Hi all,

Hope you had a wonderful weekend. On my side, had a funny part experiencing food poisoning that ended up with a broken nose. Hospitality is about creating great memories they say. I handle this one.

Anyways, I’m still able to write using a keyboard.
Quick intro to some last updates at LOBBY, and I keep it simple with bullet points

• Our TERRITORY project is up to date: the target is to highlight 1 territory for a 2-year program to show you the potential for hospitality projects. We source great places, shops to buy, ideas you can develop here, houses to rent. If you want to help, if you are looking for a new life on the coast, if you want to invest. Let’s get in touch

• LOBBY Studio agenda is now open for new project requests. You can estimate your project budget through the budget simulator

• Need FF&E and OS&E sourcing for your place? Frank’s Market now has a team for that.

• After opening 2 houses with Land for Land, we want to build the coolest outdoor community hub through a hotel. Targeting 2 locations in France. Contact Gary or me if you have any opportunities that could fit :)

So has you can see, all this projects bring a lot of questions. And this week I want to talk about a question I got all the time when someone is on a new projet.

How much do I need?

So as you know it, it depends the project you’re building. But I like the exercice of trying to gather a canva that could help get the right numbers. So this letter is challenging, and I may need your help and reactions.

Money is real. Construction costs are real. Furniture is real. Architects are real. Coffee machines are real. Fire safety is real. The invoice from the electrician who smiles too much is also very real.

But I think the better question is different.

What should I not fuck up with the money I have?

That question is more useful.

Because a low budget can create a great place if the founder understands the trade. It means more time, more sourcing, more carrying, more painting, more learning, more doing things yourself, more weekends inside DIY stores pretending you know what a washer is.

A mid budget can be dangerous because it gives you enough money to spend badly, and just enough confidence to believe you are being strategic.

A high budget can be dangerous too. Different pain. You have more consultants, more options, more finishes, more meetings, more people using the word premium ;) while slowly removing every interesting edge from the project.

Every budget has a job.

Low budget needs focus and founder sweat.

Mid budget needs a bit of discipline.

High budget needs restrictions.

That’s probably the whole letter.

But let’s go deeper, because hospitality projects don’t burn money in the same way.

A house rental, a hotel, and a coffee shop are three very different animals. They don’t create value the same way. They don’t forgive mistakes the same way and they don’t ask the same thing from the founder.

A house rental can be built with a lot of taste, a lot of work, and a very clear promise. People are buying sleep, atmosphere, ease, and the fantasy of living inside another life for a few days.

A hotel is heavier. More staff, more systems, more rules, more rooms, more ways to lose money while looking busy. A hotel needs a machine behind the feeling.

A coffee shop is brutal in another way. Small tickets, tight margins, daily repetition, and the very romantic reality of someone asking for oat milk while you just pour regular one.

So this week, I want to talk about money but by format.

House rental. Hotel. Coffee shop.

Low, mid, high.

What to protect, to avoid and where to spend. What can be saved. Where we usually panic. Where we usually lie to ourselves. And where the money should go before it goes into another beautiful chair that nobody asked for, including the business model.

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Hi all,

I’m back.

Summer was good. Busy and slightly chaotic, but very LOBBY in the end.

We opened Frank’s Market, which means we discovered again that hospitality is mostly about making a thousand tiny decisions before 10am, then pretending you are calm when the coffee machine and the first guests all arrive in the same sentence.

The first days were crazy. In a good way. The kind of crazy where you realize the project is no longer a deck you explain to people over dinner with too much confidence. People now walk in. They can order. They ask questions. They move the chairs. They misunderstand things. They love things you didn’t expect. They ignore things you spent six weeks discussing. Very fair.

LOBBY Studio is also getting ready for the new year. We’re hiring, we’re structuring the next season, we launched the FOUNDATIONS Program for founders starting from zero, and we’re working on new formats for the podcast and content. Basically, the break was a break in the same way a restaurant soft opening is “soft.” Nice word but little lie.

And during the summer, while moving between Frank’s Market, the office, the kids, the coast, calls with clients, and the usual founder sport of answering one message while forgetting three others, I kept thinking about something.

We all see that the map changed during this summer right?

I mean, we can say that this summer, the weather became part of the business model.

For years, when people talked about hospitality location, they mostly talked about visibility, foot traffic, airport access, famous destinations, beach fronts, the beautiful postcard, the obvious address…

And of course, all of that still matters.

But this summer, we understand that comfort is becoming a destination. Temperature is becoming a filter. You know, eating outside without questioning your life choices, all of that is becoming part of how people choose where to go.

The weather is no longer just the background of a hospitality project.

France had a brutal summer. Some classic destinations still performed because they are classic for a reason, and because rich people have a special ability to survive discomfort with better linen. But at the same time, cooler coasts, northern territories, mountain regions and places with a more breathable rhythm started to look less like alternatives and more like smart decisions.

Which brings me to Brittany.

For years, Brittany has been treated by some people like the emotional backup plan of French summer. Beautiful, yes. Authentic, yes. But also the place people joke about because you might need a sweater in August.

This year, the sweater started to look like a luxury item.

And I think this matters a lot for independent hospitality.

Because if the weather becomes part of the value, then the best location is not always the most obvious one. A good territory with a sane climate, a real community, decent rent, strong local culture, and a reason to exist outside peak season can become much more attractive than the postcard everyone is already fighting for.

So this week, I want to talk about that.

The weather as a new layer of location.

As a business question.

Because maybe the next generation of independent hospitality will not only be built where people used to go.

Convinced it will be built where people can still breathe.

I’ve always liked the idea that location is misunderstood:

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Hi all,

I’m writing this one earlier than usual because Frank’s Market opening is close, the coast is finally warm, and for the first time in months there’s a version of a Tuesday where I’m not up at 6.48am pretending the letter writes itself.

So here’s the plan: the LOBBYLetter is taking a small summer break. No letter for the next few Tuesdays. I’ll be back in your inbox Tuesday, August 25th, hopefully with sawdust still on my hands and a café that actually opened.

Before I disappear for a bit, I did something I never do. I went back on all 50+ letters. Every one, from the first messy batch in November to last week.

And I noticed that for 8 months I thought I was writing about a lot of different things. I wasn’t really. I was writing about 5 of them. The same 5 obsessions, over and over, from different doors.

