8th August 2026

Someone asked me last week what my "specialism" is. Openings? Operations? Purchasing? Training?

I said yes.

That's not me dodging the question. That's genuinely the answer. And for a while I thought I needed to fix that — pick a lane, get a niche, become "the guy for X." Every bit of consultant marketing advice out there tells you to specialise. Niche down. Own one thing.

I've decided that's not what I do, and here's why.

Think about a Swiss Army knife. Nobody buys one because the blade is the sharpest blade on the market, or because the corkscrew beats a dedicated waiter's friend. You buy it because when you're up a mountain, or in the back of a venue three days before opening with half of the kitchen missing and a POS system that won't print a bill, you don't know which tool you're going to need next. You just know you need a tool, now, and you need it to work.

That's my experience of hospitality. That's especially true of an opening, or a turnaround, or a GM stepping into a mess someone else left behind. One day you're negotiating with a supplier over a wine list. The next you're rewriting a training programme because half the new starters can't find the fire exits. The week after that you're sat with the board explaining why the P&L doesn't match the story everyone's been telling themselves for six months.

Using specialist consultants could bring in three different people for that. Three onboarding calls. Three invoices. Three people who don't know each other, don't know your business, and definitely don't know that the reason covers keep getting missed on a Thursday isn't a rota problem, it's a supplier problem, or is actually a cashflow problem.

I'm one person who's done all of it — perhaps not as well at first, twenty five years ago, but considerably better since. When I'm in a building, I'm not just looking at the thing you hired me to look at. I'm noticing the thing next to it too, because in hospitality everything is connected to everything else. The menu affects the training. The training affects the service. The service affects the reviews. The reviews affect the covers. The covers affect the P&L you called me in about in the first place.

That's the actual value of a generalist. Not that I'm mediocre at six things. It's that I can see how the six things fit together, and fix the one that's actually causing the other five to wobble — instead of sending you off to find someone else every time the problem changes shape.

Specialists are brilliant when you already know exactly what's broken. Most of the time, in a live hospitality business, you don't. You just know something is. That's when you want the knife with all the blades open, not the one perfect scalpel sitting in its case waiting to be told what to cut.