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Why Your Projects Should Lock Down Roles & Responsibilities & What Can Happen When They Don't

If there’s one thing that a hotel owner can do to best protect and guide a project it’s this – nail down the roles and responsibilities of your project team members before your next project begins.   By doing this, everyone (including yourself) has a clear understanding of what exactly is expected from whom and when and which budget it’s coming out of.  

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The Cost of Innovation

Like you, I’m in the business of creativity, of innovation.  Our clients expect innovation from us.  They may engage my firm to reposition an existing property, to create a new brand, but mostly they want a positive shift in their business.  In this Clear on Black Blog Post, I shine a light on the "Cost of Innovation".  

Most of us search for areas, methods, and places to create new and exciting innovations, and that exploration and work has brought me to an unexpected realization.  There are in fact better times to innovate than others.  What does this mean to you the hotel owner or operator?  This means that if you know the best times for high-level creativity, for game-changing thinking, for blue sky conceptual thinking, then you can seriously leverage that creativity and thinking and not risk making changes at the wrong time which adversely impact your project. 

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Dangerous Definition: Project Scope

One of the biggest problem areas for both hotel owners and designers is determining and defining project scope.  It deeply impacts both entities’ budgets, and it is one of the most difficult to nail down.  When I get an RFP, I have to be sure I really have a handle on the scope.  Read on to see project scope examples and how I do it.

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Is Your Leadership Hurting Your Asset?

Hotel Owner leadership.  This is a rare and nearly taboo topic.  What I’m talking about is a real definition of leadership.  I’ve noticed three traits which seem to be inherent in strong leaders in our industry and here they are.

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Taming the decision making process – what every Hotel Owner should know

I've noticed that most hotel owners likely assume that they have a project decision-making protocol in place, or they may not even think of it at all since it seems such an obvious and low priority consideration.  But in my experience, it’s one of the most important keys to achieving a unified team and an efficient project flow.  And it’s simple, simple, simple so I'm sharing them in this month's Clear on Black Blog Post.

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Your Project's Philosophy: Why Just "Story" Isn't Enough

There is a lot of talk and a lot of media coverage about the idea of a “story” for a project.  It’s the hot topic everyone clamors to in search of finding the new, new thing.  But from my perspective, what if the more important thing isn’t the “story” at all?  What if the more important thing is a Project Philosophy?  Let me show you how a unique guiding philosophy can allow each and every project (storied or not), to run more smoothly and to become exactly what everyone envisions.

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A Look at Hospitality Design Change from the Inside

While it’s a daily occurrence for many of us to open an industry trade journal and look at hospitality design and how it is evolving from the guest perspective, we rarely pause long enough to consider how design is evolving from the business-of-design perspective which, as the COO and CFO of my company, is the space I live in most of the time.  As I look back at 20 years of interviewing design candidates for Clear on Black, our boutique-sized firm, I see some fairly radical change in how we’re doing the business of design.

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