So instead of a normal letter, here’s the whole thing, sorted. 5 categories. The best of each. Save this one folks :) it’s the map to the back-catalogue, and it’s a decent summer reading list if you’re building something.

Before you jump in. Feel free to reach out during summer, I’m still around, somewhere.
Email: kevin@ciao-lobby.com
Insta: kevin_lgff

1// Concept & conviction

The idea has to be sharp before anything else is allowed to happen.

This is the one I can’t shut up about. Most places fail because nobody decided what they actually are. So the café quietly becomes a café-bookshop-flower-studio-community-space, and everyone’s surprised it feels like nothing six months later. A place that tries to please everyone has no edges. And people fall in love with edges, not with the safe middle.

Start here:

• Why most concepts are too complicated

• Who is your place not for?

• A place with no point of view is just real estate

2// Place & territory

Where you build has to be a proper decision.

Everyone fights for the same corner in the same big city, paying triple the rent for a third of the soul. Meanwhile a small town is waiting for exactly what you want to build, sane rent, real community, loyal talent, and nobody expecting you to be the 400th elevated neighborhood spot on the same three streets. Stop hunting for the perfect address. Build a relationship with a place instead.

Start here:

• Please build outside of capitals

• The town is the amenity

• Don’t look for buildings. Build relationships with territories

3// Money & model

The unromantic part that quietly decides whether you survive.

Banks fund numbers and not dreams, we all know that :). They’re also good for track record and collateral. And our vision is for the guests, not the loan guy behind the desk. “They didn’t believe in my project” almost always means “I pitched a feeling to people who only read spreadsheets.” The soul of a place is not more important than the business model. But the soul needs a model to survive. Both. In that order.

Start here:

• Banks don’t fund dreams

• The lie behind your numbers

• The invisible revenue of a place

4// Brand & story (which comes last)

Branding is downstream of clarity. I spent years selling the downstream thing.

This is the confession category. I built a whole studio on making places look alive, and the hardest thing I’ve had to admit is that a beautiful brand on a founder who hasn’t understood the job is just an expensive way to fail with better typography. Please don’t rebrand the mess. A new logo won’t fix a model that doesn’t work. It just makes the confusion look more expensive. Build the experience first. Then dress it.

Start here:

• Don’t rebrand the mess

• When a name becomes too small

• Why does everyone want their own brand instead of a stronger one?

5 - The founder’s life & the long game

The place you build and the life you live are two different briefs.

A 7-day-a-week destination restaurant is a dream, and also the reason you never see your kids. Plenty of beautiful places quietly eat the founder alive. Falling in love on opening day is easy; staying in love is the actual job. And whoever you hire first sets the temperature of the room forever. This is the category I write from experience, the good ones and the bad ones. Most days from the coast, 80% of our clients five hours behind me, kids at 5pm, café at 100 meters.

Start here:

• The place you want to build vs the life you want to live

• Your first team is your first culture

• Falling in love on opening day is easy. Staying in love is the job

Now the honest part

Read those five back to back and you’ll notice they all point at the same thing.

Do the thinking before you spend the money.

Get the concept sharp, the territory right, the model real, the story last, and the life protected —> before the branding, the architect, the lease, the €30k you can’t get back.

You’ll see through the résumé behind, I’ve been circling a new idea for 50 letters. I meet a lot of people looking to launch a place and my studio is answering a part of it. But there is also a big part of our job that is understanding the vision, and sharing guidelines. So I built a thing around it, and its called FOUNDATIONS PROGRAM.

Introducing Foundations Program

Foundations is a 4-week sparring program for independent founders who want a hospitality concept that holds up. Before spending money on branding, architects, or a lease.

Here’s the strange part: I run a branding studio, and I’m telling you to come to me before you think about branding. That’s the whole point. Most founders spend €30,000+ dressing up a concept that was never load-bearing in the first place. Foundations is the step everyone skips.

It’s 4 weeks of me pushing on your idea until either it holds, or you find out cheaply that it doesn’t.

How it works

4 one-on-one sessions, one a week, with real exercises and templates between them:

1. Challenge: we stress-test the core concept and what actually makes it different.

2. Position: who it’s for, who it’s not for, the offer, the point of view.

3. Story: the narrative and the messaging (yes, this comes late, on purpose).

4. Move: your launch roadmap and what to do first.

You walk away with a single Project Foundation Document: concept, positioning, audience, narrative, experience principles, pricing logic, your real differentiators, a business reality-check, and a 3–6 month roadmap. One document that a founder, an architect and a banker can all read and understand.

The terms, plainly

• If after session 1 it’s clear the concept shouldn’t move forward, we refund half. I’d rather you keep the money than build the wrong thing.

• The full fee credits toward any LOBBY Studio engagement in the next six months. If we go on to build it together, Foundations was free.

• I take three projects a month. It’s genuinely how much of this I can do well.

Who it’s for: first-timers opening a hotel, café, restaurant, guesthouse or something hybrid, people with conviction and some capital but not yet a concept that holds. Who it’s not for: anyone who wants a logo this month, wants to be told they’re right, or is already open.

If you’ve been reading this letter and nodding, this is the version where I actually get my hands on your project.

→ Read the details and apply here

Applications are open through the summer. I respond within five working days to anything that’s a fit. So you’ll hear from me even while the letter’s on break.

That’s it. One year, 50+ letters, 5 obsessions, and 1 program I’m genuinely proud of.

Thank you for reading this thing every Tuesday. It means more than the open rate suggests.

Go build something with edges. Catch up on the back-catalogue if you’re procrastinating. And I’ll see you Tuesday, August 25th, hopefully writing to you from behind the counter at Frank’s Market

Have a real summer,

Kevin

The other day, I started a workshop with one of our client telling us that the deadline to get the brand ready was the opening. And I had to manage, without scaring them, that unfortunately the opening was not the finish line.

Let’s call it the first public test. And that’s where many founders get caught.

We spend everything to reach the opening. All the crazy energy, all the fucking money, and probably all the adrenaline. Then the door opens, people come, the first week feels alive, everyone says congrats us, friends show up, Instagram behaves, the founder is exhausted but proud.

And then week six arrives. (Don’t ask me why week six, it works with week 7 or 8, you got the idea hun?)

