the findings into a revised entry plan. The field research also shaped the target customer profile, product specifications and marketing message, so the recommendation connected where to launch with what to offer and whom it needed to appeal to.

What I handed to the leadership team

At the end of the three weeks, I handed the findings and proposed operating roadmap to the Global GM and Head of Growth. The package brought together the legal answer, customer and product research, operating conditions, a revised location recommendation and a potential local partner.

The company could now assess a proposed entry with a clearer view of the legal position and the market it would actually serve. I had resolved the question I was sent to answer, then used the time on the ground to change the entry recommendation itself. The leadership team had a practical plan informed by both the official clarification and direct market research.

Two commitments already in motion

Two weeks into my scale-up engagement in Sri Lanka, the final in-person exams for my double degree across Germany and Finland began in Europe. The degrees had been under way for years, and the client knew about the commitments and had agreed to the travel.

The consulting work was already substantial. Within those first two weeks, I had delivered an 85-page scale-up playbook to the Board of an 850+ vehicle travel-tech business operating across Sri Lanka and Cambodia. I was working with an incoming Global GM and the leadership team to connect reporting, responsibilities and operating routines across the business.

The exams had to be completed in person while that engagement continued. I was also writing my thesis on business transformation in hospitality. The challenge was to complete the final academic requirements while continuing to deliver the work I had been brought in to do.

Keeping delivery moving through four exam trips

In under a month, I completed four international exam trips across Sri Lanka, Germany and Finland. Each trip included a 24-hour turnaround in Germany. Those journeys took me through both Germany and Finland, where the two parts of my degree were based.

I continued the consulting work remotely around overnight flights, exam preparation and the exams themselves, and kept writing the thesis alongside both. The travel had to fit the fixed exam commitments; the client work continued through it. I arranged the journeys and used the time between those commitments to keep delivery moving.

I had already spent an extended period combining work and study. Visa and financial constraints had required me to complete degree work remotely while working full-time in venue management and studying project management in Australia. That experience mattered when the final exams arrived during the Sri Lanka engagement: I was already accustomed to carrying professional responsibilities alongside academic deadlines.

Completed requirements and continued client work

I completed the degree requirements without interrupting delivery through the four international trips. The client later extended the engagement twice, taking it to nine months and allowing the scale-up work to continue from diagnosis and planning into implementation with the leadership team.

The business and the work on the ground

I spent five years working inside an iconic 300+ key beach resort hosting up to 700 guests at a time. The operation brought together four F&B venues, including a nightclub and 24-hour bar, breakfast and dinner, and a programme of day and night activities.

I personally led 1,500+ tours and events there, including leading and rebuilding more than 500 ATV and kayak safaris. That put me inside the product every day: working with guests and staff, seeing how groups formed, managing safety and understanding what made an activity commercially successful.

Tours and events were underperforming, and the resort’s reputation was falling. The offer had plenty of activities, but the long menu spread guests across competing choices. Groups split, activities missed their minimum numbers and events were cancelled. We had the ingredients for a strong social experience, but the way we offered them made it difficult for that experience to gather momentum.

Giving the day a focus and the programme momentum

I replaced the sprawling activity menu with a curated Experience of the Day programme. We actively selected the experiences around which people could gather, sometimes running more than one activity. Guests still chose how to spend their time, with a clear invitation to join something that had enough people to work well.

That daily focus reduced choice paralysis and gave guests a reason to decide rather than postpone. Instead of spreading participation too thinly across a long list, we could build the critical mass that made an activity enjoyable and viable.

I also designed each experience to help fill the next. A good day tour created friendships that carried into the evening party. Guests arrived together, the social energy grew, and the evening became an opportunity to sell the next day’s tour. That next tour restarted the cycle. The day programme, night programme and F&B venues benefited from the same relationships and momentum.

Delivering that sequence meant reading the group and creating an experience people wanted to continue. Having personally led the activities so often, I could see where an awkward handoff, a poorly run tour or the wrong invitation would break the connection.

Making the activities safer without losing their appeal

The adventurous activities also needed a better operating model. For ATV tours, I looked at where incidents were occurring and examined training, routes and group dynamics together. I changed the preparation, route choices, group structure and how guides managed riders with different levels of confidence.

Those decisions shaped both safety and the experience guests had. An exciting tour needed people who were prepared for it, a route that worked for the group and guides who could manage different abilities. The redesigned activities improved the safety profile and made the experience more trusted and enjoyable.

The deeper product was freedom: the chance to explore, meet people, try something unfamiliar and live in the moment. That understanding guided staffing and programme decisions. We facilitated experiences guests wanted to enter, while leaving them room to choose what their stay would become.

Building the staff roles and departments around the experience

I created the Social Staff role to combine guest facilitation with media creation. Staff joined tours and events, helped people enter the social experience and maintained its energy. They also captured authentic material for the resort’s marketing from the experiences guests were actually having.

I created dedicated activities and marketing departments so the programme, guides, sales, guest communication and content had clear ownership. That gave the experience work an operating structure: people responsible for delivering the activities, bringing guests into them and presenting the product to future guests.

