There is a moment when you open a new hospitality business where everything feels slightly magical.

The renovation is finished. Mostly.

The furniture is in. Hopefully.

The menu has been printed, the team are wearing their uniforms, the fridges are full and somebody has remembered to put toilet roll in the customer toilets.

You unlock the doors.

People walk in.

You’re open.

And for approximately five minutes, you can enjoy the feeling that you’ve finished.

You haven’t.

You’ve just reached the beginning.

We spend a lot of time talking about openings

Hospitality loves an opening.

There are concept drawings, mood boards, menu tastings, supplier meetings, recruitment drives, training sessions, launch parties and photographs of beautifully arranged tables that nobody has yet had the opportunity to destroy.

Opening a hospitality business can involve property, finance, design, construction, recruitment, food development, licensing, purchasing, technology, marketing and about a thousand decisions nobody anticipated making.

It’s a huge project.

I’ve been involved in enough openings, refurbishments and hospitality concepts to know how intense that period can be.

I’ve written business plans, found investors, renovated properties, developed menus, recruited teams, sourced suppliers, built systems and occasionally picked up a paintbrush because apparently paying somebody else to paint a wall has never been my preferred option.

Then eventually comes opening day.

But there’s a fundamental difference between getting a business open and building a business that works.

Because customers have absolutely no respect for your project plan

The doors open and theory meets hospitality.

A member of staff calls in sick.

The delivery arrives late.

Or early.

Or doesn’t arrive at all.

The supplier has substituted something nobody asked them to substitute.

Something breaks.

Somebody forgot to order something.

The till isn’t doing what everyone was assured it would do.

The kitchen is suddenly producing twice the volume it produced during training.

A customer wants something that isn’t technically possible but is nevertheless extremely important to them.

And that beautiful process everyone agreed made complete sense during the meeting?

Nobody is using it.

Welcome to operations.

A system isn’t a system because somebody wrote it down

I’ve seen businesses with folders full of procedures nobody follows.

I’ve seen technology bought to solve problems nobody properly defined.

I’ve seen processes designed by people who don’t actually have to use them.

And I’ve seen incredibly capable teams invent their own workarounds because the official way of doing something makes absolutely no sense in the middle of a busy service.

You can create the most beautiful process document in the world.

If the person standing behind the bar at 9pm on Saturday can’t realistically follow it, you don’t have a process. You have a document.

Good operations have to survive contact with reality.

Opening day doesn’t prove the operation works

An opening proves you managed to open.

That’s an achievement in itself.

But the questions I find more interesting come afterwards.

Can the team reproduce the experience tomorrow?

Can they reproduce it when the manager isn’t there?

Does everyone understand who’s responsible for what?

Can you see where money is being lost?

Can stock actually be controlled?

Are managers spending their time managing, or constantly firefighting?

Do your systems make people’s jobs easier or create additional admin?

What happens when something goes wrong?

And perhaps the most important question:

The handover matters more than people think

One of the easiest mistakes during an opening is building everything around the people creating the business.

They know why decisions were made.

They know where things are.

They know which supplier to call.

They know the strange workaround required when something doesn’t behave properly.

They’ve been involved in hundreds of conversations the eventual operating team never heard.

Then the project ends.

And somehow all of that knowledge is expected to magically transfer into the business.

It doesn’t.

A good handover isn’t just passwords, supplier lists and a folder marked OPERATIONS.

The operation needs to be embedded.

People need to understand not only what they’re supposed to do, but why they’re doing it and how their part connects with everybody else’s.

This is where I think hospitality technology gets interesting too

These days, a lot of my work sits around hospitality businesses, systems, processes and data.

Technology can make an enormous difference.

But software can’t fix a process nobody understands.

Digitising confusion mostly gives you faster confusion.

Before asking, What system do we need?, sometimes the better questions are:

What are we actually trying to achieve?

Who needs to do what?

Where is the information coming from?

Who needs to see it?

What happens next?

Where does the process currently break?

Then technology can support the operation rather than becoming another thing the operation has to manage.

The best operations eventually become almost invisible

Customers don’t walk into a restaurant and compliment the stock-control process.

Nobody leaves a hotel review saying the internal communication between departments appeared exceptionally well structured.

When operations works properly, customers mostly don’t notice it.

They notice that their food arrived.

Their room was ready.

The team seemed organised.

Someone knew the answer.

Problems were dealt with quickly.

The experience felt easy.

Behind that apparently effortless experience can be an enormous amount of thought.

Good operations create the conditions that allow hospitality to feel effortless.

Even when it absolutely isn’t.