No flowers. No big launch energy. No emotional applause. The friends have already come. The press has moved to the next one. The team is tired. The first operational cracks are visible and the real guests are showing up for the real purpose of your place (sleeping, eating, listening…), with real expectations and much less patience for your founder story.

That’s when the place starts telling the truth, you see what I mean? Not on opening night. Right after.

I think we should talk more about this part.

The first ninety days. The moment where the founder has to stop opening the place and start operating it. The moment where you learn what people understand, what they ignore, what they return for, what creates friction, what was a good idea in the deck and what is actually a nightmare with invoices attached.

This is not the glamorous part, which is probably why it matters. Because nobody really opens a place. You start one!

And the real work begins after the door is already open.
Lets go deeper into this in the full letter of the week my friend.

Let’s say that the launch gives you emotion

I don’t know you but, the cool thing about the opening: it gives you energy.

We have a bunch of photos, cool reactions, congratulations from everyone, fake feedbacks from people who often love you too much to be fully useful, and a temporary feeling that the project is working because rooms are full.

Read more

As you know, through LOBBY Studio, we craft places for others by creating a concept that includes all the narrative part and brand identity.
But why people hire us, is also to challenge the business, ops and the P&L of their place.
And we had this cool conversation last week, about how to manage invisible revenue of a place.

The easiest way to look at a place is to look at what it sells.

Rooms. Coffee. Dinner. Desks. Objects. Tickets. Events. Whatever is written on the receipt.

That’s the visible revenue.

And of course, it matters a lot. I love poetry, but sadly poetry has never paid a supplier invoice on time. At least not in my experience.

But the more I work on hospitality projects, the more I think some of the most interesting value of a place doesn’t look like revenue at first.

A small event that creates trust. A newsletter that brings better clients. A house that becomes content, partnerships, and community before it becomes only nights sold.

These things don’t always look impressive in the first spreadsheet.

Sometimes they look like extra work and sometimes they look like small lines.

Sometimes they look like why are we doing this again?

But they can change everything.

Because a good place creates gravity. And gravity has value, even when the accountant doesn’t immediately know where to put it.

That’s one of the reasons I’m interested in hybrid hospitality. Not because every place should do everything. Please no. We don’t need a bakery-coworking-gallery-fitness-wine-radio concept in every empty garage.

But because when the layers are coherent, a place can create value in more than one direction.

The coffee sells coffee, yes. But it also brings people in. The event sells tickets, maybe. But it also creates community. The restaurant sells dinner, of course. But it can also lift the hotel’s desirability. The workspace sells desks, but it can also become a business development machine. The shop sells objects, but it also tells the story of the brand.

So this week, I want to talk about the invisible revenue of a place.

The value that doesn’t always appear first on the till, but can make the whole project stronger.
Let’s go deeeeeper right below:

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There is a guest we all have in mind when we start building a place.

You know the one.

Good taste. Good shoes. Understands the references. Orders without asking too many strange questions. Comes for the right reasons. Notices the chair. Gets the playlist. This guest also drops the unfamous “this place was missing here” with exactly the right amount of emotion. Takes one beautiful photo, not seventeen, and somehow makes the place look even better than the photographer did.

A dream.

Very useful for Insta.

Sometimes slightly less useful in the bank account.

This letter is a lot about mistakes, and this one was one of them :D.
Building with a very clear image of the kind of person I wanted inside the place. Someone who looked like the world I was trying to create. Someone who would make the place feel right from the outside.

But over time, you learn something a bit not cool.

The guest who looks good inside your concept is not always the guest who sustains the business.

Sometimes the person who pays the bills is more practical, more regular, less romantic, less cool on Instagram, and much more important than the person you imagined when you were designing the place at midnight with too much coffee and too much confidence.

That doesn’t mean you should stop having taste.

Please don’t.

The world has enough places built by Excel with a plant in the corner.

But it does mean founders need to separate desire from demand. The dream guest can inspire the place, but the real guest has to make it work. And the real guest comes with habits, budgets, convenience issues, children, weather, parking, time pressure, and sometimes absolutely no interest in your deeper concept about slow living through objects.

Very rude.

But very useful ahah

So this week, I want to talk about the gap between the guest we want, the guest we attract, and the guest who actually keeps the place alive.

Because building a place is not only about knowing who you want in the room.

It’s also about being honest about who returns, who spends, who talks, who books, who brings others, and who gives the place its real rhythm.

Your dream guest might make the place look good.

But your real guest is the one who tells you if the place works.
Lets go deeper below:

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Not sending the LOBBYLetter at 6.30am anymore as we now have a daughter sleeping way better, so here I am, finishing this letter at 6.48am.

And this week I want to talk about why every hotel owner wants a stronger ADR (Average daily rate).

And that sentence alone could probably fill half the meetings happening in hospitality this week.

From we need to push the rate to we need a better guest mix to we need less dependency on OTAs.

All true.

But very often, when people talk about ADR, they talk about it like it’s only a revenue management topic, a spreadsheet topic. Something you solve with compsets, distribution channels, seasonality, demand curves, and someone in the room saying YYYYYYeeeeeeild with enough confidence that everyone stops asking questions.

And of course, all of that matters, but I think there’s another layer. A more emotional one and a more brand one.

Because at the end of the day, ADR is not just the price you put on a room, but it’s also the price people are willing to believe.

That’s the part we don’t talk about enough. And also because I know that a lot of readers here don’t own hotels, but they use them, very often. And sometime we don’t understand how the pricing works.

You can decide tomorrow morning that your room is worth 280€. It’s cool, bold. Congratulations to the room. But if the guest doesn’t understand why, if the promise is unclear, if the place looks like ten other places, if the story doesn’t create desire, if the experience doesn’t feel specific, then 280€ is not a strategy.

It’s a number with confidence issues, but brands can empower ADR.

But not because the logo is beautiful. Not because the font is elegant. Not because someone wrote timeless sanctuary on the website and then went for lunch.

Brand empowers ADR when it gives people a reason to pay more before they even arrive.

The thing with the brand globally in hospitality is that it reduces doubt, creates desire, makes the promise legible. Let’s keep in mind that out of Instagram, it helps the guest understand what world they are entering, what feeling they are buying, what kind of stay they can expect, and why this place deserves to be chosen instead of the cheaper one three tabs away.

That’s where brand becomes financial. As what I call the permission, the permission to charge more.

