#1. What is the Future of Hospitality??

What is the Future of Hospitality??

So, “what is the Future of Hospitality??”, I hear you ask…it’s a great question and thank you for asking it.?

In this weekly newsletter (to go with the monthly video broadcast and the soon-to-be-launched podcast) I'll share particular topics that support what you'll read below.

My purpose in creating The Future of Hospitality? is that we, as business leaders within the hospitality industry, get the opportunity to ‘peek around the corner’ at what’s coming our way so that we can mitigate risk and incorporate opportunities.

Firstly, I want to encourage and indeed inspire you to take a moment, to turn off the ‘noise’ of day-to-day activities (the ‘today’ of our businesses) and consider both the opportunities and threats which we are about to face by switching on the headlights to illuminate the road ahead enough that we can see 3-12 months in front of us (the ‘tomorrow’ of our businesses). By doing this we increase our ability to evolve and survive by aligning our own business strategies with a rapidly (and increasingly) changing external environment.

Secondly, I want to encourage and indeed inspire us to design and co-create the industry of the future, to set a destination we’re aiming to arrive at in 12-36 months' time, beyond the road we can currently see ahead in our headlights. This means not allowing the ‘tail to wag the dog’, especially in volatile and uncertain times when so much of the industry will be in ‘reactive mode’. We can either wait and see what happens or we can create the industry we want so more of the players in that industry prosper and thrive.

Why Am I creating the Future of Hospitality??

I want to inspire strategic conversations to take place in individual companies & businesses and at a collective industry level.?

At a business level, I’m encouraging leaders to have these strategic conversations with leadership & management teams so they can more closely align their businesses with their own unique external environment in order for their businesses to survive the uncertainty & volatility we are about to experience so that more succeed and thrive.

At an industry level, I want to inspire us to collectively look at our industry and make some choices about what we want the Future of Hospitality to look & feel like for our customers and our employees & other stakeholders. And for ourselves. Of course, we could just let others choose these outcomes for us…

Who Am I Speaking To And Working With?

The tribe I’m speaking to are hospitality business leaders, mostly though not exclusively:-

• hospitality entrepreneurs*
• multi-site group CEOs & leadership teams*
• independent business owners & managers*
• multi-site group general & area managers*
• and their head office and field-based support leaders*?
• hospitality suppliers
• hospitality consultants & coaches*
• And of course, where the definition of ‘hospitality’ overlaps with other sectors I’m also speaking to tourism*, F&B*, leisure* & accommodation*

*David has held this role at some point in the last 40 years

Future of Hospitality? & Strategic Conversations In Our Own Businesses

Focusing on my 5-Pillars?framework

To help us focus on both what’s heading our way (opportunities as well as threats) and what we want the industry to ‘look and feel like’ in the future, I propose we focus our minds on 5 ‘pillars’ which will become a framework for the conversations we have. These are:-

1. Leadership & Engagement
2. Strategy & Customer Experience (CX)
3. Wellbeing & Life-balance
4. Making-a-Difference & Community
5. Sustainability & Technology

These 5 pillars will support the conversations we have about what the future might look & feel like and provide me with a guide for topics to share with the tribe.

PESTLE Analysis

For those of you who have carried out any strategic analysis of markets and industries you’ll be familiar with the PESTLE analysis and for those of you who aren’t familiar with it you’ll become familiar with it as it will be the way we identify threats & opportunities coming our way. It essentially allows us to break down the external environment we operate in so that we can better understand how to design and create our own strategic responses over time.

PESTLE just stands for:-

1. Political factors
2. Economic factors
3. Social factors
4. Technological factors
5. Legal factors
6. Environmental factors

…and it is nothing more than a framework to help simplify the analysis of the complexity in the industry and marketplaces we operate in.

The development of the 5 pillars and a rolling monthly PESTLE analysis will provide us with the backbone of industry insights & key challenges/opportunities in a rolling 3-12 months period so we can have strategic conversations in our leadership & management teams, enabling you to create the unique strategy that takes you beyond surviving to thriving.?

Creating methods of communication

Everybody is busy, right? Time is precious, right? Most leaders are constantly prioritising what to do and what not to do, in order to keep moving forward, right?

Whilst the very large multi-site groups possibly have market & industry intelligence resources inside their businesses, most hospitality industry leaders don’t.?

We’re all busy and all have our own preferred ways of engaging with content which generally means favouring one; video, audio or written content. I’m delivering all three to gain maximum engagement with as many of you and your teams as possible.

Live monthly video presentation & Q&A (launched in May)

Launch Event

On 23-May I ran the first of what will be a monthly event that has the working title of “Future of Hospitality Industry Insights & Key Challenges’. It is a live video presentation, using Zoom and 320 business leaders registered for this event.?