The tours and events department became a major commercial engine, reaching record guest participation and spend despite challenging market conditions. Guests frequently described the experience as a highlight of their travels. The result came from connecting the daily offer, social momentum, safer activities and staff responsibilities into a programme that worked on the ground.

Testing whether I should buy the business

While I was still working there, I built a 400-page acquisition and turnaround proposal with partners. Years inside the operation gave me a close understanding of what guests loved, where the business lost value and what I would change. I also loved the place enough to want to own it.

Buying it required me to examine those ideas differently. As an operator, I had asked what would make the best product. As a prospective buyer, I had to ask what each improvement would cost, whether it would earn its return and whether that capital could earn more elsewhere.

The proposal covered short-, medium- and long-term operations and projected finances in detail, alongside the acquisition plan, turnaround stages, investor materials and downside scenarios. The model connected the operating improvements to the investment they required. Even under conservative assumptions, it projected recovery of the full investment within three years.

Why I rejected an acquisition I wanted to make

Diligence exposed structural risks embedded in the business that the operating plan could not fix. Stronger tours, better F&B, improved staffing and the attractive projected payback did not remove them. I had to judge the investment with those risks still present.

Even with the risk fully disclosed, our passion for the place would probably have carried the deal. Investors could have been persuaded by how much we believed in it, while still carrying risks that better management could not resolve.

I rejected the acquisition before asking investors to commit capital. My attachment to the resort and confidence in the operating upside made the decision difficult, but they were not enough to justify risking other people’s money. The detailed work had given me the basis to make that decision, and I acted on it.

An urgent call, then straight onto the floor

In July 2020, the owner of an Australian accommodation group called and asked me to get from Goondiwindi to Broken Hill as quickly as possible. The business urgently needed help during COVID. I cancelled my plans and travelled south, stopping at its properties in Cobar and Wilcannia on the way. Three days after the call, I arrived in Broken Hill and went straight to work: cleaning, learning the point-of-sale system, serving guests and helping close the bar and restaurant that evening.

I had not been given a clear operating brief, expectations or defined authority. The work therefore began with what was happening on the floor: a busy property, too few staff and new site managers still finding their feet. The owner wanted those managers to take ownership. I supported that by filling the gaps around them, giving them room to establish themselves while helping keep service moving.

What began at Broken Hill soon became emergency cover across three properties. I had packed for a few days away, but repeated changes to the assignment eventually left me away from most of my possessions for nearly a month. Each move brought a different operating problem, with little notice before I needed to start helping.

Keeping service moving and making the next work clear

For much of the first two weeks, I worked the bar while covering reception. Low staffing and high guest numbers made that cover immediately useful, but the property also had faults that made normal service harder. Alongside the guest-facing work, I repaired a docket printer, set up and repaired a barely functioning point-of-sale system, and resolved a power and UPS problem. I had to find time for those repairs within a property that was already busy.

Two weeks into the assignment, I was sent to the underground motel in White Cliffs after its manager quit. I began helping immediately, working with the manager on site on a property walk-through and improvement plan, and repairing the kitchen's non-operational docket printer.

The walk-through looked beyond the immediate staffing gap. The written plan identified a front-door lock that could leave people locked out, equipment and maintenance faults, problems with POS reporting and buttons, and communication between staff. It also considered staff facilities and menus that better matched the property and its equipment. These were specific items the site could work through, rather than a broad instruction to improve the operation.

Across the assignment, I also assessed operations and finances at other sites and worked with managers on menu costing and margin analysis. Fixing a printer restored a working tool; the walk-through and costing work helped make the next decisions concrete.

Taking over a motel with almost no warning

The afternoon after arriving at White Cliffs, I was told to report to Cobar the following day because its site managers were being removed. I arrived and took over the motel operation. The assignment had changed again, this time from helping an existing team to carrying the property through the gap between managers.

The motel was normally run by two people. On some days I was the only staff member on site, responsible for stripping and cleaning rooms, laundry, administration, bookings and check-ins. That meant doing the physical work that made rooms available as well as the reception and administrative work needed to sell and manage them. There was no separate team to carry one side of the operation while I concentrated on the other.

Days could begin before 8am with stripping rooms and finish after 8pm with reception. In my second week at Cobar, I worked more than 87 hours, before counting calls for rooms after closing. I kept the motel operating through that period, dealt with immediate problems and prepared for the incoming managers. Another manager eventually arrived to assist, giving us more capacity to cover the property and train its replacements.

Transferring the operation, not just explaining it

The incoming managers needed practical familiarity with the whole motel before taking responsibility for it. The training schedule combined administration with me, room cleaning with the cleaners, laundry, reception training with the other manager and familiarisation with the town. They learned from the people doing the work, then moved into doing it themselves.

The progression was explicit. After supported training, they handled Sunday morning's room stripping, cleaning and laundry independently. That evening they worked through end-of-week administration with me, then ran reception on their own. We covered their time off before the official takeover on Tuesday, with the other manager available to help where needed. They had begun performing the work independently before responsibility formally changed hands.