And this is where it gets interesting for independent hospitality. Because the answer is not always to join a big brand, even if affiliation can bring a tons of stuff from distribution, loyalty, bookings, and sometimes financing comfort. The answer is also not to stay independent and hope that authenticity will magically pay the bills, which is adorable but not always accepted by banks.

The real question is simpler. Have you built enough clarity for people to accept your price?

Because keep in mind that guests pay more only when the place makes sense.

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There is a very specific moment in almost every hospitality project I see, where you can feel the future mess arriving, and it usually starts when people begin the project in the wrong order.

We look for a logo before the model is clear. We talk about interiors before understanding the guest journey (this one is included in the starter pack). Opening Instagram before knowing what we really want to say. We all discover operations after signing the lease. And we all start teasing the place before we know what promise we are making.

And then, six months later, everyone is surprised that the project feels chaotic.

There is something very seductive about jumping straight into the visible parts. The name, the design, the moodboard, the furniture, the playlist nobody asked for but that somehow feels urgent at 11:43pm.

It feels like progress. And sometimes it is.

Very often, this is what I call anxiety that owns a Pinterest account.

Hospitality projects need creativity, of course. They need taste, instinct, emotion, obsession, a bit of irrational faith, and someone in the room who cares way too much about the smell of the room 46.

But they also need sequence. And believe me, the order matters.

Because if you define the identity before the model, you risk branding a fantasy. If you design the space before the experience, you risk building a beautiful room that doesn’t know how to behave. If you hire before the culture is clear, you ask people to carry something nobody has named yet. And if you launch before the operations are ready, the first guests become your beta test, which is charming until they pay full price.

So this week, I wanted to talk about the timeline nobody really respects.

Not the perfect timeline, because hospitality has a very special talent for destroying perfect timelines. But more like the right order of attention.

1 —> What should be solved first.
2 —> What should not be rushed.
3 —> What founders always underestimate.

And why opening a place is not one big sprint to the launch day, but a sequence of decisions that either protect the project or quietly weaken it before the door even opens.

Since we are just you and I here, let’s be honest.

Every hospitality project has delays. If someone tells you their project opened exactly on time, exactly on budget, with no tension, no supplier issue, no last-minute surprise, and no moment where the founder stared silently at a wall wondering if the wall was now personally against them, they are either lying or they haven’t opened yet.

Fucking delays are part of the game.

When the project starts in the wrong order, everything becomes heavier.

Start with the model before the moodboard

This is the first mistake.

A lot of founders start with the feeling of the place before understanding the mechanics of it.

I understand why. The feeling is the exciting part. You can picture the room, the music and the whole project you have in mind since you pitched it to your best bud.

But the model has to come first. And not because spreadsheets are more important than soul. They are not. But because the soul needs a business model to survive.

Before designing the place, you need to understand what kind of machine you are building. Is it a lunch-driven restaurant? A dinner destination? A coffee shop with retail? A hotel with locals feeding the ground floor? A workspace with hospitality layers? A seasonal house with high ADR but strong operational pressure? A place that depends on events? A place that depends on regulars?

These kind of differences change everything

A 35-seat café built for morning rhythm is not designed like a slow lunch spot. A boutique hotel that needs locals in the restaurant is not operated like a closed guest-only property and a furniture showroom with a coffee counter, like Frank’s Market, is not just retail plus coffee. It has two rhythms living in the same room. People may come for a cappuccino and leave with a chair. Or come for a chair and stay for a coffee. That needs to be thought through before the counter is built, not discovered when someone is blocking the entrance with a flat white and a side table.

Same with a project like Land for Land or Autofficina. If you are building houses around hospitality, sport, design, car culture, landscape or community, the model is not just nice house, nice photos, nice booking link. You need to know what people are really buying. A weekend? A way of life? A ritual? A territory? A story they want to belong to for a few days? The answer changes the offer, the services, the pricing, the content, the partnerships, even the kind of towels you buy, which is annoying but somehow always true.

The early phase should be How does it work? and not what does it look like?

A few questions I now have to challenge every new ideas (you can copy and paste them somewhere)
What are the revenue streams?
What is the guest behavior?
What is the average ticket or ADR?
What makes people return?
What kills the margin?
What does the founder need to be involved in?
What can scale?
What should never scale?
What does a bad month look like?
What does the place need to be true about itself to survive?

Once that is clear, the moodboard becomes useful.

Before that, my dad would call it, the expensive dreaming Kev.

Build the experience before the brand expression

This one can sound strange coming from someone who works on brand identity.

But I mean it.

A brand should not arrive before the experience is understood.

A logo is not a compass. A tagline is not a guest journey. A tone of voice is not a service sequence. You can create a beautiful identity for a place that nobody knows how to use. It will look good in the deck and then struggle in real life, which is a very modern way to suffer.

The right order is simple.

First, understand the experience.

What happens before people arrive? How do they hear about the place? What do they expect? What do they see first? How are they welcomed? Where do they stand? Do they understand what to do without feeling stupid? What is the first emotional signal? What do they touch, smell, hear, taste? What happens after twenty minutes? After two hours? What makes them return? What do they tell someone else?

Then build the brand expression around that.

Not before.

A concrete example: if you are creating a hotel lobby that should also work as a workspace, start with behavior. I mean:
Who sits there at 9am?
Who sits there at 4pm?
Can locals enter without feeling like they are trespassing?
Where does coffee come from?
Is there table service?
How long can someone stay?
How does the team explain the space?
What is allowed? etc etc… (the rest of the questions are available at LOBBY Studio ah!

That’s why I always push founders to define the invisible decisions early.

Give operations and people more time than you think

This is probably the part most founders underestimate.

They spend months on concept, design, finance, works, and identity. Then suddenly the opening is close and someone drops the We need to hire.

Beautiful timing.

The place is almost ready, the pressure is high, the founder is tired, the budget is tense, and now the team is supposed to magically understand the culture, the standards, the service, the offer, the rhythm, the values, the emotional temperature of the room, and where the extra toilet paper lives.

That’s not onboarding.

In hospitality, people need time to absorb the place before they can carry it.

Your first team is your first culture (we talked about it in a past letter). But culture can’t be installed in one briefing and a shared Notion called “brand values final final v3.”

People need to walk the room. Taste the food. Understand the guest. Repeat the welcome. Make mistakes before guests pay. Know what matters and what is just founder vision, because sometimes there is a difference. Not always, but sometimes.

