A Career Case Study:

 I have spent eleven years working in the seasonal hospitality business. As General Manager of the Asticou Inn, outside Acadia National Park, I learned what it means to run a small business. My biggest takeaway was that it doesn’t feel ‘small’ at all when you are at the helm of a chaotic seasonal operation. Where larger companies have separate departments each with their own dedicated leader to cover the basics of human resources, finance & accounting, facility maintenance, etc.; small business operators have just their tight-knit team. I know the ins and outs of staffing up, promoting the business, executing daily operations, analyzing annual performance, and constructing timelines for seasonal openings and closures. Now I want to use these skills to help you!

If you have experience in this industry, you know that one of the biggest challenges we face is maintaining a competent and professional staff. When hotels and restaurants begin to reopen as the COVID pandemic subsides, businesses will struggle more than ever to field a staff and retain the best workers.

The consulting portion of my business focuses on two main principles.

The first is that you don’t have time to wait for the right person to come around when you have posted hours of operation. You need good help right now. If you lose a valuable manager unexpectedly, you don’t have time to go through a professional recruitment and vetting process. But nor do you want to throw the job, with its competitive salary and benefits, at the first warm body that walks through the door. I can offer you a stop-gap solution in the form of temporary retainer packages, by which I provide you with competent management talent, in the form of my own shining face and dynamic brain, so that you can take a deep breath and then set about finding your ideal replacement. We can work together to establish a timeline that will cover gaps in your schedule over a period or days, weeks, or even months.

The second principle is that even when you have the right team in place, life will often throw you curve-ball problems that are outside the comfort zone of you or anyone else on your crew. When I was running the Asticou Inn, a one-hundred-and-twenty-one year-old building, my team and I were often confronted with crazy facility issues that affected various aspects of the operation. These problems would flop themselves down on top of the tremendous pile of work we already had to do. I would end up doing hours of research on how to fix the problem, hours that I could have spent supporting my team or improving the guest experience. How I wished I had copy of myself so that I could do both things at once! Well, now you can have that. Because you can hire me to take the head-scratchers off your plate. I can be a helpful set of eyes and ears to learn about your problem and propose a number of ready-made solutions for you to choose from. Meanwhile, you can focus on what you do best.

If you think my services can be of value to you, please do not hesitate to reach out. Let’s work together to generate solutions so that you can generate business.