Operations & Hospitality
Operations leader with a career built on people, process, and pressure
I spent 25 years in hospitality because I believe something simple: the quality of a business is downstream from the quality of its management. A good manager makes everything easier. A bad one burns through staff, money, and reputation. I’ve seen both, and I learned more from the bad stretches than the good ones.
What I have done
General Manager, Leon, London (February 2016 to July 2018) Took over a City of London site that had slipped to 38th in the group’s internal performance league table. The management and team were fractured, the numbers were sliding into the nearby Thames, and no one was clear on what “good” looked like. I rebuilt it through P&L discipline, not by cutting costs aggressively, but by making every line item somebody’s responsibility. Within 12 months, we hit 2nd place group-wide. Awarded Leon’s Golden Purse Strings for exceptional financial management.
Operations Manager, Emilia’s Crafted Pasta, London (January 2021 to January 2022) Three sites, circa 60 people, mid-pandemic recovery. The operational playbook had been hollowed out by two years of crisis mode. I rebuilt the review process from scratch - weekly structured sit-downs with each GM and Chef covering food preparation, customer service, inventory, and financial controls. Then I held us all to it until consistency became the default, not the exception.
New Site Opening, Gelupo/Vico Hired, trained, and built the operational backbone from a blank site plan. The unglamorous work - supplier setup, cleaning schedules, fire routes, the thousand decisions no one notices until they’re wrong - is what decides whether an opening is confident or chaotic.
New Opening, PizzaExpress (Za concept), Fenchurch Street Not every opening goes to plan. I knew the site the business had chosen well before we opened, and I didn’t believe it could sustain the £30,000-35,000 a week they were targeting. I said so. I just hadn’t yet learned how to make an unpopular read impossible to ignore, and the business went ahead on its own numbers. It didn’t end well. I still think about that one - being right about a site counts for nothing if you can’t get the people holding the chequebook to see it too.
McDonald’s Progressed from crew member to operations management, eventually running a flagship site with a team of up to 120 during high season - a long way from where I started on the till.
Earlier roles General Manager at Pret A Manger. A new opening at Barburrito’s second London site.
My approach
I build teams through honesty and leading from the front. My job is to give managers and staff the judgment to make good decisions themselves, not to make every decision for them.
When I walk into a struggling site, I take it back to fundamentals: People, Product, and Process. Most operational problems trace back to one of those three things, and you fix them in that order, because bad process with good people works better than good process with bad people.
A new opening succeeds or fails before the doors open. Site selection, the right team from day one, and clear standards set early are what separate a strong launch from a difficult one.
I trace a lot of this back to a manager early in my career who gave me carte blanche - hired my own staff, organised the floor my way, and had salaried managers reporting to me because of the responsibility I’d been given, not my job title. That trust is why I give people the same thing: the tools, the trust, and then I hold them to the standard. When they surprise you, they usually surprise you upward.
Two worlds, one set of instincts
Hospitality is where I learned to work with stakeholders under real pressure: head office reporting during a turnaround, an owner asking hard questions mid-service, a team that needs a calm decision in the middle of a busy Friday morning breakfast shift. Staying steady, communicating clearly, and making a call when it matters - these turned out to transfer directly into the technology and service delivery work I do now.
It runs the other way too. Supporting a national law enforcement agency’s technical operations taught me to slow down before I act, document the decision, and check the impact before making a change. That’s not a different mindset from hospitality leadership. It’s the same discipline, applied somewhere the mistakes are less visible but no less real.
I don’t see hospitality and technology as separate careers. I see one set of instincts - stay calm under pressure, own the outcome, communicate clearly - applied in two different environments.
Underpinned by an MBA
Between 2022 and 2024, I completed an MBA at the University of Essex. If I’m honest, I don’t have a tidy story yet about it transforming how I operate day to day - that’s not why I’m including it here.
The real reason I did it was simpler. I kept walking into interviews with 25 years of results behind me and getting asked what formal qualifications I had, as if the years didn’t count for much without a certificate to back them up. It left me feeling less capable than I knew I was. The MBA was me closing that gap on paper, not because I needed the theory to do the job, but because the market kept asking for it.
Brands I have worked with
McDonald’s, Pret A Manger, Barburrito, Leon, PizzaExpress, Gelupo & Vico, Rotisserie on the Rise, Emilia’s Crafted Pasta