And operations need the same respect.

A realistic hospitality timeline

If I had to simplify I’d think about it like this.

12 months before opening, or as early as possible, the real work should be:
- the model, positioning, business case, guest, financing story, and the big promise of the place.
- What are we building?
- Why here?
- For whom?
- How does it make money?
- Why will people return?

9 months before opening, the concept and experience should start becoming clear. The guest journey, the service principles, the offer, the spatial intentions, the role of F&B, retail, rooms, workspace, events or whatever layers are inside the project. This is where design should be fed by behavior.

6 months before opening, the brand identity, interior details, operational systems, supplier logic, hiring plan, communication strategy and pre-opening story should all start connecting. This is where the project stops being a nice idea and becomes a machine.

3 months before opening, the team, operations, training, content, launch sequence, partnerships, pricing, menus, tools, booking flow, signage and soft opening plan need to become very real. If everything still lives in the founder’s head at this stage, good luck and maybe add more coffee.

1 month before opening, the goal is no longer dreaming. It’s testing. Test the service. Test the first fifteen minutes. Test the payment system. Test the music. Test the menu. Test what happens when three people arrive at the same time and someone asks a question nobody prepared for. This is where you want to break things privately before guests do it publicly.

And after opening, please don’t disappear into celebration. The first ninety days are not a victory lap. Make sure they are dedicated to observation.
- What do people understand?
- What do they use differently than expected?
- Who comes back?
- What creates friction?
- What needs to be cut?
- What needs to be repeated?
- What was theory and what is now truth?

That’s the timeline.

Questions for founders and owners

Before starting or relaunching a hospitality project, ask yourself a few honest questions.

Are we designing the place before we understand the model?

Do we know how this project makes money, or are we hoping the vibe will do some heavy lifting?

Can we explain the promise of the place in one clear sentence without sounding like we are pitching a concept to people trapped in a meeting room?

Have we mapped the guest journey from discovery to return, or are we just designing the room?

Does the brand express the experience, or is it trying to compensate for the lack of one?

Do we know what needs to happen in the first fifteen minutes of the guest experience?

Are operations being designed early enough, or are we treating them like something we’ll figure out later, which is usually founder language for future pain?

Have we hired early enough for people to absorb the culture before opening?

Do we know what has to be tested before the public arrives?

What are we doing too early because it feels exciting?

What are we doing too late because it feels boring?

That last one is my favorite and it works all the time :)

I’m Kevin, founder of LOBBY Studio.

We help hospitality founders shape places people actually want to return to, from concept creation to brand identity, storytelling, positioning, launch strategy, and all the small invisible decisions that make a place feel right.

Hotels, restaurants, cafés, workspaces, hybrid places, weird places, ambitious places. Basically, places with a pulse.

If you’re building one, or wondering if you should, you know where to find us.

Hi all,

I know, it’s Wednesday and I’m 24h late on the sending of this letter. But I’ve been traveling the past 2 days and couldn’t make it :(

Buuuut, here I am. And first, I invite you to join Cooper’s Office —> The past few months, we renovated an old house for our new office by the ocean that we now have 7 extra dedicated desks for friends from the ecosystem looking to work from the coast.

Second one, the topic of the week. I had some great conversations the past week with project owners about rebranding an existing asset, starting with the unfamous one: we need to rebrand.

And sometimes it’s true. Sometimes the identity is outdated, the story doesn’t match the business anymore, or the place has genuinely evolved and the brand needs to catch up.

But very often, when someone says we need to rebrand, what they really mean is something else.

The service feels off and the team is tired. The room doesn’t have the same energy anymore. The menu is trying to please too many people and the experience has lost its rhythm. The place is still beautiful on paper but in real life something doesn’t land.

And instead of touching the things we don’t like talking about, we start talking about the logo.

Because as you know, the logo is safer and our friends Claude & ChatGPT are able to do something with huge taste in 12 seconds ;)

But the logo doesn’t ask for a difficult conversation with the team. The logo doesn’t require changing a supplier, tightening a menu, resetting standards, fixing operations, or admitting that the place slowly drifted away from what it was supposed to be.

What I mean by that is that a rebrand can be useful, but it can also become a very elegant way to avoid the real work.

I’ve seen this happen too many times. A place feels messy, so the founder wants a new story. The experience feels weak, so they want a stronger visual identity. Guests don’t return, so they want a new campaign. The room feels flat, so they want new content.

And of course, all of that can help but only after the place has been fixed.

You can’t rebrand confusion and expect people to suddenly feel clarity. You can’t put a beautiful new identity on a broken experience and hope guests will politely ignore the fact that the welcome is cold, the offer is unclear, and the place doesn’t know what it wants to be anymore.

Guests are annoying like that.

They feel the truth very fast.

So this week, I want to talk about the difference between a rebrand and a reset.

Because most places just need to work again.

(Don’t miss the questions list I share at the end to test on your own place, its pure magic)

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I promised I would write every Tuesday, but its not an easy one… :)

And to be very honest, this week, I had no idea what the angle should be.

Too many tabs open in my head. Too many projects. Too many tiny things that all feel important when you are inside them, and completely absurd when you list them on paper.

So I did.

I listed what happened last week.

Finalizing the Land for Land website before the launch. Ordering the last few pieces of furniture for the Autofficina house in Portugal. First contract for our first resident at Cooper’s Office, our hospitality workspace in Brittany. Leaving the office to go paint at Frank’s Market, which is now 100 meters from my desk, because the opening is getting close and sometimes the best strategy is just helping with a brush in your hand.

Then there were sales calls for LOBBY Studio, not enough of them. RFPs for inbound requests, way too long to do. Meetings on our ongoing projects at LOBBY Studio, because we currently have four projects running at the same time inside the studio…Structuring Frank’s Market operations, which means insurance, menu, coffee machine, printed assets, and a lot of tiny shit that never looks strategic until it blocks the opening. A few network calls, also not enough. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I created a Home Scoring App with Claude to help us identify the right future houses for projects like Land for Land or Autofficina, because apparently my brain still thought we needed one more open door.

And on top of that, I was alone with the kids this week, with shorter days so the 5pm to 9pm slot was basically closed. Not less productive. Closed.

So yes, for the first time, I have to admit, I went into too many topics at the same time.

