Life as a general manager of a hotel, bar or restaurant is complicated. Your concern as a property owner is building and maintaining value over time, but the on-site manager lives in a series of moments. Each day brings challenges through guests, personnel and building issues that must be addressed immediately. The long-term plan tends to fade behind a curtain of instant needs. To move beyond this pattern, you can turn to a hospitality management consultant. This person remains situated outside the flurry of activity to help identify ways you can keep your property on track for the big picture.
Costs and Revenue
Your on-site manager maintains, at times, a very different relationship with costs and revenues than you do. Revenue comes through paying customers. The manager needs to keep up with the busy periods and try to find ways to increase business during the slower times. Building a long-term strategy for managing both of these tends to slip into the background.
Similarly, costs depend largely on present needs. If something breaks, it must be replaced quickly. If a customer complains, that must be addressed immediately. While the best managers act with the overall property needs in mind, a deluge of concerns can supersede that mindset.
A hospitality management consultant can provide the benefit of broader perspective. He or she will look at the ways you spend over time, and how effectively those expenditures work to increase revenues and profits. Spending that leads to growth often differs from spending that does not. The consultant can look for patterns that emerge over time and recommend ways to maximize the positive impact of your expenditures.
Crises and Opportunities
But what about the times you do need to manage those critical moments that arise? Sometimes the big picture depends on navigating specific events well. A hospitality management consultant can create tremendous value for your property in the realm of crisis management as well. Part of that comes from helping create management plans that anticipate and develop responses to potential events. These can include a natural disaster, a disgruntled group of customers, or even a physical or cyber attack on your property. Creating plans and contingency arrangements to continue operations and respond effectively might limit the adverse impact these events have for you.
Sometimes, of course, all the planning in the world fails to prevent problems. Here, too, a hospitality management consultant can often mitigate the damage you experience. Crises create immediacy, and some direct response is usually required. Your consultant, though, can help you benefit from the overall perspective by directing responses not only to the reaction in the moment, but to moving toward a stronger state going forward. Crises often create opportunities for you to learn and your company to grow. The benefit that experience provides can help you not only to survive, but to thrive.
Managed Growth
Strong consulting leadership can help in good times as well as bad. A good consultant can work with you to manage your growth at sustainable rates. Rather than overspending in boom times, he or she can make recommendations to conserve in some areas and maximize revenue without sacrificing stability for the long haul. In fact, a professional such as this can lead you through the process of creating or revising a long-term plan to account for the ebbs and flows your revenue streams inevitably experience.
Your business should change and adapt to realities as they emerge in the industry. Working with a hospitality management consultant allows you to gain broader perspective and grow into your property’s future.