The accompanying task list covered meeting staff, housekeeping, laundry, check-ins and check-outs, bookings, finance, wages and maintenance. It also addressed the practical friction that can make a new manager dependent on whoever came before: reviewing old operating sheets, keeping useful paperwork and manuals, testing and identifying keys, and organising the office so its information and tools were usable.

After roughly three weeks at Cobar, I handed over a functioning motel to the incoming managers. I had carried the live operation through the staffing gap, while the staged training and practical handover gave its replacements a way to take over. The assignment finished with people who had already practised running the property, rather than needing me to remain there to keep it moving.

Good events, but too few guests taking part

I worked as Duty Manager in La Paz, Bolivia, and Events Manager in Arequipa, Peru, within a South American social hostel group. The product depended on what happened between the bed and the bar: guests meeting one another, finding something they wanted to join and choosing to spend more of their stay with us. My work included designing and leading events, tours and activities, alongside working with diverse teams and international guests across language and cultural barriers.

In La Paz, I observed that participation on many nights was a very low proportion of the people staying at the property. The staff were doing a good job, and the guests who attended were happy. That made it important to look beyond the event itself. A good programme could still miss most of its audience if guests never felt drawn into it.

I wrote a guest-engagement and events plan around that problem. It connected the personal welcome, the shape of the weekly programme and the activities guests chose away from the hostel. The aim was to give people reasons to join, stay and return, while making better use of the staff interactions and experiences already available.

The invitation began when a guest arrived

One of the clearest observations came from taking guests to their rooms. Many of the people I personally showed around joined me at the bar later. Being told where the bar was gave them information; being invited to come for a drink with someone they had already met gave them a familiar person to join. The room show was an opportunity to build rapport and help a new guest feel comfortable.

The existing arrangement made that opportunity harder to use consistently. Reception handled room shows as well as check-ins, so taking someone to their room slowed the queue when other guests were waiting. The same staff member was trying to welcome one guest properly while several others needed attention at the desk.

I proposed volunteer cover for room shows from midday to 8pm, followed by a night volunteer until 11pm. That person could also help with laundry, the luggage room and visitor check-ins when reception was busy. The arrangement would create time for a personal welcome while relieving pressure on the desk. The invitation into the social experience would become part of arrival, with someone able to give it proper attention.

Building nights guests had a reason to choose

Once guests felt welcome, the programme needed to give them a reason to choose another evening with us. Similar activities and playlists night after night made other venues more attractive. I set out distinct themes and proposed experimenting with each event's structure to find what suited the property and its guests.

The strongest recurring nights could draw on two things specific to the hostel: being in Bolivia and having an Irish identity. I designed a Bolivia night around local drinks, a cultural session led by local staff, salsa, cooking and a shared dinner, followed by music and an evening gathering. An Irish night could use the same connected structure with Irish music, dance, food and staff-led cultural activities. These would give the property recognisable occasions guests could hear about, plan around or extend their stay to attend.

The shared dinner had a practical purpose within that design. Serving everyone who had signed up at the same time would bring a group into the room together and give them a chance to meet before the main event. Guests would not need to attend the cooking class or the rest of the afternoon to join dinner. Each part offered a way into the evening, rather than requiring everyone to follow the same schedule.

The rest of the week needed variety too. Karaoke was already one of the more popular nights; the plan proposed expanding it with singalongs and group dancing. Other nights used different music, activities, dress-up themes and food or drink offers. The point was to make the experience of one night different enough from the next that staying at the hostel did not mean repeating the same evening.

Working with the way guests wanted to spend their day

A quieter day needed its own social offer. For guests recovering from a night out and not especially interested in drinking, I proposed a film session with food and drink service in the room, followed later by trivia. Trivia was already popular and gave people a reason to gather without needing another party.

The programme also had to work with activities guests were choosing elsewhere. A popular wrestling outing took people away from the hostel, and they often did not return afterward. I proposed sending a staff member with the group, making the outing part of our programme and inviting people back for trivia. Their interest in wrestling became a way to connect an external experience with the evening at the property.

Day tours could create another connection. Guests who met and became friends during an outing would have people to join later, including those who had not initially planned to visit the bar. The plan allowed for existing tour-partner agreements: where we could not run the activity ourselves, a staff member or volunteer might join the partner's tour. The relationship with guests could continue without replacing the existing arrangement.

That did not mean putting every hour on a fixed timetable. Standard afternoon drinking games were a poor fit for the La Paz crowd. I favoured staff reading the guests who were actually there and responding with an activity that suited them, while using planned activities within the larger themed events. A recognisable weekly programme and adaptable daytime hosting served different parts of the experience.

Staying close to guests as the conditions changed

The work also took place through political unrest in Bolivia and COVID lockdown conditions in Peru. I maintained operations and guest safety during those disruptions, working with multilingual teams and international guests as the operating conditions changed.

The La Paz plan shows the commercial thinking in detail: start with the guest interaction, identify what makes participation easier and connect the welcome, activities and offer around it. The room-show observation gave that thinking a concrete starting point. Guests who knew someone had a person to join; the programme then needed to give them something worth joining.