And while writing this intro, trying to understand what the hell this week’s letter should be about, I came back to one thing I know I don’t want to repeat. One thing that didn’t work in some past experiences.

Building stuff for myself: a brand, a concept, a place for myself.
I mean, building for the version of myself I had in my head.

The person you imagine has time. The person you imagine has money. The person you imagine behaves exactly like the moodboard. The person you imagine always chooses the independent place over the convenient one. The person you imagine comes back regularly, brings friends, buys the objects, joins the event, books the room, and emotionally understands the full concept without needing a 34-minute founder monologue.

Cool kid.

Very useful in a deck.

Sometimes slightly hard to find in real life.

And I say that with love, because I was that founder and I’m still sometimes. I want to believe people will cross town for the right energy, that they will choose the place with soul over the place with parking. That they will care about the weird little detail that kept me awake for three hours.

And sometimes they do. But not always enough to build a business.

The failure wasn’t having a point of view. I still believe that places need one. The failure was confusing my own desire with a real need.

I imagined the guest from inside my head, not from inside their life.

And people don’t visit places from inside your dream, no no José. They are the one living their own day, and need to visit from their side.

They have kids, meetings, limited time, fatigue, and sometimes absolutely no interest in understanding the deeper meaning of your lamp.

Very sad for the lamp, but still, very useful for the business.

So this week, I think I’m gonna talk about that gap. The gap between the place you want to build, the person you think you’re building for, and the guest who actually shows up, pays and makes the place real.

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I’m sure you came through this picture of a coffee machine in the back of a car. If you’ve been following me for a while, it may be the best ingredients to make me stop scrolling.

A Range Rover, a Fiat, a Defender, an old van, whatever has enough charm, enough boot space, and enough electrical uncertainty to make the whole thing feel cool. And no more luggages, we now have a spot for espresso, branding and people pretending they just accidentally created the coolest morning ritual at the gas station ;) (we know you didn’tttt).

I love it, and there is something very seductive about it.
Branded cups, a cool car, the Marzocco in the back, your friends around, and when you can, the coolest view that goes with.

It looks simple and maybe that’s why it works. But I don’t think this trend is only about coffee. I see the coffee is the excuse, in the right way

The real subject is that everyone is trying to find the smallest possible version of hospitality. And that’s a fucking good way to start. You don’t have to open a full place, no lease to sign and don’t need to spend 300k€ before the first guest even appears.

And that is much more interesting than the coffee machine itself.

So I wanted to talk about this, because this letter is also a good opportunity to answer the WHY is it getting bigger. Coz’ lets be honest, some trunks should remain trunks. Some cars are already doing enough emotional work just by starting in the morning.

But the format brings us somewhere about where hospitality is going today.

This idea is smallern lighter and more mobile. Also more visible.
Less dependent on the old idea that a place must start with real estate.

For founders, it raises real questions.

• Is this a smart way to test a brand?

• Is it a business or just content?

• Can you make real money from it?

• Is it legally easier than opening a place?

• And more importantly, does it create something people will come back to, or just something they will film once?

That’s what I want to explore this week, because a coffee machine in a trunk is not a place.

But sometimes, it can be the first signal of one.

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Hi folks! This one is special as we have hundreds of new readers who joined last week. So first, thank you all for joining. Thank you for the one staying, and in a week, it will be my one year writing every week. Can’t wait to share this special one

And yes we can say it, hospitality became cool.

And I still remember that, back in 2022, when I was explaining LOBBY to my wife, she looked at me like I was starting some kind of political lobbying business. Which, to be fair, is not completely absurd when your company is called LOBBY and you’re waving your hands trying to explain places with soul like someone who had too much coffee and not enough revenue.

At that time, hospitality was still a niche conversation. Of course hotels, restaurants, cafés and places existed (Yes breaking news, people needed to sleep and eat before 2022), BUT the idea of building around hospitality as a cultural, creative and entrepreneurial field still felt a bit strange to many people.

It wasn’t yet the obvious thing.

Now it feels like everyone wants to open a place. Fashion people want cafés. Designers want guesthouses. Creative studios want restaurants. Real estate people want lifestyle hotels. Brands want physical spaces. Investors want community-driven hospitality concepts, which is always a dangerous sentence when said too fast in a meeting room with bad coffee.

And c’est ok like they say

From the outside, hospitality is extremely seductive. It has all the ingredients of a beautiful story: a room, a mood, music, people, objects, food, light, a sense of belonging, a place where taste is not just shown but lived. It feels more human than another app, more tangible than another content platform, more memorable than another digital brand promising to connect communities while everyone is alone behind a screen.

But I don’t think hospitality became trendy only because it photographs well.

That would be too easy.

I think hospitality became trendy because real life became rare.

After years of digital brands, remote work, online communities, infinite feeds, and relationships managed through notifications, people started craving physical rooms again. Not just nice rooms. Useful rooms. Rooms where something happens. Rooms where you can meet someone without sending a Calendly link first, which, let’s be honest, is already a small act of civilisation.

A place as we consume them is now a proper medium.

A way to express taste, gather people, create culture, build community, and make a brand feel real without asking anyone to download an app.

That’s powerful and dangerous at the same time

Because when hospitality becomes trendy, a lot of people fall in love with the image of the job before understanding the responsibility behind it. They love the idea of having a place (I talked about it last week)

The harder question is whether they love holding one.

And that’s where the trend starts to separate people.

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Hi all,

Hope you’re doing well!
Its been a busy month at LOBBY & Late Checkout.
As some of you probably saw on Instagram, we are launching few projects in the upcoming weeks:
- Land for Land (A crafted outdoor house for sport, nature and slow living) —> The official website will be live by next week
- Autofficina (A mid-century house collection and auto-inspired brand built for design lovers who collect homes like they collect cars)
- Frank’s Market (Yes, back with a coffee shop in Brittany, but not like any others…)
Actually, once this letter is sent, I’ll go back to do some paint
- Cooper’s Office (It goes with Frank’s Market but we renovated the house next door to do LOBBY’s new office and few offices for our friends…)

So the question, with all of this projects. How do you tease them before you open (with a small amount of money too…)

And I had this discussion the other day about the fact that a lot of founders wait too long before talking about their project.

We wait for the money.
We wait for the keys.
We wait for the final logo.
We wait for the renders.
We wait for the proper moment.

