Advisory Director — Capital and Performance (Hospitality)

Counsel on the money a property business commits

Hospitality capital rarely goes into one large bet. It goes into refurbishments, systems, guest-facing upgrades and back-of-house projects, each modest on its own, each resting on something else being in place: a reservation platform that can carry a new offer, a team trained to deliver it, a control that catches what goes wrong. The Advisory Director is appointed to help leadership write investment hurdles that make those dependencies visible before a proposal is approved.

The seat is advisory. The director gives counsel to the people who decide, over 12 months. Their influence comes from the quality of their questions and the evidence they insist on, not from a signature on the approval.

Where the adviser's voice carries

The Advisory Director helps leadership settle who decides on investment, what stays in local hands, and which measures should guide spending, capacity and control across markets. They recommend which inherited commitments should carry on, wait or close. They question any finance proposal whose cost or risk lands on nobody in particular, and any investment case that is quiet about uptake, reliance on other work or the downside. They also counsel on the leadership team's shape and on how unresolved questions travel upward, help the Audit Committee Chair and operating leaders work through disagreements, and suggest how often capital progress and pending choices should be reported.

A year of hurdles proposed, used and handed over

Within the first ninety days, draft hurdles should go from the adviser to leadership, setting out the delivery and control dependencies every proposal must name. Around month nine those hurdles should be in use on new investment cases, with challenge recorded where a proposal falls short so that patterns become visible over time. By month 12 the framework should be reviewed with the Audit Committee Chair and passed to management to own, so the hurdles outlive the advisory term.

The adviser leadership will listen to

Your background should include businesses that turned over $275 million or more, with 2,000 or more people in five or more countries, and experience of integration, platform pivot and professionalisation. An adviser on hurdles needs capital allocation at level 4. At level 3 you will need risk judgement, controls reporting and FP&A forecasting, which together let you test whether a proposal's numbers, controls and risks hang together.

Your grasp of hospitality comes from capital decisions that carried your name, including a project you halted for want of support before it could cause harm. Baselines you set have been tested hard by an audit committee chair and by the operators who would live with the result, and they held. You can tell where a property manager's own judgement should stand and where it should give way to a common rule, and you write that line down. Your advice keeps its shape when it is unwelcome, and you stand behind it across the full 12 months rather than offering it once and stepping away.

The people you would advise, in the order you meet them

First, in week 1, the Audit Committee Chair meets you by video, in confidence, to discuss the brief and how you would frame the first hurdles. Then, in week 3, the Risk Committee Chair and you work through control dependencies in real capital cases. Week 5 puts you in a room with executives from each function, whose proposals will meet your hurdles. The final stage, in week 7, is with the full board. Four working days is the longest you should wait for our feedback, in writing, after each stage.