Next Event

These events will now drop into a cycle of being on the 3rd Monday of each month and the next one is on Monday 20th of June . I’m currently focusing on leaders in Australia and the UK so the time is 6-8pm Melbourne/Sydney and 10am UK. I’ll review the time slot after a few months of trying this time.

Weekly Newsletter (launches June - this is it!)

This is the first of what will be weekly newsletters for those who prefer to read articles. I’ll aim to have lots of links to external data sources and each week I’ll list a summary of the big issues and write about one of them.

This will be produced primarily as a LinkedIn newsletter, but also modified into a website blog and medium article and other channels later on.

If you’re one of my 18,000 or so connections then you will have received a LinkedIn generated invitation to subscribe to this newsletter which means you opened it up and you’re now reading this bit! Thank you and well done for subscribing to it.

Weekly Podcast (audio & video - launches July)

My intention here is to interview industry leaders, experts, gurus, innovators, visionaries and more. I want to share views, opinions and predictions about the threats and the opportunities, the challenges and the solutions. This will be available in video and audio formats.

Other Resources

• Masterclasses (free)

I’m pretty passionate about the 5 pillars and I’ll produce & deliver some (free) masterclasses to support any business leader's desire to dig deeper into how these pillars can become a competitive advantage for them. The larger multi-site groups have some of these pillars covered internally and I’ll be working with some of them in an advisory role to help them build their strategic capability. Between the monthly insights live video briefing, the newsletter, podcast and masterclasses we’ll cover most areas of interest over the coming months and then stay on top of them.

• Short Workshops (free-first-time)

For those business leaders wanting to roll up their sleeves and learn “how to do it” in a workshop environment, I’ll be running some 2-hour workshops, on a ‘free-first-time’ basis.?I’m launching two to start with:-

Supporting pillar 3, "Life-balance & Wellbeing, "Life Leadership Hacks For Greater Life Balance & Wellbeing" is a free-first-time 2-hour workshop for those wanting to transform life outside work to find greater success & happiness.

Supporting pillar 2, "Strategy & CX", "Learn 5 Strategic Steps To Go From Surviving To Thriving In Tough Times" is a free-first-time 2-hour workshop ?

I’m aiming to keep the Future of Hospitality as an industry-focused insights-focused information-out format that supports as many business leaders as want to engage with it.

The workshops, like the masterclasses, support the 5 pillars that almost every hospitality business leader will be dealing with in the next 3-12 months.

Why Am I Doing This?

I am passionate about this industry and I see real danger ahead for many operators who will increasingly become focused on putting out fires ‘fires’ today and stop looking up at what’s about to hit them next.

I have had a long successful career in this industry, becoming the CEO of a multi-site group was one goal I achieved and becoming a self-made multi-millionaire as a hospitality entrepreneur was another goal.

I also had a major crash too, with 5 hospitalisations in 12 months and losing a few million dollars and almost my life. Living through a real-life cross between a Sopranos & Underbelly TV series can do that to you. But it taught me about wellbeing and the importance of focusing on our own wellbeing and I now share what I've learnt.

My business ‘David Carruthers Consulting’ will continue to offer strategic advice and mentoring to hospitality leaders but I’m restricting my number of individual clients in the next 12 months due to me also starting a master's degree in regenerative economics (my masochism has no limit), the knowledge from which will dovetail nicely into the future focus I wish to concentrate on over the coming years. I will be establishing a group mentoring program in July which will help hospitality business leaders who want to thrive in business & life, but again that will only involve a few enrolments per month.

This project, creating the Future of Hospitality? is my passion project and I believe I can make a difference for many players in this industry. I’m certainly going to give it my best shot.?

What Am I Asking Of You As A Fellow Hospitality Business Leader?

Watch, read & listen to some (or even all) of the content I share, so that you can create strategic conversations around the topics I raise inside your own businesses.

Contribute, ask questions, and share your own insights through Q&As, commentary, chats and direct messaging me.

Recommend leaders whom I can interview on the podcast and get onto lives and maybe speak at the monthly insights sessions.

This project will work best when we collaborate and co-create the Future of Hospitality?

Finally

I’m not professing to know everything. I do know a bit :) But, I ask good questions and I’m naturally curious and future-focused. And I’m committed to making a difference as I know many of you are too.

My roles as president of 2 business & industry associations over a 7 year period gave me an insight into how, when we work together to support each other, for the benefit of the industry, rather than merely see each other as competitors, we can make a difference for the benefit of all (certainly most!)

I invite you to join me on this journey of a thousand miles and take the first step with me to a better Future of Hospitality?.