And I get it. Nobody wants to look amateur. Nobody wants to announce something too early and then spend the next six months answering, So… is it open yet? while silently crying into a spreadsheet (I had this case with Autofficina…)

But I think we often misunderstand what teasing a project means.

It doesn’t mean pretending the place already exists.
It doesn’t mean posting mysterious black-and-white photos with captions like soon and hoping people emotionally invest in a door handle.

It means starting to create a bit of gravity around why you started this project.

Before you have walls, before you have a budget, before you have the final name, you can already make people feel where the project is going. You can share the intention. The world. The problem you’re trying to solve. The people you want to gather. The references that shaped you. The feeling you want to protect.

We don’t need money to start that.

We need taste, consistency, and a bit of nerve.

Because a project doesn’t start when construction starts. We all know that a project starts when people begin to understand why it should exist.

That’s what I want to talk about this week: the simple tools I would use to tease a project with almost no money.

Not to create fake hype. Please no. We have enough empty hype in hospitality.
But to create belief.

And belief is usually the first real currency of a place.

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Hi all,
Sorry for the late sending, I started this letter yesterday instead of this week-end and couldn’t make it for this morning. So here I am, and I’m going to say something simple:

Please start a place outside of Paris (or any other big cities)

Not because Paris is dead. Paris will be fine, big cities will be fine. Paris always finds a way to complain beautifully, charge eight euros for coffee, and still be full.

But because territories deserve your energy too.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, probably because more and more of my own life is moving between places that are not supposed to be the center. Brittany. Small towns. Roads. Harbors. Industrial zones. Corners where you don’t expect much until someone decides to care properly.

And every time, I see the same thing.

There is space.
There is need.
There is beauty.
There are people.
There is often much more potential than the usual creative map allows us to see.

But for some reason, when people dream about opening a place, they still often dream through the same coordinates. Big cities. Known neighborhoods. Places where visibility feels easier and validation arrives faster.

I get it. Big cities gives you audience, press, density, clients, investors, friends who can come to the opening and pretend they discovered you before everyone else.

But outside big cities, something else can happen.

A place can matter faster.

Not because it becomes trendy. Because it becomes useful.

In a smaller territory, a good café, a smart restaurant, a tiny hotel, a workspace, a bakery, a listening room, a bookshop with proper coffee, whatever you want to build, can become more than a business. It can become a signal. A reason to stop. A reason to stay. A reason for locals to feel proud and for outsiders to look twice.

That’s powerful.

And maybe we should stop treating territories like secondary markets.

They are not secondary.

They are just under-served by ambition.

In the paid version, I want to talk about how cool places can empower a territory. Not by arriving like missionaries of good taste, please no. But by becoming local infrastructure. By creating rhythm, pride, jobs, attention, and connections.

Because a good place outside Paris doesn’t just serve people.

It can change the way a territory sees itself.

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The past week, I came across the question I think most place’s founders should ask before opening a place.
I live where people go on holidays. And its always the same thing when we have friends visiting:
I want to get my hotel here or my coffee shop, then I could surf whenever I want and enjoy the beach with the kids.

Here is my answer to this: my last surf session was last Sunday, and the one before, 4 months ago.

So the question to ask yourself, would be a much more personal one.

What kind of life does this project create if it works?

Because that’s the part people forget.

Founders are usually very good at imagining the place. The room, the light, the music, the menu, the atmosphere, the mood, the guests they want to attract, the story they want to tell. They can see the finished thing very clearly.

What they often don’t see as clearly is the life attached to it.

The opening hours.
The staffing pressure.
The weekends gone.
The late nights.
The seasonality.
The fact that a place doesn’t just need your taste. It needs your time, your attention, your nervous system, and sometimes your entire calendar.

And this is where things get interesting.

Because some projects are beautiful on paper and exhausting in real life. Some concepts sound exciting but create terrible founder lives. Some places look sexy from the outside and quietly eat the person who built them.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because the hospitality world has a strange tendency to romanticize what it takes to run certain formats. A dinner restaurant sounds beautiful until you remember it means every evening belongs to someone else. A bakery sounds charming until your alarm starts acting like an enemy. A seasonal hotel sounds dreamy until you realize your year is now one long conversation with pressure and payroll.

That doesn’t mean these projects are bad.

It just means they might be wrong for the life you actually want.

And I think more founders should be honest about that before they fall in love with the place.

Because the real question is not only Do I want to build this?

It’s also Do I want to live with what this builds around me?

In the extended version, I want to go deeper into that. Because I think a lot of people are not choosing projects with enough honesty. They’re choosing identities. And those are not always the same thing.

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Hi all,

Another Tuesday, another conversation about places.

And the funny thing is, when you start talking about places, you always end up in the same place. Real estate. Then money. Then the bank.

I’ve seen this scene more times than I can count.

A founder walks into a bank with a project they deeply believe in. A place with soul. A strong vision. Something different. Something that could actually matter.

They explain it with passion:
We’re building a hybrid hospitality space with a strong community layer, curated programming, and a unique positioning…

And somewhere around that sentence, the banker politely disconnects.
Not visibly. Not aggressively. Just enough.

You can feel it in the room.

The founder thinks: they don’t get it.
The banker thinks: this is risky.

Both are right. And that’s the problem I wanted to share with you today.

Because most founders don’t fail to get financed because their project is bad, we failed because we were speaking the wrong language to the wrong audience.

Pitching vision to someone who’s trained to evaluate risk.

And vision, when it’s not translated properly, sounds like uncertainty.

I’ve learned this the hard way.

Not by reading a book about financing, but by sitting in rooms where I realized something simple:

👉 the goal is not to make the bank excited.
👉 the goal is to make the bank feel safe.

In the paid version, I’ll break down how I think about it now, how to present a project without killing the vision, but without scaring the person who has to say yes, using all the NOs I received to better understand how I then got a YES ahah (and still got some NOs sometimes…)

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Hi all,

I hesitated between two topics this week.

The first one was about a project I decided not to do. A place I had in mind, quite clear, quite exciting on paper… and the moment where I chose to stop before it even started. Not because it wasn’t good, but because it wasn’t right. I’ll come back to that next week.

The second one is connected to it.

It’s the question that usually sits underneath those kinds of decisions, even if we don’t always say it out loud: who is your place not for?

So let’s start there.

One of the most dangerous questions in hospitality sounds very innocent.

How do we make this place appeal to more people?

I understand why project owners ask it. Empty rooms are scary. Quiet service is stressful. A slow week makes everybody suddenly more open-minded. The temptation is always the same: maybe we should widen the concept a little. Add a few more options. Soften the edges. Be more flexible. More accessible. More for everyone.

And slowly, without noticing, the place starts losing its point of view.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because the places that stay with me are rarely the ones trying to satisfy everyone. They’re the ones that know exactly what kind of relationship they want to have with people. They know their rhythm. Their tone. Their boundaries. Their type of guest. Their type of energy.

And just as importantly, they know who they are not for.

That doesn’t mean being arrogant. It doesn’t mean being cold, exclusive, or pretending the place is too clever for normal people. It means being clear enough to create attachment.

Because the truth is simple: if your place is for everyone, it usually becomes unforgettable to no one.

The hardest part for founders is that defining who the place is not for can feel risky. Almost rude. Like you’re turning people away before they even arrive. But strong places don’t become strong by constantly widening themselves. They become strong by getting more precise.

And precision is a form of care.

In the paid version, I want to go deeper into that. Because I think many places don’t struggle from lack of demand but struggle from lack of boundaries. And once you don’t know who the place is for, you usually end up serving the loudest guest instead of the right one.

We do spend spend a lot of time defining what a place is, and below are 3 STEPS that could help you define who’s your place is not for:

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Dans ce nouvel épisode de LOBBY Talks, je reçois Jean-Baptiste et Greg, cofondateurs de Dose Café à Paris, un coffee shop de quartier qui a su s’imposer avec justesse, sans jamais en faire trop.

Avec eux, on est revenus au début. Pourquoi Dose est né, dans quel contexte, avec quelles intuitions. Et surtout, tout ce qui ne se voit pas quand on passe juste prendre un café.

On a parlé des fails, sans détour. Des erreurs de parcours, des moments où ça tangue, des décisions qu’on referait différemment aujourd’hui. Parce que derrière chaque lieu qui fonctionne, il y a une série de tentatives, d’ajustements, parfois de remises en question assez dures.

On a aussi parlé développement. Comment on grandit sans se perdre. Comment on garde l’ADN d’un coffee shop de quartier quand le projet prend de l’ampleur. Comment on construit dans la durée, sans brûler les étapes.

Un échange honnête, concret, presque brut, pour celles et ceux qui veulent ouvrir un lieu — et surtout pour celles et ceux qui sont déjà dedans et qui savent que le vrai sujet commence après l’ouverture.

Bonne écoute, vous êtes sur LOBBY Talks.

Hi all,

It’s Wednesday, 6.37am, just wrote this last line to send you this new letter by being a day late… To be honest, I was not fully convinced with the topic I was supposed to share with you and had to come back to some conversations I had last week.

And I had this wonderful discussion with one of my friend, talking about simplicity…
And we tried to bring some in the LOBBY world with LOBBY Town & LOBBY Studio

A founder starts with a simple idea. A café. A restaurant. A hotel. A bakery. Something clear, something solid. Then slowly, because clarity apparently feels too naked these days, the idea starts collecting accessories.

Now it’s not just a café. It’s a café-bookshop-flower-studio-community-space with a small retail corner, occasional dinners, morning runs, a playlist on Spotify, and a founder statement that sounds like the last scientist born in Brittany

I’m exaggerating a little.

But not that much.

And I understand why it happens. Simplicity is scary. When an idea is simple, it can be judged quickly. It’s exposed. People understand it immediately, which means they can also reject it immediately. Complexity feels safer. If the concept is dense enough, layered enough, wrapped in enough words, maybe nobody will notice the conviction is still missing.

But guests are not stupid. They can feel confusion very fast.

Not because they need everything to be basic. Because they need to know what the place is asking them to do. Sit, stay, eat, grab, meet, celebrate, work, disappear, come back. The clearer that invitation is, the stronger the place becomes.

The more places I visit, the more I believe this: the best concepts are usually not the most original on paper but they are the most coherent in real life.

And coherence rarely comes from adding more.

In the full version, I want to go deeper into this, because I think a lot of founders are suffering from concept anxiety. They keep layering things because they haven’t decided what the place really is. And that indecision ends up everywhere: in the menu, in the service, in the atmosphere, and eventually in the guest experience.

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When people talk about opening a place, they usually talk about money.

How much the works cost. How much the kitchen cost. How much the architect cost. How much the landlord wants. How much the opening stock will hurt. Everyone has a spreadsheet. Everyone has a number. Everyone has a little panic attack somewhere between the deposit and the first payroll.

All of that is real.

But I think most founders still underestimate the real cost of opening a place.

Not the visible one. The hidden one.

Attention (with the french accent please)

A place eats attention all day long. Quietly, constantly, without shame.

A light is out. A supplier is late. A team member is off. The coffee order is wrong. The playlist feels weird. The espresso is suddenly too bitter. The guest in the corner looks slightly annoyed. The table by the entrance doesn’t feel right anymore but nobody knows exactly why. The toilet paper is somehow already gone, which is always humbling when you thought you were building a concept.

That’s the real thing nobody explains properly.

Opening a place is not just a financial commitment. We have to care a lot about attention. And that’s where the commitment is.

And that changes everything.

Because some founders think they’re opening a brand, when in reality they’re opening a daily maintenance discipline. A system that needs presence. Not necessarily your physical presence every hour, but your mental presence, your eye, your standards, your care. The place keeps asking questions, every day, sometimes every five minutes. And if nobody answers them properly, the place starts slipping. Not dramatically. Gradually. Which is worse.

This is where the fantasy usually breaks.

A lot of people fall in love with the opening. Very few fall in love with the upkeep.

They love the moodboard.
They love the launch dinner (less the tenth time the grinder needs recalibrating)
They love the idea of hospitality (and not really the maintenance of it).

And to be fair, I get it. Maintenance is not sexy. It doesn’t photograph well. Nobody posts a carousel about that huge problem you had with a bathroom. But that is literally where the quality of a place is built.

In the paid version, I want to go deeper into this. Because I think a lot of founders are not struggling with strategy. They are struggling with attention debt. And that debt is what slowly kills good places.

Money gets all the drama when you open a place. It gets the spreadsheets, the meetings, the investor decks, the late-night calculations, the have we added enough contingency? conversations that make everyone look serious.

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